Warhost of Vastmark

‘No beer left,’ rasped Ivel from his cranny. Scathelessly smug before Arithon’s flicked glance, and crafty enough to anticipate, he tipped his grizzled beard toward the tread that advanced and shrugged his bony shoulders. His large, seamed hands with their thumbs worn shiny from years of twining hemp gleamed red against shadow as Dakar fiddled open the gate of the iron stove and prodded the embers inside.

‘Rope store’s full burnt,’ the splicer quipped in brassy cheer. ‘Can’t make me work in yon rain without materials.’ He tilted his narrow head, impertinent as a gossip. ‘What’ll ye do? That gold store of yers, lad, she’s bound to be played right low.’

Arithon swept aside a litter of sticky crockery, kicked a bench closer, and sat. ‘I’ll thank you not to comment until the master shipwright has explained himself.’

Ivel leaned aside and shot a neat stream of spit at a bowl on the trestle by his elbow. ‘Master shipwright’s run off. He feared to face yer temper, and some lass in Shaddorn took him in. You want to know what happened, I’ll tell it. Else you can try out yer touch with the wretch who torched the yard. The men hazed him like butchers. He won’t talk.’

Arithon straightened, his wet fingers clenched and his eyes icy sparks in the gloom. ‘One man?’

‘Aye.’ Ivel’s grin revealed gapped, yellow teeth. ‘Hates yer living guts. Hid in the brush till the lads all got drunk, then launched on his merry bit of sabotage.’

‘He knows who I am?’ Arithon asked in a dead, level voice. ‘He told the labourers?’

A cracking, high cackle split from Ivel’s throat. He hugged his knees to his chest on his barrel, a dried-up, corded little monkey of a man who lived and breathed to stir up malice. ‘He told the men nothing, for all the hide they singed off him. What I ken, I got because I took him water when he raved. But your secret’s full safe with me, prince.’

Arithon snapped up a chipped flagon and hurled it. The smash of unglazed crockery against the board floor raised a storm of clay dust and chinking fragments. ‘Secret?’ He laughed in a brittle, thin irony more bitter than the splicer could match. ‘The whole of the north knows precisely where I am, and I find my ships burned to ashes.’

Still by the stove, polished ruddy by the coals, Dakar rubbed sweaty knuckles over his rumpled tunic. ‘You say the man who did this is held captive?’

Ivel rocked off a nod. ‘Aye, he is. Bound and locked in the boiler shed. The master joiner guards the key.’

The wood fire had been lit to heat the steam box again. Aware of the rain as a drummed, liquid trickle off the thatch and the erratic, spaced hiss as a leak dripped onto the hot copper vat, the prisoner curled on his side in abject misery. The damp, sand floor made him shiver. Hungry, thirsty, fevered down to his bones, at first he presumed the footsteps outside meant a labourer had come to fuel the stove.

Since such were wont to kick him as they passed, he wormed into the gap behind the log stores. If he feigned sleep and stayed out of sight, sometimes his presence was forgotten. Today, the mere hope made him pitiful. The sweeping chills that seized through his frame made him unable to keep still.

The footsteps outside came closer, overlaid by agitated talk. Then a stranger’s voice blistered across rising argument like tempered steel through threshed straw. ‘Enough! I’ll hear no excuses. Stay out here until you’re called.’ Keys chimed sour notes through a patter of hurried strides, and the new arrival spoke again. ‘No, Dakar. You will wait.’

The bar in the lock grated and gave; the door jerked open. A flood of rain-washed air swirled through the heat and a small, lithe man stepped inside. He stood a moment, eyes searching the darkness, while the fiery glare from the furnace lined his sharp profile and the lip he curled up at the stench.

Snapped to a scourge of clear anger, he said, ‘You claim he’s in here?’

The master joiner’s south shore drawl filtered back, uncertain through the silvered splash of water. ‘Master, he’s there. My heart’s blood as surety. We’d never let him escape.’

Without any fumbling, the man found the lamp and the striker kept ready on the shelf by the doorway. His hands shook as he lit the spill. The trembling flare of illumination as he touched flame to wick shed gold over finely made knuckles. He raised the lamp and hung its iron ring from a nail in the rafters.

Through vision impaired to slits by bruises and swelling, the prisoner saw him fully, centred beneath the yellow glow. Thin and well-knit, he looked like a wraith in dark breeches, his white shirt slathered to his shoulders by the rain. His hair was black. Wet strands stuck like ink to his temples and jaw. The features they framed were pale granite, all chipped angles and fury, the eyes now shadowed by lamplight.

Wind riffled through the portal at his back. The lantern flame wavered and failed to a spark, then leaped back in dazzling recovery. Swept by a chill that chattered his teeth, the prisoner shrank into his cranny.

The man spun toward the noise like a predator. He could not miss the lashed pair of ankles that protruded from the wood stores, livid and blackened with scabs.

‘Merciful Ath!’ He lilted a fast phrase in the old tongue that resounded with appalled shock. Then in a rage to freeze the falling rain itself, he changed language and commanded, ‘Strike his bonds.’

‘But, my lord,’ protested the master joiner through the sizzle as the leak let fall another droplet on the boiler. The wretch came intending to murder y—’

In fearful speed, the man in authority cut him off. ‘Do it now! Are you deaf or a fool, to defy me?’

While the joiner entered, chastened to cowering, the black-haired man sank to his knees and laid his own icy hands over the prisoner’s roped ankles. ‘Give me the knife. I’ll do this myself. Then send for a litter and some sort of tarp to cut the rain.’ In the same distilled tone of venom he added, ‘Dakar and I will serve as bearers.’

The prisoner flinched in agony as his leg was grasped and steadied and the knife touched against the crusted cord.

