TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark by Janny Wurts

  His suffering made the moment too real. The scent of waxed wood; the startled flight of two maidservants caught idle and gossiping in the corridor, tiny things, each burned in bleak imprint that ripped away hope of self-denial.

  Lysaer squeezed his fists closed. The dig of his nails into flesh gave no surcease. Memory harrowed him in every vicious detail; still he saw Lady Talith's appalled shock as her loss shredded the last tissue of her hope. He saw her skin lose all tint; the blushed tips of her breasts a cry of colour the more punishing for the surge as desire remained to hound his flesh before a need that made him quiver like an addict.

  For of course, he could not entrust her now to bear his heir. He could never again treasure her unsullied company, nor allow her inside his defences. Not without suffering her suborning influence and the deadly, real chance she might seduce him to abandon law and justice.

  Once passion escaped reason, a man could go mad.

  Lysaer cursed his weakness. If one fool had been blind enough to lose himself to love, the blame for the turned weapon was an enemy's. Through tears of hurt for his wife's tragic usage, like a litany against demons, the Prince of the West recited the lethal chain of logic that undid him.

  'Never gold, you inhuman, soulless bastard. The ransom and the raid, they were all smoke and ruse. Your purpose with Lady Talith was this, and no other: to pierce and to weaken and to level by storm the only exposed place within my heart.'

  Ways and Means

  Sethvir returns to Althain Tower after an absence of five months and on his doorstep finds Lirenda, First Enchantress of the Koriathain; and to her tartly-phrased demand for the return of her order's Great Waystone, he replies, 'I've been wondering for the past five hundred years when you ladies would trouble yourselves to ask. Why not come in for tea?'. . .

  Spurred on by outrage over the piracy that has caused Talith's ransom to be paid twice over, a delegation of Tysan's city mayors and trade ministers gather in council at the crossroads city of Erdane, and the document they thrash through in state language is the draft of a charter to acknowledge Lysaer's right of succession to Tysan's high kingship, underwritten by town law . . .

  While Avenor's royal galley rows north bearing Princess Talith back home to the towers of Avenor, her husband drives south with all speed; and like darkening storm, his armies mass on the borders of Vastmark to wreak vengeance and death upon the Master of Shadow before the onset of winter. . .

  VII. GRAND AUGURY

  Dawn broke in a spray of high cirrus over the Westland Sea. Tossed like a chip on the royal blue swell, the brigantine Khetienn ploughed southeastward in an offshore course, her bowsprit hazed under plumed sheets of spray, and her stretched canvas bent to the force of each following gust. Dakar the Mad Prophet sat on a bight of rope, a woeful stream of water frayed by the wind off the screwed ends of his hair. He was not seasick.

  'I wish I'd had a sword,' he said in black vehemence. 'So help me, someone should have paid for Dhirken's death.'

  The voice of Kharadmon flung back through the keening air. 'To what use? Vengeance won't bring her back. Arithon told you the same.'

  'Then went ahead and vented his scalded nerves on his seamen.' Dakar rolled his eyes at the creaking gear aloft, while behind him at the wheel, the quartermaster and two sailhands wrestled oaths through clenched teeth, straining to man the rank helm. 'Fiends plague, we're risking every stick in this tub to a gale, and not one sail with a reef tied in!'

  'I do have more finesse than to rip out her canvas,' Kharadmon said in reproof. When his accuser failed to return an apology, the discorporate Sorcerer added a breezy remonstrance that tweaked the untidy hems and untucked laces of the Mad Prophet's sodden state garments.

  'We're in a hurry because Khetienn has debts against her at Innish,' someone said in unwarranted explanation. 'I want them cleared before the notes come due.'

  Dakar's sullen brooding gave way to awareness that Arithon s'Ffalenn stood behind him, and had probably overheard his last comment. Braced for unpleasantness, he spun to look.

  State doublet and silk shirt had been changed for a sailor's smock with several generations of tar stains. Beneath wind-snatched dark hair, the Shadow Master's expression showed no stripped edge of reprimand, but a self-haunted directness Dakar had never seen.

  Arithon addressed a query to the invisible presence of the Sorcerer. 'If Dhirken could be condemned for the honest charter of her brig, what in Ath's mercy will befall Talith?'

