TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  Bad enough to suffer the cruelties of nature, far less the driven fury of thwarted men-at-arms whose commanders were too righteous to let them quit.

  Bone-weary, stinging and bloodied where he had raked himself in the scrub, the Mad Prophet huddled in the lee of an outcrop while the band he was to guide gathered at the head of the glen. Five brindled sheep dogs padded anxious circles through the legs of tribal archers, who gnawed on smoked jerky and tested wet weapons in worried regularity. The beautiful horn and lacquer recurves they preferred were packed away in dry leather. Heavy wet would ruin them. During squalls, they favoured the same indestructible yew longbows as the woodland clansmen.

  Over the common woe of bowstrings that stretched, Rathain's scouts exchanged phrases in stilted tribal dialect.

  No one made jokes. Hungry, half-frozen, they waited for twilight, then set out in gloom under silver-bellied cloud. Ahead lay the Kelhorn's worst cliff walls and precipices, where soldiers unfamiliar with the territory could only follow at severe disadvantage.

  Needled half-blind in cold rainfall, cloaked in smoking drifts of mist, the men in Dakar's party picked their slow way, with the sheep dogs flanking to scent out the presence of enemies. The endless hiss of runoff over rock could not always hide the chink of slipped shale, or the sliding rattle of a misstep. Inside the first furlong, a pack of tracking hounds picked up their backtrail. The deep-voiced bay of man-hunting mastiffs was answered by the cry of a horn, then by shouts as their handlers fanned out in search.

  'Skannt's band,' said the rearguard scout who raced up to deliver breathless warning. 'Watch the ground ahead. He'll have an ambush waiting. On my mother's grave, that's his style.'

  A whicker of attacking bowfire stuttered off the boulders where the shepherds had flattened into cover. Someone cursed in dialect. All shared the sharp frustration: they could see no target to aim at.

  Plagued by the crowding sensation of raw fear, Dakar peered into the night. 'They hope to pin us in place.' Mage-sight yielded intermittent pulses of life aura through the stippled fall of precipitation. The staid form of stone was always more elusive to pick out when he had little stomach for patience. He persisted, though the interference thrown off by running water harried his nerves and made him queasy. Their party held position on a windswept rim of shale. He could sense the scarlet-tinged bloodlust of enemies entrenched where the scarp met the mountain.

  'We could loose our dogs to stall the trackers,' a herdsman offered.

  Dakar shut his eyes to steady himself through a moment of clawing dizziness. 'Do that.' If he could stand off the chill enough to concentrate, he could set a spell to magnify sound, create enough echoes to make the animals seem more fearsome than they truly were. The hounds might not stay fooled. But men in the dark in strange country would be vulnerable to unsettled nerves. For the ambush entrenched ahead, he had no recourse.

  Clan scouts with their knowledge of infighting must battle every step of the way.

  Caolle's men sorted themselves into a skirmish line and slipped up the ridge through the dark. The herdsman stroked muzzles, his soft-vowelled dialect sharpened by regret. He fingered the luck talismans twined to the dogs' ruffs, then released his beloved animals with the trained commands to drive off wyverns or wolves.

  Eager whines, a bound of motion, a gale-flung scent of wet fur, and the sheep dogs hurtled down their backtrail. While their growling charge diminished in the storm, Dakar mustered tattered skills, fumbled his first wardspell, then lost the thread of the second to a shimmering, redoubled fall of rain. Cloudbursts played havoc with conjury, could mute wards and cancel out his most reliable constructs of spells. The Mad Prophet fought through lethargy, shook off numbing cold, and finally succumbed to bright anger. He wove the elemental chaos of the deluge into his next effort and the bindings grabbed, then like fell vengeance.

  In the darkness, the snarls became magnified as the herd dogs launched into attack. Yowling hounds and the fall of kicked shale pocked the night as the two packs collided in conflict. Men's shouts clamoured through the uproar, faint and scared against what sounded like the very wolves of Sithaer, set reiving by the hand of the Fatemaster.

  'Go,' urged the herdsman, torn to tears by his pride. 'As long as my dogs live, they'll keep fighting.'

  But immersed in a webwork of glass-edged spells, Dakar shook his head. 'Arithon's people need this trail after us. The headhunters will have to be routed.'

