by Janny Wurts
“Well?” rasped Cosach’s whisper. “Have you finished the headcount?”
The Mad Prophet blinked. “Not yet.” Stressed by the interruption, his ethereal vision shimmered through commonplace sight like a half-world unfurled out of dreams. The chieftain’s gruff presence beside him crackled with impatience, torch-bright against a night landscape buckled into fluorescent haloes and electromagnetic distortion. Obliged to reknit his frayed concentration, Dakar dug back into immersive trance.
He acknowledged nothing: not the breathless scout just shoved in behind, nor the flurried responses raised by a report that rang like tapped glass in his sensitized ears.
“… rampant idiocy, to use ox-drawn wagons before pack-mules.”
“Wasteful,” Cosach grumbled, equally taken by the stupidity. The Barrens wore summer’s glory of forage, sweetened by adequate rain. “D’you wonder how many axles they broke? Or men’s backs, when their wheels bogged down? Your patrol’s off their mettle. Couldn’t they hear the penned cattle at distance or smell the reek of manure on the breeze?”
“No. That’s because someone’s enterprise slaughtered the livestock. Maybe they’ve roasted the lot for a feast?” The scout flashed a weasel’s grin. “Makes a quick task for our handful of archers. Luckless as gaffing frogs if those squatters are snoring, gut-stuffed with beef.”
Cosach scraped at his tangled beard, less amused, though the drays offered cover to obscure their advance from the enemy sentries. “These are not priggish merchants we’re raiding.”
“Not like you to slink like a cur from a bone tainted by the whiff of uncertainty.” A wry shrug, and the clan scout sobered. “So you’re thinking we fire the tents and the tarps?” Easy enough to thin out the targets once they pelted into the open. “Drop the watchmen, then swoop on the tents to dispatch the startled survivors?”
“Right enough.” Cosach fingered a talisman under his shirt. “Dawn won’t wait. Send the word.”
The scout slithered backwards, gone on silent feet while the chieftain elbowed Dakar’s barrel ribs. “Forget the bungling reconaissance. We’ll grow roots for your fussy delay.”
Dakar surfaced, befuddled, until the dawning impact of the clansman’s decision jabbed him to alarm. “Don’t move on that camp!”
“What?” Cosach snapped.
“Break off the attack. Do it now!” His sweep of the lane current had fingered nothing, which suspect quiescence in hindsight screamed warning. No time to pursue the suspicion of mage works. “Those wagons conceal a laid trap!”
Coward or not, Dakar spoke as a prophet.
Cosach chose to fall back, hamstrung by the need to order the retreat in silence. His signal relay reacted, too late: the strike leading the war band’s advance already had broken away from deep cover.
Pinprick flames bloomed on the overlook. Then a volley of arrows creased the jet sky. Wakeful all along, positioned for the sally, the True Sect bowmen stormed the clan engagement from the crest, spurred by the blast of an officer’s horn.
Cosach’s band reeled under the hostile fire. No help, knowing the intruder’s camp was laid bait. More shafts shot from above pelted into the parked drays and stacked lumber. Both sheeted into an oil-fed blaze, while other flights scribing their high, crimson arcs rained with staccato retorts through tarred canvas. The encampment crowning the summit ignited. No sleep-fuddled dedicates fled the inferno in shouting panic. Ominous silence instead erupted to a hollow boom as the box cargo beds of the wagons dropped ramps from false bottoms and disgorged armoured men, steel drawn for slaughter.
Cosach yelled for his surprised war band to scatter. The command marked him out. A viperish hiss of enemy arrows slashed through the covert of stunted brush. Twice, the sickening whap of a broadhead punched into living flesh. Cosach’s agonized grunts caught Dakar still immersed and wide open to mage-sight. He reeled, wrung helpless, while the clan chieftain recoiled in torment. Cosach’s breaths sawed as though drawn through wet cloth, a ghastly refrain to the shock of mass bloodshed, spread over a widening stage of disaster.
The spellbinder wrung in the mangle wrestled to salvage his boundaries. Nausea folded him into a crouch, while subsequent volleys slashed into the thicket and snicked in rebound off the bank at his back. The flights kept on coming. Launched from the hill-top, the whickering deluge pelted like hail, the near misses close enough to part hair. Safe movement was impossible. Nothing might salvage the war band’s pinned men, with who knew how many already cut down, dead or drastically wounded.
