Warhost of Vastmark

‘Then we’ll find a path down.’ A leap and an athletic slither saw Arithon up to the ridgetop. He returned with his quiver and spare shirt. Before need that disallowed the indulgence of his hatreds, Dakar lent his hands to the grim work of splinting and binding.

The boy gave one full-throated, agonized cry as his shinbone was pulled into line and set straight. Arithon spoke to him, soothingly gentle, a constant barrage of reassurance. Whether his voice spun fine magic, or cruel pain claimed its due, when the ankle and knee were strapped immobile, the child lay quiet, unconscious.

‘Pity them both,’ Dakar whispered as he ripped linen to strap Jilieth’s gaping lacerations. ‘She must be half-empty of blood.’ He need not belabour his certainty that the wounds beneath his hands were surely mortal. The grief in the Shadow Master’s expression matched him in stricken understanding.

‘There’s hope. We might save her,’ Arithon insisted as he tucked the shepherd boy into the folds of his cloak.

Dakar pushed back upright and trailed through the climb up the cliff path, the girl cradled limp in his arms. ‘Are you mad? Five bones in her rib cage are separated from the cartilage, and one lung is filled up with blood!’

‘I know.’ Arithon draped the boy over his shoulders, clasped the small, unmarked wrist and one ankle, then set his weight to scale the last rise of rock. ‘Just keep her alive until we find a spring. If she’s still breathing then, try and find the forbearance to trust me.’

Dakar clamped his teeth. The Prince of Rathain had never asked his help; never before now bent his stiff royal pride to admit that other company was better than a burden to be managed in blistering tolerance. If Asandir’s geas hounded Dakar to sheer misery, for Arithon, the bonding was a nuisance.

Tempted into a sympathy that felt like self-betrayal, Dakar ground out the first rude word to cross his mind. Then, stubborn in prosaic disbelief, he passed the doomed girl into Arithon’s waiting grip and dragged his plump carcass back up the rim wall to the slope.

Two hours later, on a sandy bank beside a rock pool, Arithon prepared a heated poultice to treat the punctures and slashes on Ghedair’s mauled forearm. His concentration seemed unaffected by the oppressive gloom of the site. Damp and streamered in green shags of moss, the gorge reared up sheer on two sides, the sky a hemmed ribbon between. Light seeped through the clouds, dim as the gleam off a miser’s silver, while the breeze fluted mournfully through the defiles. Far off, the braided whistles of a wyvern pair screeled in bone-chilling dissonance.

Tired of feeling useless, set on edge by the spring’s erratic plink of seeped droplets, Dakar gave rein to spite and prodded Arithon to elaborate on his earlier, misguided cause for hope.

‘Jilieth’s already failing.’ The clogged drag of her chest seemed to worsen with each tortured breath that she drew. To distance the unaccustomed sting of pity, the Mad Prophet lashed out. ‘You know full well there’s nothing left to do but keep her warm and sheltered until she dies.’

Her face by then had been cleansed and swathed in the torn strips from Arithon’s spare shirt. Outside the bandaging, the lashes of her undamaged eye remained, fanned like cut ends of silk against a cheek so colourless the freckles shone dull grey. To look at her at all, to see her child’s hands so far removed from life they never twitched, was to suffer a sorrow past endurance.

Small comfort could be gained, watching Arithon’s fine fingers wind and tuck smooth the ends of the dressing over the boy’s poultice. That task completed, he settled Ghedair back in his cloak and plied him with herb possets until he slept.

Dakar could no longer hold out. The child in his arms gasped on the edge of suffocation; she was going to pass the Wheel within the hour. Her plight most ruthlessly tore away pride until no grudge was enough to maintain his sceptical rancour.

To Arithon, he ground out, ‘If you think we can save her, say how.’

‘Easily spoken, in theory. Not so simply carried out.’ A wind-tousled figure stripped down to hose and shirtsleeves, Arithon rinsed his hands. Water spattered off his reddened fingertips, shattered the pool into ring ripples that burst his reflection into a maze of jagged lines.

Dakar found himself pinned by a measuring stare that assessed him wholly without judgment.

‘You’ve had longevity training,’ Arithon said at blunt length. ‘I’ve got a masterbard’s ear for true sound. If you build the spell seals to initiate healing, I can link them through music to the signature vibration that defines Jilieth’s life Name.’

If not for the hurt creature that burdened his arms, Dakar would have shot to his feet. ‘Dharkaron’s fell Chariot and Spear! You have no idea what you’re asking.’

‘You’re most wrong.’ Arithon looked away. ‘I’ve a fair enough indication.’ In unadorned phrasing, he described the time he had joined talents with the enchantress Elaira to reconstruct the mangled arm of a fisher lad. The result of that experience, coupled with the mage’s schooling he had received from his grandfather, lent him full awareness of the implications. The aftermath had hurled his heart beyond peace; the woman had been driven to leave Merior.

Dakar shrank from revulsion that pealed like an ache through his bones. ‘I might know your whole mind!’ The unspoken corollary freighted his tension, that the shared course of such bindings could expose every facet of Arithon’s warped character to the intermeshed weave of the link. No secret would stand between them; no subterfuge. If Dakar once lost his grip, he would find his awareness submersed in the quagmire of the other man’s criminal nature, to the everlasting upset of his conscience.