  'Do you really wish to know?' Kharadmon's interrupted appeal to the winds whirled into a small eddy that chased droplets over the deck.

  'I must,' said Arithon in stark demand.

  'Why care?' Dakar broke in. 'Talith was insufferably arrogant. She flaunted her looks outright to manipulate an opening for intrigue.' To the Fellowship spirit which arrowed above the brigantine's masthead, he added, 'I watched the whole thing. Arithon kept his distance from the lady as though she were fiend-plagued and venomous!'

  'So he did,' Kharadmon agreed. Wind screamed through stays, and the brigantine slammed smoking through another swell. A green swirl of waters slapped across her rails, to drain in throaty gurgles through her scuppers. 'Despite that care, Talith came to recognize Arithon's compassion. She was too proud to play false with her husband. And she believed Lysaer's judgement was not impaired. Desh-thiere's curse showed her the error of her trust, but too late.'

  'Her marriage is ruined,' Arithon concluded in an anguish that begged against hope for contradiction.

  Kharadmon was not wont to soften the impact of cause and effect. 'Lysaer will never lie with her again. He'll honour her position and not flaunt a mistress. But his liaison with his wife until the day of her death will be kept to a state formality.'

  'He'd put her aside?' Incredulous, Dakar shoved up straight. The Khetienn rolled. Braced through a particularly virulent dousing, he became torn into conflicted interests by Arithon's precipitous departure.

  'Believe it,' Kharadmon finished. 'The lady came back having seen too much. The marred gift of s'Ilessid justice won't let Lysaer abide the ambiguity.'

  Ice-cold, shivering in suspicion that rang clear through to his bones, Dakar laced stubborn, red fingers over his streaming knees. Fellowship Sorcerers were ever subtle players. The distinct possibility could not be ignored that Kharadmon might play his sympathies against Lysaer for a purpose, particularly if Sethvir sensed any echo that he harboured a secret augury on Arithon's life.

  Dakar lacked the straight courage to confront the matter outright; and at an indeterminate point inside the next hour Kharadmon left the Khetienn to make her way south on the world's winds.

  * * *

  The seamen changed watch at nightfall before the Mad Prophet caught the startling anomaly: Arithon had made no other appearance on the brigantine's deck since his disjointed inquiry after the fate of Princess Talith.

  The weather had eased with the sunset. Khetienn sailed large, rocking to a fair weather swell. Her course bent due south, and wind off her quarter flapped the royal pennon no one had troubled to run down from the masthead. A game of dice was under way in the galley; the whoop of a winner and the pound of a fist against wood drummed up from the trestle belowdecks. Topside, sails and rigging carved the starry sky in neat order; too neat, the Mad Prophet surmised. As if the mate on watch had tidied the Khetienn's lines and spars in the expectation no adjustments would be asked.

  'Himself went below,' the quartermaster answered in laconic response to Dakar's concern. 'Said, let him bide. He didn't want to know if the wind changed. Steward was turned off, also. No food and no service before morning.'

  Dakar's pulse quickened in alarm. Adamant as Arithon could be when he desired solitude, he was an irreproachable captain. Never before had he failed to oversee every nuance of sail trim and course. His slackened attentiveness now made no sense, not when the Khetienn was engaged in a race to reach Shand ahead of Lysaer's galley.

  'Fiends,' swore the quartermaster, his brow c
reased with disbelief for the determined set to Dakar's stance. 'Oh man, you're not going down after him. The fool who tries his temper, I swear on my hindparts, is fair askin' to get the gizzard knifed out o' him.'

  But like the misfortunate princess, Dakar had been too far and seen too much. From an altered perspective he scarcely knew for his own, he lashed out at the helmsman in anger. 'Did you never think? Arithon's not indestructible, however hard he tries to act the part. He's just been told another friend passed the Wheel. The upset can't help but aggrieve him.'

  The staid old quartermaster looked wary, his eyes knurled in wrinkles like walnuts. 'True or not,' he allowed, 'I'd rather you twist the snake's tail than me.'

  Dakar returned an epithet, not cheered by the thought that for once in his born life, Asandir would have praised him. 'I've been a dimwit since the second I drew breath.' Still grousing under his breath in sad misery, he squeezed his girth down the companionway. 'Even a dog has the good sense to know when it's too old and simple to change.'