  Bloody swords were going to get bloodier, and on the black spine of the mountain, strafed by howling winds, weather would hamper both ally and enemy. Pouring sweat off cold skin, Dakar clamped down on a vicious twist of nerves. How simple if he could pit the pack of Skannt's headhunters against Bransian's lancers, and as a herb witch did with vermin, let them hack at each other, bemused under spells, until the way to the passes lay open.

  The front rank skirmishers returned, wiping sticky knives, their numbers pared down by half. In typical fashion for clanborn, they showed no sentiment for losses. 'Trail's cleared ahead.'

  Behind, the guttural snarling of dogs echoed back, cut by the yelps of one wounded. Steel clashed on rock, and men exchanged shouts in townbred accents. Through a gap in the drizzle, Dakar saw Caolle's clansmen lock glances.

  'Headhunters aren't fools enough to give way. They'd just track us from behind. Daren't leave them,' said one, bearded and very young. No doubt one of Jieret's Companions, he spat on his blade in salute. 'That, for the blood of my sister.' A grin and one step saw him vanished amid the storm, older clansmen in formation close behind.

  'Come on.' Dakar rallied the huddled band of shepherds. 'If we don't make the high country, Caolle will get worried and send another party down.' He hoped against chance that Arithon would be quick; rough conditions were not going to slacken.

  Two dogs rejoined them as they pressed up the ridge, both torn at the ears and one limping. The rank taint of blood stained the rainswept air, leaving Dakar gut sick and gasping. The trail up the scarp cut back on itself, draped with the throat-slit corpses of ambushers, dangling head down from wet rocks.

  By midnight, the winds drove a barbed slash of sleet. Dakar flexed numbed toes in his waterlogged boots and shouldered head down against the blast. A cold yet more bitter rode the back of the storm, and a chill raked him through his wet clothing. The shepherds seemed inured to the discomforts of the climate. They made no sound in complaint. Dakar was aware of them only as movement, the tap of a bow against a silver-chased horn, or a soft, slipped step in total darkness. They relied on his mage-sight to feel out the path. His senses were overstrung and tired.

  Enough that he misread his own vision.

  When a flare of thin light glanced at the edge of his perception, and his nostrils picked up what could have been a faint, sheared trailer of ozone, he stopped. He unreeled his awareness into howling dark until he could taste the rank density of the night. He found nothing. The flare had not been lightning. Flat clouds spread over the mountains in a fabric of random motion.

  Nowhere did he encounter the latticed energies of charged spellcraft. Hazed to uneasiness, he could pinpoint no reason why the blank elements should feed his spurt of alarm.

  A shepherd blundered into him and spoke soft apology. Poised on the trail, his straining skills immersed in the web of natural forces, Dakar bludgeoned tired wits for some clue to prompt whether he had imagined that trace flicker of strayed energy. Nothing remained but the ugly recognition that this cold snap would turn the grass and bracken. Winter had crept in, all unnoticed, while one fragment of prophecy had unforgivably slipped his attention. As his pause grew prolonged, and the shepherds voiced uncertainty, for need, he reassured them and pressed on.

  Once his party was safe, at the soonest opportunity, he must turn back and tell Arithon of his prescient vision concerning an assassin's posited attempt to claim his life.

  Dakar tripped on the scarp, slammed his knee on an outcrop, and bit back his urge to cry curses. Ath knew, if Rathain's prince was t
o die of a strike from covert ambush, these hills held the gamut of his enemies to choose from.

  The arrow foreseen on that sere, rain-bled slope would be frightfully simple to arrange.

  In an agony of doubt, the Mad Prophet struggled on to the upper vale settlement. The archers by then were staggering on their feet from the punishing climb against the tempestuous gusts. A biting drop in temperature made the last league a terror of slick rocks, glazed over in snap-frozen ice. As desperate as the men for the chance to get warm, the Mad Prophet crawled into the first shelter he was offered, hurting to his bones from too many hours with his mage-sight cranked to heightened focus. In a dank tent on a gale-whipped hillside, he accepted hot soup from a shepherd child with huge eyes, wrapped in some grandmother's tasselled shawl.

