Warhost of Vastmark

‘It’s likely just the carcass of a mountain cat,’ Dakar carped. ‘Mother of all bastards, will you slow down? You’re going to see me trip and break my neck!’

Arithon called over his shoulder, cheerful. ‘Do that and you’ll just have to roll your fat self off this mountainside. No trees grow within a hundred and fifty leagues to cut any poles to make a litter.’

Ripped by a bilious stab of hatred, Dakar spat an epithet on each tearing breath until he slipped and bit his tongue between syllables. Sullen and sickened by the rank taste of blood, he hauled up panting beside the Master of Shadow and gazed over the brim of the cliff head.

The first minute, his eyes refused to focus. His head swam, and not from the pain; sharp drops from great heights infallibly made him unwell. Where the wyverns ducked and wove in fixed interest, the channel-worn rock delved out by a glacial stream slashed downward into a ravine. The bottom lay dank as a pit. More wyverns threaded through the depths. Their dark scales glinted blue as new steel, and their spiked wingtips knifed a whine like a sabre cut through updraughts and invisibly roiled air.

Arithon paused a scant second, then stooped and slung off his lyranthe.

‘You’re not going down there,’ Dakar objected.

He received a look the very palest of chill greens that boded the worst sort of obstinacy. ‘Would you stop me?’ Arithon said.

‘Ath, no.’ Dakar gestured toward the defile. ‘Be my guest. You’re most welcome to crash headlong to your death. I’ll stay here and applaud while the wyverns gnaw the bones of your carcass.’

Arithon stooped, caught a handhold, and dropped down onto a broken, narrow ledge. There he must have found a goat track. His black head blended with the shadow in the cleft. Dakar resisted the suicidal, mad urge to drive him back by threatening to hurl Halliron’s instrument after him into the abyss. In the cold-hearted hope he might witness his enemy’s fall instead, the Mad Prophet tightened his belt to brace the quiver in his gut, grabbed a furze tuft for security, and skidded downslope on his fundament.

The wyverns cruising like nightmare shuttlecocks screamed in piercing outrage, then flapped wings and arrowed up from the cleft. From what seemed a secure stance on an outcrop below, Arithon kicked a spray of gravel into the ravine. The pebbles bounced, cracking, from stone to stone in plunging arcs, and startled four other settled monsters into flight. The chilling, stuttered whistles they shrilled in alarm raised a dissonance to ache living bone marrow.

Dakar saw Arithon suddenly drop flat on his belly. He peered downward also, unable to gain vantage into the recess beneath the moss-rotten underhang. The Shadow Master’s exclamation of warning came muffled behind a sleeve as he rolled, unlimbered his strung bow from his shoulder, then positioned himself on one knee and nocked an arrow.

Moved by danger to scramble and close the last descent, Dakar also spotted the quarry which held the wyverns in circling patterns.

In the deep shade of a fissure, on a ledge lower down, a shepherd in a stained saffron jerkin crouched braced at bay against the cliff face. One arm was muffled in a dusty dun cloak. The streaked fingers of his other hand were glued to the haft of a bloodied dagger. Heaped to one side like a sun-shrivelled hide, the corpse of a wyvern lay draped on the scarp. The gouged socket of the eye that took the death wound tipped skyward, stranded in gore like a girl’s discarded ribbons between the needle teeth that rimmed the parted, horny scales of its jaw.

Another living wyvern perched just beyond weapon’s reach, wings half-furled and its snake-slender neck cocked to snap. Its golden, round eye shone lambent in the gloom, fixed on the steel which was all that deterred its killing strike.

Arithon drew his horn recurve. The arrow he fired hissed down in angled aim and took the predator just behind the foreleg.

The wyvern squalled in mortal pain. Its finned tail lashed against the rocks. Torn vegetation and a bashed fall of stones clattered down the ravine. The leathery crack as its pinions snapped taut buffeted a gusty snap of air. One taloned hind limb raised to claw the shaft, then spasmed, contorted into death throes. The creature overbalanced. It battered backward and plummeted off the vertical rock wall to a thrash of scraped scales and torn wings.

The man with the knife jerked his chin up, his face a pale blur against the gloom. He cried in hoarse fear as another wyvern plunged from its glide in a screaming, wrathful stoop, talons outstretched to slash and tear whatever moved in the open.

Arithon nocked and drew a second arrow. ‘I thought you said they never fought in packs!’

‘They don’t.’ Morbidly riveted, Dakar watched the weapon tip track its descending target, the twang of release left too late to forgive a missed shot. Arithon’s shaft sang out point-blank and smacked home. The wyvern wrenched out of its plunge. It cartwheeled, the arrow buried to the fletching beneath its wing socket.

His envy compounded with unabashed regret for such nerveless, exacting marksmanship, Dakar qualified. ‘That was the mate of the one you killed first. The creatures fly paired. They defend their own to the death.’

‘I believe you.’ The edged look of temper Arithon threw back bruised for its knowing, poisoned irony. ‘But if you happen to be wrong, you’d better do the same.’ He thrust his bow and his unhooked quiver into the Mad Prophet’s startled grasp.

Unable to mask his raised hackles, Dakar glared as Arithon hurled himself over the lip of the ledge. ‘You think I’d bother? I don’t care how often you’re reminded. It’s no secret I’ll rejoice to see you dead.’

Arithon’s reply slapped back in hollow echoes off the sheer walls of the ravine. ‘I’m not quite the fool I appear. With eighty leagues of mountains between here and Forthmark, if you don’t fancy climbing, you’re stuck. Unless you find the sea legs to single-hand my sloop.’