  The stemcastle door lay ahead, an unlit square of dark varnish. Dakar weighed his outright cowardice against his unspeakable fear; and terror won. He stepped forward, entered, and bumbled against the heave of the vessel down the narrow corridor to the captain's quarters.

  His knock went unanswered. The door, unsurprisingly, proved locked.

  'Open,' snapped Dakar, out of tolerance with unease. 'If you don't, so help me, Arithon, I'm going to break the latch. And not by neat sorcery, either.'

  No sound came from the far side. To a half-snarled oath, then a rushed prayer to Ath, the Mad Prophet lowered his chin for a bull's charge, prepared to crash his shoulder against the wood.

  The latch tripped and the panel whipped open to reveal Arithon in his shirtsleeves. 'I asked not to be troubled,' he said in ruthless annoyance. 'The quartermaster warned you. Is this loyalty, Dakar? Or, Sithaer forbid, an attempt to shepherd my conscience?'

  'None of those.' Dakar straightened up, dusky as a plum. A self-control he never knew he possessed held him steady as he raked his attention over the prince who opposed him. The clothing and hair, faintly dishevelled, and green eyes acute in their focus gave him scant grounds for reassurance. He planted himself amid the opened doorway in outright, stubborn intent.

  'By all means,' cried Arithon in explosive antagonism. 'If you're going to make an occasion of my mistakes, you might as well come inside. The whole blighted crew doesn't need to share in the happy exhibition.'

  As the Shadow Master cleared the passage, Dakar saw beyond to the damning array of items laid out in the spill of the lamp on the chart table.

  'You were going to break in,' Arithon said by way of rough defence for the small stone pipe, and the opened cap of a canister whose spice-scented contents snapped Dakar's foreboding into dread.

  'Ath's own infinite mercy!' The Mad Prophet spun to face down the Prince of Rathain, unmindful of temper, uncaring how he meddled, this once in his life a Fellowship spellbinder upbraiding a fellow mage for sheer idiocy. 'What were you thinking to do! You can't try an augury under influence of tienelle. You've blinded your talent! The poisons in that herb will run their course beyond control. If the toxins don't land you stone dead, you'll end up crippled or witless.'

  'That can be argued,' Arithon said, his fury burned down to rankling sarcasm as he twisted the key in the lock. 'Davien's works and the Five Centuries Fountain should put your unpleasant point to the test.'

  Dakar fell back and sat with a thud on the cabin's lower berth. True to his own form when high stakes left him shaky, he forgot the most salient details.

  As Arithon regarded him in nasty hilarity, he resisted with mulish annoyance. 'You've got longevity protection, no more than that. It doesn't make you immortal. The Fountain's effects might keep your body alive, but nothing about the Betrayer's handiwork can guard you from going insane. Lost to mage-sight, your mind will be undone and naked.'

  'Well then, one way or another, I won't be self-blinded after this,' the Shadow Master said. He sought the tienelle scrying for more than just augury. Plainly he intended to use the same means to smash down the blocks which disbarred his access to his arcane perception.

  'I've never known you to be such an outright fool.' From Dakar, the censure fell bitter.

  Arithon crossed the cramped cabin, turned before the dark panes of the stern window. The confined space snapped his temper, and he spun; slammed a fist in cornered force against the bulkhead.

  'Listen,' he said in breaking desperation. 'If I keep on making errors of judgement and see every friend I have come to grief, I'm going to be driven mad anyway.' The fallow glow of lamplight lined his shoulders and the suffering, stark edge of an expression kept turned beyond view. 'Tharrick was tortured. Dhirken and Maenalle were executed. Merior's now the bound outpost of Avenor, and Talith -'

  'Stop this!' Dakar cracked. 'You aren't responsible for everybody's lives! You can't let yourself be ruled by their choices, no matter how much the s'Ffalenn royal gift leaves you exposed to their hurt.'

  Arithon whirled, his eyes defenseless in pain as few ever saw, and terrible for the depth of their vision. 'Ath preserve, we're not talking about individuals this time. If I make a miscall against this warhost in Shand, the Vastmark tribes will be scattered. Erlien's clansmen are also involved, and outside my sovereignty to forbid. Do you think I can live with a repeat of Tal Quorin, but on a scale to make that massacre seem an exercise? Save us all! My feal clans in Rathain were all but destroyed the last time Etarra marched to war.'