Dakar shivered, seized by morbid awareness the assault from above only staged a distraction for something worse.
Yet Cosach’s straits trumped the prescient suspicion. Trapped in the breach, the Mad Prophet seized the felled chieftain’s ankles and hauled him under the embankment. Through the slide of loose pebbles and the redoubled impacts of hostile bowfire, Dakar sensed the surge of wrought spellcraft convulsing the flux. He glanced up, aghast, just as flickered movement veered one of the air-borne shafts in mid-flight. Unnaturally turned, it whistled straight in under the influence of a sigil of homing.
Dakar swore murder. Too stout for heroics, he sprawled his pudding bulk to shield Cosach. Crude practice the only available recourse, the spellbinder bloodied his palm in the seep from the chieftain’s pierced chest. His other hand, scrabbling, snatched up a dead stick. He smeared the bark, slapped a hasty seal over a counter-ward, and hurled the slap-dash construct away. The spelled arrow swerved in its final descent, struck the lure, and hammered the split wood to earth amid a kicked spray of dirt.
Dakar yelped, stung by the raw back-lash. “Fiends plague the hereafter!” he snarled in despair. For his stop-gap defence interfered with no less than the Order of the Koriathain. His outmatched resource would not spare the war band, or thwart who knew what nefarious partnership aimed to eradicate clanblood. Neither could he take stock or count losses, flattened like a cur in a gulch. Even if Cosach had been the sole quarry, The Hatchet’s engagements always mopped up with a relentless rear-guard action. Those clansmen yet able to flee for their lives faced being outflanked.
Even Cosach grasped the bad odds. “Ath wept! I need you to shove off!” Teeth clenched against shudders of pain, he heaved under Dakar’s planted weight.
The Mad Prophet granted his desperation no quarter. “Stay put!” Fastened like a lamprey on the chieftain’s wrists, he bore down against manic struggle. “Damn all to your rock-head bravery! Stop causing havoc! Embedded with arrows, you won’t get far, and breaking from cover can’t help when you’re tagged by a spelled attack latched to your blood-line.”
Cosach renewed his furious argument. “All the better! I’ll make good use. My run as a decoy buys us the time for you to spin a defence. Just get my survivors away.”
“Be still!” Dakar snapped. “Show yourself, and those archers will stick you like a seamstress’s pincushion.” His rushed effort to raise a protection sheared off, sucked away as a sudden, subliminal shift opened a well of unnatural darkness. The surrounding brush crackled and sang, quickened sap seized by a cold fierce as death, silver dusted with glassine hoar-frost. The encompassing density of the event suffocated all access to mage talent.
One hand alone wielded the naked element with the power to suppress Rathain’s lane current.
“Daelion avert, my vision’s gone dark!” Cosach’s outcry showed panic. “I cannot face the end. Not before I’ve seen my people out of here.”
“You aren’t blind,” Dakar contradicted. “Nor are you chilled by the turn of Fate’s Wheel.” Though his foolish tongue perhaps spoke too soon: an arcane residue tainted the set arrows. Soft fingers more suited to toying with whores than the nuance of advanced healing, the Mad Prophet measured a damage fit to wreck hope. He was not Asandir: never innately skilled or adept enough to defy the grim course of a spell-driven fatality.
Cosach ground on, oblivious, “Ath forfend! This is an onset of Shadow? Then by every measure of worth, I have failed!”
/> Dakar’s aplomb shattered. “That’s blustering arrogance on top of self-punishment! All human nature is fallible. Even the almighty Fellowship Sorcerers can’t steer his Grace clear of jeopardy.” Yet platitudes only insulted a sacrifice that soon must cost everything honour held dear.
Nothing appeased Cosach’s wild fury. “Blast that minikin bastard and his s’Ffalenn pride! Just snap off the shafts and help get me up. I must draw the archers! As much to stand shadow for Rathain’s crown blood-line, as to give my war band their chance to win free.”
“The minikin bastard in fact disagrees.” Arrived in a furtive rustle of brush, the breathless speaker slid in beside the chieftain’s doomed struggle.
“Fiends alive!” exclaimed Dakar, battered afresh by the fists of Cosach’s refuelled outrage. “You always deliver, like salt in a sore, slap on the thorns of a crisis.”
Through the rattle of bowfire, Arithon’s dry irony, “You think I’m here for the feckless blood sport of baiting the bear?”
