Warhost of Vastmark

The crash of the surf masked their voices. Jinesse bent her neck, her features blocked in sudden dimness. ‘You feel there’s distinction?’

Tharrick stirred from discomfort that had little to do with blistered skin. ‘The accusations fit too well to deny. Don’t forget, I saw what he caused at Alestron.’

‘You’ll betray him,’ Jinesse said.

‘I ought to.’ Tharrick shoved aside the corner of the coverlet and reached out a wrapped hand to cup her knee. ‘I won’t.’ Aware of her porcelain fairness turned toward him, he swallowed. ‘Corrupt, evil, sorcerer he may be, yet I am not Daelion Fatemaster to dare stand in judgment for his acts. By my lights, he’s the only master I have served who treated me as a man. For that, I’d take Dharkaron’s Spear in damnation before I’d turn coat and pass blithe beneath the Wheel to Athlieria. If blind service to Prince Lysaer’s justice is moral right, I prefer to keep my own honour.’

‘What will you do, then?’ Jinesse demanded. ‘The peninsula’s cut off by Avenor’s crack troops. The duke’s war galleys blockade the harbour. Lysaer’s guardsmen watch every move I make. Sooner or later, demands shall be made of me. The villagers don’t support my silence.’ She finished in a bitterness on the trembling edge of breakdown. ‘I cannot abandon my children.’

The tips of Tharrick’s fingers flexed against her knee. ‘I gave you my promise, mistress.’ In short, snatched whispers, while the moonlight fled and flooded and limned the widow’s form with silvered light, he told of the sailhands who rowed from the Shearfast for the shore.

‘They were to seek sanctuary in the hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood. It’s my plan to go there and rejoin them, and take whatever facts I know concerning Lysaer’s campaign plans. I’m telling you this, mistress, because I hold earnest hope that you will decide to come with me.’

‘I can’t.’ The thread that held Jinesse to composure came unravelled, and her slender body spasmed to the jerk of stifled sobs. ‘Fiark and Feylind are endangered. Lysaer insists he’s concerned for them. But he cannot be everywhere and atrocities happen where armies march. I fear what might come if my twins were caught in the path of the bloodshed intended to bring down the Master of Shadow.’

The brimming, liquid tracks of her tears and the anguish in her voice caused Tharrick to shove upright despite his pain. He gathered her against his warm shoulder. ‘I may have chosen to throw my lot in with Arithon. That doesn’t mean I support the ruin of small children. Come away with me. I’ll help see your young ones restored to you.’

‘So he did tell you where he was bound,’ Jinesse murmured. Her sigh of relief unreeled through a throat tight with weeping.

‘No,’ Tharrick whispered against the crown of her head. ‘But as Ath is my witness, he must have told you.’

Interlinks

In striking unconcern for the Koriani plot to break the wards over Althain Tower, Sethvir sits dreamy-eyed over an emptied mug of tea, while his misty regard quarters sights far removed from the winter sky outside his casement: on Avenor’s brick battlements, a desolate royal wife sheds lonely tears; two exuberant, blond-haired children laugh on a brigantine’s decks in Southshire harbour; in Vastmark, wyverns ride the winds like blown rags, their reptilian eyes alert for strayed sheep, while below them, a laggard band of shepherds herd their flocks through the defiles to lowland pastures …

In the steppelands of Shand, a motley assortment of raided livestock stampedes through the wilds of Alland, herd after herd of mixed horses and cattle hazed westward by Erlien’s clansmen …

In Merior by the Sea, patient as he waits out a widow’s tortured silence, Lysaer s’Ilessid pens a letter to his wife tender in assurance that war is not yet in the offing, until his watch officer interrupts with the bad news that Jinesse and the man Tharrick have evaded the guard on the cottage, and a search of the village has failed to find them …

III. VASTMARK (#ulink_84ff0997-ba28-5c38-b043-1fd98c6036e0)

On the morning that Lysaer’s cordon across the Scimlade peninsula was tightened in brisk effort to block Tharrick and Jinesse in their flight out of Merior, Arithon s’Ffalenn put his sloop Talliarthe in at the trade port of Innish. There, he spent a busy brace of days playing for small coin in the taverns. He renewed select friendships and secured help from a merchant to arrange for a ship’s crew to liberate the Khetienn from the rigger’s yard at Southshire. Then he collected the messages left waiting for him in posthouses and taverns throughout the city.

In the bone-lazy mood brought on by a night spent in a first-rate brothel, Dakar watched the Shadow Master answer his correspondence in hagridden hurry. Since the threat posed by Lysaer’s armies lay far removed from Innish, the Mad Prophet railed that the rush was a criminal waste. After more than a year lost to sea passages and the backwater boredom of Merior, only an idiot or a man possessed would not linger amid civilized comforts.