  Wet, weary, the archers shed quivers and unstrung yew bows. Given loaned blankets, or hunkered down in fleeces, they slept where they sat. By the light of a swinging lantern, two herd girls treated the dogs with a salve made from herbs and mutton fat. The air smelled of meat and fresh blood and wet sheep. Dakar strained reddened eyes through the smoke-thickened air, unsurprised to find a ewe who had lambed out of season, legs folded and dozing in the corner. A younger child lay curled between her kids, tucked asleep amid their grey-fleeced warmth.

  Outdoors, the gale shrilled and rain fell, and sheep milled in plaintive, wet knots. A sentry reported. Caught nodding over his meal, the Mad Prophet snapped straight and snatched his bowl as it tilted. He need not have troubled. The broth had cooled off and congealed. Too tired to swear, he asked the grandfather who tended the peat fire. 'Arithon. Has he come in?'

  'No.' The answer was given by a clanborn scout, just arrived in from the passes. 'Caolle's gone out. There's been some delay down the trail.'

  'Not more headhunters?' Dakar raked back his bangs, winced to the sting of a scabbed wrist, and fought against the ache of abused muscles. His boots had stiffened like cold iron around his ankles and he was sitting in a puddle.

  'If enemies were lurking, we couldn't see them. Night's like the black heart of Sithaer.' The scout peeled his soaked cloak, then surrendered the dry linen he had saved to tend his sword to bind up a gash on a sheep dog.

  Cold to the bone, warned by the creak of the ridgepole on its pins and the thrummed slap of canvas of a wind still sullenly rising, Dakar shook off paralysing tiredness to ask the grandfather for a blanket to replace his soaked clothes. While the tribesman stepped out to borrow from a neighbour, the Mad Prophet lost his battle against exhaustion. Sleep overcame him, and in misplaced kindness, no one saw the need to roust him out.

  * * *

  He woke to the gut-sick, upset sense of something gone terribly wrong. As if power had stirred just beyond his awareness, or a prescient tremor had shot through his dreams before he could grasp its significance. The first thing he heard was Caolle's voice, declaiming, in a tone unwarrantedly jubilant.

  Someone else answered, laughing. Then a scout's buoyant whoop shook droplets from the ridgepole onto Dakar's face. He spluttered and sat up, stiff enough to groan and blinking to clear bleary eyes. The tent was empty, the fire gone out. Startled by the lateness of the hour, he ploughed through dank fleeces to the door flap.

  Cold air slapped his face, no improvement. His wits were too sleep-clogged to think. The view met his vision in blinding whiteness. He squinted, picked out thin mist, grey rock, and dead bracken, dusted over with hoarfrost.

  Dawn was hours gone and a shepherd had filched his cloak.

  He groped through a dimness muddled in the smells of rancid food and peat ash until he found a garment to pull over his shivering shoulders. Emerged like an otter out of water into cold, he gasped, 'What's happened? Where's Arithon?'

  Caolle stood by the cracked ice of a spring, slapping caked sleet from his sleeve cuffs. He turned a face with rimed eyebrows toward the tent. 'You slept through the news? Jaelot's garrison's finally had enough. This morning, they're folding their camp. Columns are marching east as we speak. They've started to pull out of Vastmark.'

  To Dakar's continued stiff silence, he added, 'Not to worry for the others. They've delayed for good reason, to be sure the retreat matched the rumours.'

  'Where's Arithon?' Dakar repeated.

  His plaintive note of fear cut through at last and snapped the war captain's complaisance. 'Why?' Caolle strode over, his raw knuckles clamped to his sword hilt. 'His Grace is down the trail. Asked for time to himself.' He swept a glance that bit over Dakar's dishevelment. 'Fiends alive, what's wrong?'

  The Mad Prophet never broke his own absorbed study: of cliffs that felt skewed out of balance; over a wilderness of mist, raked like tufted fleece across the valleys; and under sky capped in lead-bellied clouds. The steep rake of rock where the tents clung like lichens dropped away into sparkling white, spiked in frost that cased stone and grasses in ethereal, glassine beauty.

  Through the brutal cold, Dakar cried, 'Caolle, get your scouts! Tell them to look for an assassin!'

  Then he was off at a limping run toward the narrow trail that snaked down the slope. Shouting erupted behind him, sliced by the sliding, steel ring of blades from wet scabbards. Clansmen were running at his heels, fanning out to scour the ridges.

