TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  But none of the guardsmen on gate watch had seen any fugitives escape. Sweating over this setback in the breezeless haze of noontide, the commander of Jaelot's garrison cleared his throat and diffidently tried to shift the blame: the minstrel and his party must have slipped out of Jaelot by boat.

  Turmoil transferred to the dockside as fishing smacks were commandeered to sweep the coves and the bay. To placate the sloop captains who grumbled in disagreement, mounted patrols fanned out to scour the coastal road.

  * * *

  The cart and its widely-sought occupants by then lay well south, pulled up in the sticks of a hazel copse to evade the headhunter teams who rode in hot hopes of a bounty. Freckled with sun-dolloped shade and fuming biliously, Dakar the Mad Prophet straddled the driver's seat, the lines hooked over his raised knee. Never a spirit to hold a grudge quietly, he cursed fate that relentless pursuit out of Jaelot should befoul his raw urge to pick a fight.

  'You asked for cold water?' Sullen as a bear with a canker, he tipped his chin over his shoulder. 'There's a glacial stream down that gully.'

  The royal personage he addressed unfurled from a tortured crouch in the wagon bed. Arithon surveyed the surrounding thicket through sweat-plastered strands of black hair. Taxed by the effort to raise himself, he climbed over the pony cart's tailboard. The Mad Prophet observed in viperish satisfaction as he made his way downhill, ill-balanced as a man with a gut wound. The backlash he suffered was doubly well deserved, Dakar thought; the earth power wantonly channelled through Jaelot was enough to scour sanity and leave any mortal deathly sick.

  Galled past forgiveness for the trick which had played him straight into Asandir's design, the Mad Prophet curbed his impulse to bash his fist on his leg. 'Bastard,' he mouthed after the form that lurched down the stream bed.

  A slurred objection arose from the blankets nested in the wagon bed. 'How unoriginal. If you're minded to try insults with Arithon, you'll need something better than a truth he's likely bored with hearing.'

  'Halliron?' Diverted from his angst, Dakar twisted further to find the Masterbard wakened and regarding him. The old man looked unwell, his complexion sickly grey except where a spreading, mottled bruise blackened his cheekbone and temple. Since the appalling blow that had felled him, he lapsed often into unconsciousness. The muscles on the battered side of his face sagged in paralysis; the opposite eye, tenuously open, was black and unnaturally dilated.

  Aware such symptoms boded ill, Dakar vented his heartsick frustration against Arithon. 'You're an outright fool to defend him. And twice the fool, for last night. You shouldn't have let him talk you into travelling.'

  Halliron's lips twitched in lopsided resignation. 'Better to be uncomfortable than dead. Which we would be, make no mistake, had we tried taking cover in Jaelot. I never liked their mayor's penchant for burning accomplices to sorcery alive on a pile of oiled faggots.' Palsied fingers fluttered and plucked at the blankets that springtime's moths had pricked holes in; gravely, the Masterbard added, 'I heard what Arithon played. All of it. His art crossed the bounds of unconsciousness. There's a greatness in him now that even you must appreciate.'

  'By force, and in wretched sobriety,' Dakar answered, his eyes upturned and venomous, and glazed in reflection with a sun-caught matting of summer leaves. 'There you have my troubles in a nutshell.' He would have capped with epithets, had the passage of more mounted lancers not precluded the wisdom of retorts.

  'You're not inclined to go back either, I see,' the Masterbard observed dryly.

  Dakar lapsed into glowering silence until the object of nxs spite returned to nettle him. Back from the gully, stripped down to shirtsleeves and hose, Arithon held in shaking hands the tunic he had just soaked in stream water. Braced against the wagon side, he forced the concentration to fold the garment into a compress.

  As he bound its wet cold to ease the Masterbard's ugly swelling, the old man made an effort, but failed to damp the shudder of pain that recoiled through his frail body. 'It's poor thanks you're getting, for winning us passage out of Jaelot.'

  'I beg your pardon.' Pale himself as torn parchment, and scruffy from strain and lack of sleep, Arithon dredged up a smile. 'Dakar has shown astounding generosity. He's made six offers to abandon me, and I have accepted each one.'

  'Just wait until we reach Tharidor!' the Mad Prophet snapped in choked fury. 'Then I promise, you'll see me keep my word.'

  With that maddening, false complaisance which had marked his alias as Medlir, Arithon raised his head. 'Well if that's true, you can help by watering the pony.' No change of stance offered warning; he shot a hand into the stores box, hooked out the leather bucket, and in pure s'Ffalenn temper pitched it at Dakar's middle.