Arithon gave such complaint less weight than he ever had. On the following tide, he raised anchor again and set Talliarthe’s heading farther west. A rainy two-week passage brought her to landfall in the Cascain Islands.

Like everywhere else on the Vastmark coast, the shoreline was all hostile rock. Galleys made no ports of call there. Captains who plied the trade routes gave the chained islets with their reef-ridden narrows and foamnecklaced channels a nervous, respectful wide berth. Forbidding slate cliffs stabbed up through the froth of winter breakers, black, jagged-edged and desolate. Their knife-bladed faces, clean polished by storms, slapped back every sound in meshed echoes.

Assaulted from the moment the anchor splashed by the screeling cries of flocking gulls, Dakar puffed his cheeks in a sigh of relief. Today, he suffered no hangover. In a beady-eyed vigilance launched out of malice, he kept himself sober to see what Arithon would do next.

The loss of the shipyard in its way became as shattering a counterblow as the wreckage of the fleet inflicted upon Lysaer at Minderl Bay.

Never more patient, Dakar passed his days in coldblooded discontent. Arithon caught out in ignominious retreat was novel enough to be fascinating. The options left to choice were all mean ones. Lysaer’s warhost, so brilliantly reduced, now moved southward, pared down to its most dedicated divisions. Once the weather eased and more companies arrived to bolster the strike force at Merior, the Shadow Master dared not be caught cornered. No quarter would be shown by the specialized troops trained at Avenor for this war; Duke Bransian’s seasoned mercenaries and the hotly partisan garrison divisions lent by Etarra and Jaelot would vie to be first to claim his head.

‘Your tactics have only burned away the dross,’ Dakar pressured as Arithon turned the sloop’s second anchor line on a cleat and flipped in a sailor’s half hitch. ‘You now face the eastlands’ most gifted commanders. They won’t make misjudgments for the season and the supply lines. They’ll know to the second how long they can expect prime performance from an army in foreign territory.’

Dakar fiddled with his cuff laces, a half-moon smile of anticipation masked behind his moustache. Against established officers and hard-bitten veterans, the livestock raids made by Selkwood’s barbarians would gad this war host no worse than stings by a handful of hornets.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Erlien’s clansmen dance to their own mad tune.’ Arithon straightened and wiped salty hands on his breeches. ‘Am I meant to be grateful for your wisdom as a war counsellor? Lysaer and the duke won’t find much satisfaction using crack mercenaries to beat the empty brush at Scimlade Tip.’

Too wily now to rise to goading, Dakar listened and caught the fleeting catch of pain that even a masterbard’s skill could not quite pass off as insouciance. Merior’s abandonment to the whim of hostile forces stung, and surprisingly deeply. Just what the village had meant to Arithon, Dakar avowed to find out.

Asandir’s geas bound his person to the Shadow Master’s footsteps. Unless he wished to be crushed like furniture in the thrust of Lysaer’s campaign, he must sound Arithon’s plans, then use whatever vulnerable opening he could find to leverage influence over their paired fate.

But his nemesis acted first in that maddening, wayward abandon that seemed designed to whip Dakar to fury.

Given the intent to embark on a foray into the mountains of Vastmark, the Mad Prophet blinked, caught aback. ‘Ath, whatever for? There’s naught in these hills at this season but frost-killed bracken and starving hawks. The shale beds in the heights get soaked in the rains, and the rockslides can mill you to slivers. Those shepherds with sense will have driven their flocks to the lowest valleys until well after the first spring thaw.’

For answer, Arithon packed a small satchel with necessities. He heated his horn recurve bow over the galley stove to soften the laminate enough to string. Then he fetched his lyranthe, his hunting knife and sword, and piled them into the dory.

‘You’ll need warmer clothing,’ Dakar said in tart recognition that the shore excursion lay beyond argument. His dissent was ongoing as he squeezed his girth past the chart desk to delve in a locker and scrounge out a pair of hose without holes. ‘There’s ice on the peaks. How long are you planning to sulk in the hills if it’s snowing?’

‘If you wish warm clothes, fetch them.’ Arithon checked the sloop’s anchor lines one final time, then climbed the rail and dropped into his rocking tender. The yard workers I’ve retained won’t rejoin us here for at least another two fortnights. If you stay, the wait could be lonely. I didn’t provision to live aboard.’

Dakar almost lost his temper. No hunter by choice, he detested the stringy taste of winter game. Just how the Shadow Master proposed to maintain his team of experienced shipwrights lay beyond reason since the coffers from Maenalle were empty. Whatever else drew him to peruse the barren uplands that sliced like broken razors against the clouds, the principality of Vastmark was by lengths the loneliest sweep of landscape on the continent. The shepherds who wrested their livelihood from its wind-raked, boggy corries subsisted in wretched poverty.