  Too fat to sprint, Dakar skidded down a shale face to cut off one bend in the trail. White plumes of moisture streamed past his lips. He moaned at the stab of icy air. There was no rain, he thought, desperate. His prescient dream had shown rainfall, dead bracken, and lichened boulders, not the naked, scoured rock he traversed at a windmilling scramble.

  The track cut to the right. Past the rim of the hill, the trail jagged like a kinked cord into a ravine sheltered from the winds, and grown with stands of grass and russet fronds of killed bracken. The cold of high altitude had turned the plants early. Dakar gasped as dread plunged in a rush through his vitals. The site was the same. He had passed the place, unrecognized, unknowing, last night in the darkness.

  Here lay the location his prescient prophecy had revealed for the Shadow Master's death.

  The last, outside hope became dashed at next breath. There the prince stood with his back turned, absorbed by something farther down the trail. Arithon wore leathers streaked dull from foul weather, the black hair uncut since his court visit to Ostermere knotted back with a deer hide thong. A quiver of arrows hung near empty at his hip, the yew bow he had borrowed set aside, still strung, against a scaled shoulder of rock. His bearing held the loose-limbed, enviable grace seen so often on the tranquil sands of Merior.

  Then a rattling fall of pebbles shattered his moment of solitude. Arithon spun, his wild start of tension eased to a welcoming smile.

  'Dakar,' he shouted. 'It's over. The warhost has broken to march east.'

  Even from a distance, his face looked shadowed. The hollows left chiselled by sleepless nights and strain had yet to soften, though the killing, the risk, the deadly danger presented by Desh-thiere's curse grew less for each minute that passed. He might have no time to celebrate the fact he had survived with his integrity intact and his tribal allies unharmed.

  Dakar swore and kept running.

  Time slowed. Vision acquired a rending brilliance of detail; again he saw the brown skeletons of bracken, the eerie sense of framed stillness in the half-breath before frightful tragedy.

  Then the last hope, ripped away as the sky opened up into downpour. The final facet of the vision given months before fell inexorably into place. Two steps, and Arithon would complete the angle of that image. Some assassin's arrow would fly and strike, and all they had accomplished would be lost. All; Dakar howled for the waste. The Mistwraith's dire threat would acquire free rein through his own colossal carelessness and a tardy, selfish hoarding of a loyalty he had almost rejected for blind prejudice.

  He tried to shout. The wind snatched his words. He could not make himself heard for the drumroll of rain on rock, nor cry over the unbroken trickle of runoff guttered over bare ledges. By some cruel trick of nature, a fickle gust
from behind, he heard very clearly the twang of a bowstring from cover higher up the scarp. Then the hum of the arrow as it launched toward rendezvous with its living target.

  Dakar had no time to frame spells to command steel, to bend air and arrest wood and feather. His desperate effort to warn Sethvir slipped awry in the chaos of the deluge. The fleeting second for preventive action slipped past. Arithon closed that fatal, last step, to stand isolate at the crux of fate and prophecy.

  There was nothing else left under earth and sky one labouring, fat spellbinder could do.

  The Mad Prophet launched his ungainly body in between to offer himself as Arithon's shield.

  A split second he had to flinch from folly, to ache for the likely fact the archer in hiding could simply fire a second spelled shaft and complete the diverted work of the first. One heartbeat he raged against the futility of his act and ached for obligations left undone.

  Then the arrow struck. Impact pitched him forward onto his face and pain sliced his regrets to screaming ribbons.

  Dakar hit gravel rolling, primed with the counterspells he needed to engage his longevity training. His first effort was waylaid and poisoned inside. Slashed through the scald of his blood by something more sinister than steel, he locked his jaws and groaned. Had he not been spellbinder to a Fellowship Sorcerer, he might not have recognized the distinctive bite of arcane energy; the crystal driven resonance of a Koriani seal, furtively set to ensure the arrow's wound would be mortal.

  He gasped. Rain fell in his eyes. Every muscle in his back and abdomen cramped, and agony drove him to whimper. He could feel the bleeding. Instinct insisted he must engage this sigil and that binding to stem the gush; to close torn tissues and claw back a firm foothold on life.

  But a rank tide of dizziness sucked through his awareness. He could not think, could not concentrate, could not snatch back the threads of self-discipline. Five hundred years of arduous study, and he lacked the means to unwind the fugitive work of a solitary Koriani death seal.