“What else?” Cosach ranted. “It’s a useless task, nurse-maiding celibate royalty hell-bent on flitting into harm’s way.”
“Be still! For all your misguided s’Valerient courage, a suicide charge will spare no one. In fact, your clan war band has nowhere to run.” Jostled as Dakar muscled back in to suppress the chieftain’s crazed rebellion, Arithon finished his summary. “The Hatchet’s placed his rear-guard in ambush. Your folk are set up for a massacre.”
Cosach bulled onwards, shamed beyond embarrassment. “Dharkaron’s Black Spear take your gadding cant, the Avenger’s caprice could not let this happen. My outlying scouts were not slacking off! Never, while we stalked a Sunwheel encampment for a covert attack.”
“The Light’s pious,” declared Arithon, “had arcane help.” Then, directed across Cosach’s stupefied rage, the blunt impact of accusation, “Which choice gossip your prophet already knew.” To Dakar, gaffed speechless, the punch line stripped tact. “Did you plan to warn Cosach, before I breezed in?”
The Mad Prophet swallowed, indecently scrambling. “Is this a torturous duel of conscience? I should know, at first hand, how it feels to suffer an arrow impressed by enchantment.” He twisted the knife-thrust. “If your recall’s not faulty, you’d be remiss not to remember that you were the thwarted target.”
The bite of s’Ffalenn temper responded. “You’re citing the life debt you once held from Vastmark? Surely the back-stab of betrayal at Halwythwood cancelled that score.”
“Your access to memory isn’t complete!” Lamed in self-defence, Dakar paid dear for the loyalty that protected Elaira.
Arithon’s rebuke demolished nicety. “Let the clan chieftain breathe. He’s got no strength to waste.”
Dakar woke to that cruelty and moved, just as Cosach’s composure broke into an urgent shudder of agony. No skilled healer mistook the ominous signs. Fate’s Wheel was already turning. A dying man’s dignity deserved the truth. “The manipulative hand in the enemy’s glove is the Prime Matriarch of the Koriathain.”
“The victim’s aware.” Gentled as his ministrations mapped the severity of Cosach’s injuries, Arithon added, “Liegeman, be still.”
But a lifetime of service as the realm’s steward rejected complacency. “Your Grace, must I beg to salvage my botched legacy? Take your wily talent and leave this place. Guide my war band to safety without me.”
Rathain’s cross-grained crown prince objected. “Dakar’s able to shoulder that challenge. I stay at your side, beyond question.”
The Mad Prophet smothered dismay, with cause afraid the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s adamance stemmed from a prior debacle, when his attendance at the ninth hour had eased the lethal wound of another steadfast liegeman. If Sidir’s prodigal rise from extremity underlay today’s insane choice, Arithon’s restricted recall could not fathom Elaira’s vital role in that miraculous recovery. Dakar tried again to unseat false conviction. “You realize your presence is tempting a move against you by the Koriani Matriarch?”
“Yes.” The word rang like iron.
One recalled, in that moment, the massive accumulation of iyats collected that unpleasant morning on the Tiendarion. Epiphany dawned late, and with bruising anguish, that the obstreperous resistance hurled down then likely had been a feint.
Stunned to realize his crown prince had not been obstructive at whim but had diverted restraint from a strategic action, Cosach protested through gritted teeth, “Surely, your Grace, you’re abetting the purposeful snare the Prime’s laid to play you from the start!”
But attempted dissuasion only provoked the formal response of the crown prince faced by a liegeman’s passage: “Be at peace. Leave the threat to the realm in my hands. I’cuelan am-jiask edael i’tier, Cosach,” Which translated, “your feal prince attends you.” Then came the grave promise last spoken to Sidir, downed by a lung wound as grievous. “All you fought for, my hand will put right.”
Cosach arched, distressed.
“Go, Dakar,” urged Arithon, working his craft as he spoke. “My plague storm of iyats will strike within minutes. You will take that opening. Break the lines of the enemy ambush and grant the High Earl his war band’s deliverance.” While Shadow impeded the archers’ aim, he closed quickly, “You can’t argue my rightful place here.”
Dakar caved to exigency. He knew far too much. Noosed as he was by the volatile secrets buried in Arithon’s history, straightforward cowardice relieved his quandary to keep the cruel facts safely buried.
The Mad Prophet wormed, swearing, into the gulch, eager to be quit of both battle-fields. “Given you got yourself in here unscathed, you’re welcome to your own devices.” He did not look back. And because he was rankled, his spurious talent for augury failed. Dakar never forecast the catastrophe sown in the wake of his slinking departure.