In distrust and suspicion that Arithon’s excursion must be plotted as a feint to mask a more devious machination, the Mad Prophet snatched up his least-battered woollens, crammed them in a wad in his cloak, and in a clumsy boarding that rocked water over a gunwale, parked his bulk in the stern of the tender.

His compliance did not extend to shouldering the work of an oar. Nor when the craft beached on the nar row, pebbled strand did he lift a finger to help drag the dory into cover above the high tide mark. Ferret insight into Arithon’s affairs though he might through adventure into a wilderness, Dakar scowled to express his commensurate distaste. Open-air treks and clambering up scarps like a goat came second only to the mazes through sand grains once dealt him as punishment by Asandir.

The pace Arithon set in ascent from the strand was brutal enough to wring oaths from a seasoned mercenary. Breathless within minutes, aching tired inside an hour, Dakar toiled over rock that slipped loose beneath his boot soles, and wormed past chiselled escarpments which abraded the soft skin of his hands. The wind poured in cold gusts off the heights, freighted with the keen snap of frost. Chilled in his sweat-sodden woollens, raked over by gorse spines, and sliced on both palms from grasping dried bracken to stay upright, Dakar hung at Arithon’s heels in an unprecedented, stalwart forbearance. The higher the ascent, the more stoic he became, until exhaustion sapped even his penchant for cursing.

By then, the divide of the Kelhorn Mountains loomed in saw-toothed splendour above; below and to the northwest, in valleys the sheenless brown of crumpled burlap, the black- and red-banded stone of a ruin snagged through the crowns of the hills. Once a Paravian stronghold, the crumbled remains of a power focus threw a soft, round ring through the weeds that overran the site. Had Arithon not lost access to the talent that sourced his mage training, he would have seen the faint flicker of captured power as the fourth lane’s current played through the half-buried patterns. Since the site of Second Age mysteries posed the most likely reason for today’s journey, Dakar’s outside hope became dashed as the valley was abandoned for a stonier byway which scored a tangled track to the heights.

Once into the rough footing of the shale slopes, Arithon left the trail to dig for rootstock. He offered no conversation. The Mad Prophet spent the interval perched atop an inhospitable rock, undignified and panting.

The afternoon dimmed into cloudy twilight. Arithon strung his bow and shot a winter-thin hare, which Dakar cooked in inimical silence over a tiny fire nursed out of sticks and dead brush. Vastmark slopes were too wind-raked for trees, the gravelly soil too meagre to anchor even the stunted firs that seized hold at hostile sites elsewhere. The only crannies not scoured bare by harsh gales lay swathed in prickly furze. A man without blankets must bed down on rock, wrapped in a cloak against the cold, or else perish from lack of sleep, spiked at each turn by vegetation that conspired to itch or prickle.

Dakar passed the night in miserable, long intervals of chilled wakefulness broken by distressed bouts of nightmare. He arose with the dawn, disgruntled and sore, but still entrenched in his resolve to outlast the provocations set by his s’Ffalenn nemesis.

They broke fast on the charred, spitted carcass of a grouse and butterless chunks of ship’s biscuit, then moved on, Dakar in suffering silence despite the grievance of being forced to climb while he still felt starved to the bone. Arithon seemed none the worse for yesterday’s energetic side trips. His step on the narrow rims of the sheep trails stayed light and sure, the bundles slung from his shoulder no impediment to the steepest ascent.

‘You know,’ Dakar gasped in vain attempt to finagle a rest stop, ‘if you slip and fall, you’ll see Elshian’s last lyranthe in this world crunched into a thousand sad splinters.’

Poised at the crest of an abutment, Arithon chose not to answer. Dakar sucked wind to revile him for rudeness, then stopped against his nature to look closer. ‘What’s wrong?’

Arithon shaded his eyes from the filtered glare off the cloud cover and pointed. ‘Do you see them?’

Dakar huffed through his last steps to the ridgetop. His scowl puckered into a squint as he surveyed the swale below their vantage.

The landscape was not empty. Sinister and black above the rim of a dry river gorge, creatures on thin-stretched, membranous wings dipped and soared on the wind currents. The high mountain silence rang to a shrill, stinging threnody of whistles.

‘I thought the great Khadrim were confined to the preserve in Tornir Peaks.’ Prompted by a past encounter that had ended in a narrow escape, Arithon reached tot his sword.

‘You need draw no steel. Those aren’t Khadrim,’ Dakar corrected. ‘They’re wyverns; smaller; less dangerous; non-fire-breathing. If you’re a sheep, or a leg-broken horse, you’ve got trouble in plenty to worry about. The Vastmark territory’s thick with their eyries, but they seldom trouble anything of size.’ He studied the creatures’ wheeling, kite-tailed flight a considered moment longer. ‘Those are onto something, though. Wyverns don’t pack up without reason.’

‘Shall we see what they’re after?’ When his footsore companion groaned in response, Arithon grinned and leaped off the boulders to land running through the gorse down the ridge.