‘I don’t want to be privy to your unsavoury intentions,’ the Mad Prophet declaimed, afraid for what he might suffer.

The concept was abhorrent. His enemy’s deadly aberrance; all the doomed, fell bindings of Desh-thiere’s geas could backlash and imprint his private memory. Though he would not share Arithon’s subjugation to the curse, the Master of Shadow asked him to risk first-hand knowledge of the hates that drove the war against Lysaer; the same amoral passions which had brought the bloody slaughter of eight thousand lives on the banks of the River Tal Quorin, then the burning of the trade fleet at Minderl Bay.

Those horrific burdens were none of his making, to assume for the sake of a child.

Rathain’s prince at least had the decency not to stare while the Mad Prophet pondered the unkindly reach of later consequence. The faltering life held sheltered in his arms became tormented testimony to the list of his personal shortfalls. Dakar stood as a man on the edge of an abyss. One word in consent, one misstep in weakness, and his self-awareness might become forever skewed.

Worse, success could not be guaranteed. He could agree, and shoulder his whimpering fear, and still fail. The girl was far gone already. She could end a cold corpse beneath a shepherd’s stone cairn, surrounded by her circle of weeping kinsfolk.

Dakar closed his eyes against a thorny barrage of selfish thought. He could equally well master the sacrifice and see Jilieth walk whole in the sunlight.

At his back, in drawn quiet marked off by the splash of the rock spring, Arithon awaited his decision. The understanding implicit in his stillness itself became a goad, until Dakar burst out in acrimony, ‘There’s no risk to you! All I have on my conscience is debauchery and vice. Every decadent trait you despise. You fear no remorse. Your self-restraint should scarcely be shaken.’

Arithon’s reply was all steel. ‘I stake a certain independence of mind. Nor am I Sethvir, to pick out every nuance of future impact.’

The child in Dakar’s care shuddered through another racked breath; a wider patch of scarlet flowered through the layers of her bandaging. The spellbinder set his teeth and glared at rain-chiselled stone, that would endure through long ages, indifferent to the trials of mortal suffering. He measured himself in unprecedented cold logic, and understood, should he shy from the choice, the courage of a boy and a little girl’s brown eye, beseeching, were going to haunt him forever. He bitterly dreaded to face their contempt in the dregs of every beer keg, to the ruin of his irresponsible pleasures.

There remained only malice toward the man who laid that irreversible crossroads before him. ‘Damn you,’ Dakar answered to Arithon s’Ffalenn in a tone very like the one Tharrick had used before swearing his oath in Jinesse’s cottage. ‘I cannot refuse, as you’re fully aware. Ath’s pity on us both when we come to regret this hour afterward.’

‘There’s always the chance that we won’t,’ Arithon said; but his pained snap of sarcasm showed his dearth of faith.

The fact such doubt was justified hurled Dakar over the edge. His consent was flung down like a duellist’s challenge, as much to spite the scorn of an antagonist as to save a failing child from certain death.

‘Make me the butt of your hatred all you like,’ Arithon baited in maddening, nerveless composure. He fetched his lyranthe and in fierce, hard jerks began to unlace its fleece wrappings. ‘But unless you wish to tempt disaster, let your feud with me bide until later.’

Dakar chose not to acknowledge the insult. Longevity alignment was no novice’s lesson; five centuries of study made him far from incompetent. Any spellbinder apprenticed to Asandir would be well trained to put by his surface passions for the clear self-control demanded for acts of grand conjury. The practice had never been an exercise the Mad Prophet welcomed; the deep, still quiet required for fine spellcraft often fired his spurious fits of prophecy. If the Fellowship Sorcerers had insisted the gift could be tamed to control, the gut-tearing sickness that followed each episode had been Dakar’s trial to bear. He preferred to escape in debauchery.

The fact hurt now with surprising venom, that he yet lacked the knowledge to initiate Jilieth’s healing. Arithon might be damaged beyond conscious access to his talents; still, he owned the intuitive experience to explain how the trial should be approached. Dakar flicked up gravel in irritation. He had no option except to follow the plan, though trust gouged like sand against his grain. He had no wish to assume the reasoned risks of a man whose penchant for devious artifice held no limit.

Through the sweet, plucked run of his tuning notes, Arithon said, ‘Merciful maker, Dakar. If we’re going to be foolish and corrupt ourselves, let’s not waste time browbeating the issue. Lay the child across your lap. Get comfortable. You may not be moving before nightfall.’ The splashed descent of an arpeggio cut through his measured instructions. ‘The theory should not be unduly complex. I can use music to build a bridge-link to Jilieth, then turn the discipline I learned at Rauven to open myself as a conduit. If you can conjoin into sympathy and thread your power through me, I can transmute the seals into sound and heighten their pull on the girl.’

As Dakar settled in capitulation, the Shadow Master cautioned him further. ‘I can build upon your foundation. But I will be blind to the spell construct as it forms. You must be my eyes as well as the source of raw energy. I can only weave sound on what I hear and sense through my empathic gift as a bard. The result will be measured and limited by the depths to which you can release yourself into sympathy.’

Dakar chewed his beard in unalloyed apprehension as notes sprang and sparked like sprays of dropped crystal through the mournful moan of the wind. The browned tufts of sedges on the stream banks flattened and hissed and shivered. From the musician bent cross-legged with his instrument there came no hint of recrimination for the need to bare himself to an enemy.