  'I'm sorry,' Dakar said, still obstinate as a dog caught lounging muddy in silk sheets. 'I can't stand aside and let you take such a risk.'

  Arithon gave way to a laugh that cut off in abject disgust. 'I only meant to drive you out of my affairs. What I've gotten instead is an interfering ally, and Dharkaron witness! I'd rather you stayed drunk.'

  'No ally at all,' Dakar amended, crisp above the thunder of the wake as the brigantine nosed through a swell. 'You forget. We're eighty leagues from land and I don't know the first wretched rule of navigation.'

  'All right.' Arithon pushed from the bulkhead, his tension rueful in capitulation. 'You've won your right to berate my choice of timing. If we're going to argue, at least use your powers as spellbinder to set a minor binding on that door latch. There could be other crewmen with the interfering guts to break down my joinery and investigate.'

  Dakar shoved up, staggered, caught a handhold, and banged his head in the ridiculous train of mishap that passed for locomotion on a ship. When the heave of the deck let him reach the companionway, he bent to the door lock and cast the spun thread of his consciousness through his fingers to engage the rusted dregs of his training.

  The Name of the wood answered him, clean as new song. He had never felt so fired to self-awareness. As he marvelled at the change, he scarcely heard the step behind him. Nor could he react, lost in trance as he was, or feel aught but the pain of the hard, sure blow that slammed into his nape and felled him.

  * * *

  Dakar awoke, limp as a slit meal sack, and sprawled out prone in the cramped little corridor outside of Khetienn's master cabin. His mouth tasted like baitfish. The lump on the back of his neck flamed his skull and his shoulders into a jellied mass of aches. These exploded to white sparkles of shot pain the instant he tried to move. With his cheek pressed to oak, and his fists crimped under his breastbone, he groaned a string of oaths that came out all vowels against the battering effects of s'Ffalenn temper.

  For a racked span of minutes, he lay slack before a hurt that undid his desire for survival.

  Forward, through the sluice of parted waves and the creak as a sheetline tugged through a stiff block, the click of ivory dice and laughter drifted back as a sailhand finished a joke about a whore and a belaying pin. The talk turned to gossip. Someone else joined in comment that made laughingstock of Dakar's lame-brained effort to butt into Arithon's business.

  'Coldcocked the interfering fool, right e
nough,' came the excited baritone of the bosun. 'You didn't see him? He's sprawled out flat beyond the aft companionway, senseless as a skinful of sausage. We've got us a wager that says he won't stir until the midnight change in the watch.'

  The Mad Prophet mumbled another oath to the deck boards, though, in fact, he bore the sailhands small rancour. Rather, he wished he had a bet of his own on. The pull of the stars against his bludgeoned awareness showed he was awake against all the odds. The least he deserved was a round of winnings for his troubles since the pain scarcely let him keep breathing.

  In natural complication, Arithon s'Ffalenn would have gone on to try the unthinkable.

  The breath Dakar drew to fortify himself came burdened: the frost-clean bite of tienelle fumes trailed from the crack underneath the stern cabin's door. He understood he had no choice but to burst in and measure the extent of the damage. A dead prince was an altogether safer prospect than Arithon bound insane in a prescient trance while entangled in the geas of Desh-thiere's curse.

  As if in response to that surge of jagged fear, something in the cabin crashed over to a scream of splintering wood.

  Jolted to hurry, Dakar took a jelly-legged step and thumped into the door panel. The latch had been wedged from the far side and the key left turned in the lock.

  'Dharkaron's Spear and Chariot!' Working magecraft in the pinch of a thumping headache was his particular hated pastime.

  His palms printed sweat marks on the varnish as he leaned on the lintel alongside the fastenings. He moaned, shut his eyes, then let his awareness filter like fingers of light through the layered grain of the wood. Fused within its substance, Dakar sensed the kissed warmth of summer and the rainfall that had nourished the cut tree. Against the airy grace of its substance, the latch stood out, a bright cry of resonance wrought screaming in hammer strokes and forge fire. The pin was brass, and had been braced with a rolled leather map case. The hides of its making, to mage-sense, still reeked of the stock pens where the bullock had been slaughtered before skinning.