‘That’s not funny.’ Dakar cast down bow and arrows in disgust and sucked in his paunch to give chase. If his descent was ungraceful, he was scarcely less fast. He dropped to the lower ledge in a shower of dragged gravel, yanked down the tunic left hiked up to his armpits, then spat out the inhaled ends of his beard to deliver a scathing retort.

His words died unspoken. A shudder of horror swept through him as he saw: the shepherd with the knife proved no man at all, but a boy not a year more than twelve.

The child stared at his rescuers in uncomprehending shock, eyes dark and round in a face of vivid angles, drained to wax pallor beneath its scuffed dirt. Straw tails of hair stuck in matted hanks to a bloodied shoulder. The stained, cloak-wrapped wrist used to fend off teeth and talons was rust with the same stiffened stains. His shirt was more red than saffron. The one bare foot visible beneath the ripped cuff of his trouser lay swollen beyond recognition.

‘Daelion forfend, you’re a very lucky boy to be alive,’ Dakar said. Overhead, the wyvern pack whistled and dived in balked circles, too wary to close now their prey was defended.

While Dakar battled to contain squeamish nerves, Arithon bent, caught the child’s knife wrist, and pried his sticky fingers off the grip. ‘It’s all right. Help has come. You aren’t going to need that any more.’

The boy broke with a shuddering whimper. Arithon bundled his head against his chest and cradled him tightly, then used his left hand to probe the hot, swollen flesh above the ankle. The child flung back against his hold as he touched. ‘Easy. Easy. We’ll have you up out of here in just a minute.’ But the jagged grate of bone underneath his light fingers belied his banal reassurance.

As if crazed by pain, the boy struggled desperately harder.

‘Jilieth,’ he gasped, the first clear word he had spoken. ‘Look to Jilie.’ He fought an arm free to tug at something shielded in the crevice behind his back: a second, more heartrending bundle splashed in scarlet.

‘Merciful Ath!’ Dakar dropped to his knees, his antipathy eclipsed. Closer inspection showed a face and a small hand inside the mass of shredded clothing. Behind the boy lay a second child, a girl no more than six.

‘Your sister?’ asked Arithon.

The boy gave a stricken nod.

‘All right then, be brave.’ While the Shadow Master shifted the injured boy aside, Dakar squeezed past with tender care and lifted the younger girl’s pitiful, torn body into the open. She stirred awake at his touch. The one eye she had left fixed, brown and beseeching, on his bearded, stranger’s face. ‘Papa. Where’s my papa?’

The Mad Prophet clenched his jaw in helpless grief. ‘If I could command even half of what Asandir taught me, I could help.’

‘Never mind that.’ Arithon loosed the boy with a murmur of encouragement, turned aside, and cupped the girl’s tear-streaked face.

‘Papa,’ she repeated as his shadow crossed over her.

‘Your father is with you, believe it,’ he assured in the schooled, steady timbre earned in study for his masterbard’s title.

‘Ghedair said he would come.’ The girl gasped. Blood welled and trickled from the corner of her mouth. Her chest heaved against drowning congestion as she forced in another pained breath. ‘It hurts. Tell my papa, it hurts.’

Arithon soothed back crusted hair to bare the mauled ruin a wyvern had left when its front talons had raked and grasped her face. The rear claw had sunk through her shoulder and chest; deep gashes had torn when it flew. Ends of separated bone and ripped cartilage showed blue through the shreds of her blouse.

It wasn’t Ghedair’s fault,’ the girl blurted. ‘He was watching. But I ran off. Then wyverns came.’

‘Hush.’ Arithon added a phrase in lilted Paravian, too low for Dakar to translate. But the powerful ring of compassion in his tone could have drawn out the frost from ice itself. ‘I know that, Jilieth. Stop fretting.’

In merciful relief, the child’s one eye slid closed.

‘Your bard’s gift let her sleep?’ the Mad Prophet asked.

Arithon soothed her cheek against Dakar’s rough clad shoulder. ‘That’s the best I could do.’ In the moment he glanced up, the deep empathy of his feelings stripped his face beyond hope of concealment. ‘Keep her quiet if you can.’

Stupid with shock, Dakar clung to the girlchild while the Shadow Master bent to tend the boy. The blood on the torn saffron jerkin proved more the dead wyvern’s or his sister’s than his own. The arm, bundled out of its swathe of shredded cloak, bore deep punctures and gashes swollen to angry red. The break above the ankle was clean beneath the swelling. Arithon patted the boy’s crown, arose, and in a fit of balked grace, kicked the rank, knife-hacked corpse of the other fallen wyvern over the edge of the outcrop. The implication was enough to stop thought, that somewhere lay another slain mate.

The resourceful boy owned courage enough to shame a full-grown man.

While the rest of the drake pack, in a squalling, stabbing squabble, glided down the gorge to scavenge the remains of their dead, Arithon disrupted Dakar’s appalled stupor in brisk and fluent Paravian. ‘We’ll have to splint the leg first. Arrow shafts should do for the purpose. I’ll tie them with my cuff lacings. The girl, we’ll have to bind up as we may. I hate the delay, yet we’ve got no choice. They’ll have to be moved. The herbs in my satchel and some of the roots can be pounded up to make poultices. But I can’t brew the remedies without water and sheltered ground to make a fire.’

‘There ought to be springs at the base of the cliffs,’ Dakar said.