For Cosach, the terrible wait for release resharpened his leaden regrets. Some, he could do naught to assuage: his thirst for Jalienne’s tender kiss, and the legacy owed to an infant child abandoned ahead of maturity. The fatherly pride and adult advice lost to his eldest son, Esfand, and two more daughters by an earlier marriage forsaken untimely. Smaller things carried an unforeseen sting. Experiences not to be savoured anew: the brisk gallops in snow under cobalt sky, or the fierce joy that tingled the nerves when the first blush of solstice sunrise crowned the ancient oak groves in Halwythwood.
Yet even those yearnings dwindled before the wronged crown prince, stationed in steadfast futility beside him. Breath drawn against the grate of the broadheads lodged into bone and viscera, Cosach argued, “Your Grace, you must leave! Since I never granted you my feal oath, in fact, you have no obligation. Don’t burden me further by risking your neck to a True Sect offensive.”
His liege chose not to answer; in fact never heard, immersed as a mage to finesse his elemental mastery of shadow. The pause hung, while the chilly breeze sieved through the brush carried fragments of horn-calls and distanced shouts. Throughout, the enemy arrows still flew. Between his hitched gasps, Cosach picked out the explosive crack of stressed wood, snap-frozen and shattered like glass. He realized, clenched against desperate tears, that far more than Dakar’s escape had been covered.
Beyond view in the dark, the ambush was routed. The war band’s survivors were well away, with his crown prince’s adamant vigil as fixed as a boulder in hostile terrain.
“No more can be done, here,” Cosach gasped, insistent. “Don’t waste yourself for a stranger’s useless recrimination.” Bitter experience acknowledged the fact: blood loss must eventually finish him.
“I might lift the worst of the pain.” A stir of leather and cloth, in the void, as Arithon settled for the duration. “By your leave?”
Seized in the throes of a terrible spasm, the clan chieftain bent to necessity rather than widen the disaster by flagging adverse attention. He shouldered the shame and let Arithon’s deft handling ease his contorted body. Nothing assuaged his laceration of spirit. The fateful rejection on Thunder Ridge could
not be reversed, any more than averting the harrowing grief he bequeathed to his absent family. But humility might appeal for forgiveness if a dying man dropped his towering pride and addressed his mistake.
Cosach fumbled, at a loss to begin. The presence beside him was too self-contained, a stranger schooled to high mastery, and dangerous, given his relentless command of darkness obscured every natural referent. Initiate power was not wont to speak first. A mage who honoured integrity volunteered nothing, unasked.
“However, Athera’s Masterbard might,” the Teir’s’Ffalenn responded aloud to his liegeman’s stricken uncertainty. The touch that ministered to Cosach’s distress never faltered, while the trained voice resumed with sincerity, “You did not fail your charge to Rathain’s crown lineage.”
Remorse erupted like a burst boil. “Kharadmon’s censure was unequivocal.”
“Was it?” Under the pall of primordial night, that shrouded a desperately naked intimacy, Arithon’s stifled laughter held astonishment. “Given that Fellowship Sorcerer’s nature? I’d stake my life the ferocious rebuke was a lesson for Dakar.”
“It wasn’t. Don’t crapshoot with fate out of misguided kindness.” Cosach’s wet cough carried scorching irony. “I was stripped of title. Were you not told? My son Esfand’s been named for succession.”
The prince trampled objection. “And have the Seven not made intervention before? History records, in the bleakest of times, they’ve used their designate authority to secure a significant lineage. I’ve lived to bear witness. Your forebear, Earl Jieret, endured the same. At infancy, his daughter Jeynsa was made heir apparent to stand shadow behind Rathain’s throne.”
Cosach grunted in derision. “A shell game of semantics did not land me in exile, banished from my family in Halwythwood.”
“Exile?” Shock displaced bemusement, recoiled, and sharply attacked the assumption. “On the soil of Daon Ramon? How, when you bleed on the same turf where the Riathan Paravians once ran wild? And have you not fallen in defence of Cianor Sunlord’s birthplace?” Charged to indignation, Arithon snapped, “Damn all to Kharadmon’s wicked style! This matters: you haven’t fought for a monument but to save Mankind’s viable future. How have you forsaken your obligation by defending the clarity of the mysteries?”