‘Easy,’ soothed the speaker in a murmured change of register. As the bonds fell away, the same fingers explored the swelling cuts and burns, gentle despite their marring tremor and the slowed reflex of deep chill. ‘We’ll have to ease him out before I can reach to free his wrists.’

Worked clear of his cranny with the aid of a fat man he recognized, the captive forced open the grazed, bloodied pulp that clogged his eyelids. The presence of the gem-dealing imposter last seen tied for questioning in the Duke of Alestron’s private study cleared his wits. At close quarters the identity of the other could be guessed.

Such sharp-angled features and green eyes must surely belong to the Master of Shadow, who had ruined his name in the duke’s guard and brought him to ignominy and exile.

‘You!’ he ground out, half-choked by bile and hatred. ‘You’re the dread sorcerer who enspelled my lord’s armoury the day it burned. I swore in cold blood to see you dead!’ He wrenched his strapped arms with such force that the stout, bearded henchman scrambled back in sceptical alarm.

‘You see who he is? You’re sure you want him freed?’ The Mad Prophet clasped his fat fists in trepidation. ‘He’s sure to fly at your throat.’

Arithon s’Ffalenn simply sat down. Already white, his face looked like paper soaked over bone from the impact of pity and shock. ‘I said I want his bonds struck. Have you eyes? Ath Creator, the man’s out of his mind with pain, and feverish to the point where a fair weather breeze could knock him down.’

‘At your service, with pleasure, your Grace, except for one thorny problem.’ Dakar’s round face furrowed in sly sarcasm as he accepted the knife to slice ropes. ‘When this brutish fellow gets up and cuts your heart out, I’ll be forced to explain. The Fellowship of Seven will hold me to blame when they hear how your line met its end.’

A small movement; the Master of Shadow turned his head.

Dakar sucked in a sharp breath. ‘You win, as always. Dharkaron show mercy, forget I ever spoke!’

Awash in dizziness and quick hatred, the captive gritted his teeth. Such reversal of fate lay beyond even dreams, that he might snatch back his chance to avenge his honour. He endured the frightful pain as his enemies raised his shoulder and turned him over. ‘I was never careless,’ he ground out in mulish acrimony. ‘Your black sorcery allowed you entrance to that keep. A vixen’s cunning got you out alive. Ath’s Avenger bear me witness, you shall get what you deserve.’

Behind and above him, Arithon s’Ffalenn regarded the older grid of scars that marked the captive’s naked back. ‘Your duke made you pay sorely for what was, at most, a lapse of attention. What brought you here? A need to strike back for injustice?’

Stubborn in pride, the exiled guardsman held silent, his cheek pressed to damp sand until his cuts stung. The grate of broken ribs stitched his side in red fire and spasmed his muscles at each breath. He squeezed his eyes closed, clinging to patience, but the close heat and the sweat that ran from him in his agony made him light-headed and sick. His senses upended into vertigo. Long before the ropes that tied his wrists were sawn through, his awareness had unreeled into dark.

He awakened raving, deep in the night. A vision tormented him, of clean sheets and the astringent scent of poultice herbs. He thrashed against the touch that restrained him and railed aloud at the woman’s voice that implored an unseen demon for assistance. Then he cursed as other hands reached down in diabolical force to restrain him.

‘Is there no end?’ someone cried in distress. ‘He’s started the bleeding again.’

Over his head loomed the face of the antagonist he had ached and endured horrors for the chance to kill. He shivered. His nerves an inferno of thwarted rage, he tried to strike out with his fist.

Bandages stopped him; then the sorcerer’s features, haggard with an incomprehensible pity.

‘Mountebank,’ gasped the guardsman, reduced to frustration and tears. His enemy’s dread shadows and his darkness were real enough. They spun him in their web once again and swallowed his struggles. Pinned helpless and moaning, he lost his thoughts into starless, lightless night.

Later he heard someone weeping his name. The harsh accents sounded like his own. Sunlight burned his eyes and branded hot bands at his naked wrists and ankles. He remembered the prison and the post. Again he tasted the fire of the whip, as Duke Bransian s’Brydion’s master-at-arms flayed open the skin of his back. ‘I’m no traitor, to beg like a dog to be forgiven,’ he said, and then retched, sickened by his weakness. ‘Why can’t you believe me? I opened no doors. I met no Master of Shadow!’

But the whip fell and fell. The accusatory voice of Dharkaron Avenger seemed to roll like thunder through his dreams. ‘If you suffered a flogging harsh enough to scar for failing to secure a locked passage, then what shall be your lot for setting fire to the ships of a sorcerer?’

The bed where he lay underwent a mad spin, like the turn of Daelion’s Wheel. The pain in his flesh swelled and drowned him. He heard water splash from a bowl and then music. Notes tapped and pried against his fevered senses like slivers flung off breaking crystal. Their sweetness conspired to weave a rolling pattern of freed beauty that scalded a breach through his hatred. Again he wept. The purity of song left him chilled like white rain, then threatened to break his laboured heart. He fell back, gasping against a soft pillow that swelled around his head until he died.

Or thought so, until he opened his eyes, limp and lucid, to a gloom gently lit by a candle. Rain chapped against the shutters of a cottage which smelled of oiled oak and dried lavender. He moved his head, aware by the softened prickle beneath his cheek that someone had washed and trimmed his hair. The strands were tarnished gold again, and shining on the linen, combed neat as in the days before his beggary.

‘He’s awakened,’ said a woman in a shy, cautious whisper.

Someone else in the shadows responded. ‘Leave us, Jinesse.’ Light steps creaked against the floorboards. A man’s outline swept across the candleflame, etched in brief light before he pulled up a wicker stool and sat down. ‘Your name is Tharrick?’

The guard captain condemned to an unkind exile opened bruised eyelids and discovered his enemy at his bedside.