  The Mad Prophet fumbled the catch. Smacked hard in the gut, he whooshed out a gusty belch of air that cost him the breath for rejoinder. As he stalked off in sticksnapping pique, the Master of Shadow resumed with unbroken mildness, 'How are you feeling?'

  Halliron closed his functional eye. Denied its vibrancy, his seamed skin draped like wet paper over his nose and cheekbones. His eyebrows sketched a pale smear above sockets sunken into his skull. 'My bones don't take kindly to knocking about,' he admitted on a near-soundless breath.

  Arithon swallowed. Sorrow overcame his spent strength. He shored up his weight on clenched fists; and for long-drawn, agonized minutes, only the fluting calls of thrushes plinked through the gurgle of brook water. Yet another company of mounted lancers thundered past the bend in the road, while below the bank of the gully, Dakar cursed and blundered to a chorus of thrashed bracken and turned stones.

  'Arithon,' Halliron said with sudden force, the more wrenching as numbed lips slurred his speech from its trained and mellifluous clarity. 'You must inherit my lyranthe. My left hand has lost feeling. The fingers won't move. Let the last song I leave to Athera be the musical tradition you continue.'

  The knuckles clenched against the wagon boards flexed once in soundless protest. Beyond that, Arithon never moved. His answer came simple and steady. 'I'd be honoured.'

  Released as if cut from a wire, the Masterbard relaxed beneath the blankets. 'Bless your directness.' A half-smile tugged his seamed cheek. 'You shall be great. I'm not wrong. Your skill shall surpass my best talent, perhaps restore the grace of the Paraviaris our troubled kingdoms have forgotten.'

  'You speak of dreams,' Arithon interrupted. While the buckskin gelding in the traces flicked its tail and twitched off flies, he twisted aside to mask an anguish grown suddenly too fierce to stamp down.

  'No dream.' Halliron freed his arm and clasped the wrist of his successor in a reassurance undercut by icy weakness. 'One day the old races shall return. The Fellowship has never lost hope.'

  His truncated smile stretched wider. 'I shall live to see the sun shine over the river delta at Innish.' The one, lightless eye flicked up briefly and enlivened pinched flesh with wry amusement. 'I had that much of Dakar.' As if the admission stole vitality, the Masterbard's hand slid down, limp. His unswollen lid drooped closed again. 'So you see, I really didn't mind playing the fool to win the Mad Prophet's freedom, nor to give that horrid mayor his come-uppance. There's only home left ahead, now. I want to die reconciled with my family...'

  Arithon stirred, straightened, and with the rags of his unstrung dignity, smoothed down the rucked blankets. 'Rest easy. Sleep if you can. The moment it's safe, I'll find you a bed and a healer.'

  Yet when twilight settled over the roadway and mantled wooded hillsides under felted layers of dark, the pony cart bearing the Masterbard laboured scarcely three leagues further to the south. Twice more, Dakar pulled aside into hiding, with Arithon forced to spin shadow to mislead determined headhunters. Resolved not to quit empty-handed, the returning trackers and riders dispersed in formation to sweep the cobalt gloom of every spruce thicket they passed.

  Clouds rolled in after sunset and sifted down veils of fine drizzle. Dakar hunched in hostile silence; slack reins left the pony free to pick its own co
urse through the ruts, while the cart's painted wheels splashed and serried the pewter gleam of shallow, scattered puddles. Tucked dry under spread canvas, Halliron rested unmoving.

  By the tailgate, damp to the skin, his arms folded over drawn-up knees to contain the cramps that knifed through him, Arithon endured the ongoing physical reaction to his past night's performance with scarcely a whimper of expelled breath. The Mad Prophet knew magecraft well enough to guess how each jolting bump fed his suffering. Since misery to his deceiver would just gratify his passion to retaliate, Arithon clenched his jaw and managed not to plead for respite. The cart must stop shortly for Halliron's sake. A camp would be chosen in the open on a site that allowed for immediate flight.

  Except for the wet, the weather stayed mild. High summer tasselled the verges in groundsel and vetch, and feathered the grasses in seed heads. Too long constrained by town walls, Arithon savoured the rain-drenched scent of meadow flowers, spiked by the pitchy bite of evergreen. Now and again the east wind's breath wafted saltscoured taint off the bay. Attuned to the dance of the seasons in sound, where his mage-sight had deserted him, he bent thought to pick out the chord of the earth through the racketing creak of the wheels; in notes subtly echoed in the warning pipe of killdeer, and between the nighthawks' thrumming, madcap flight. With closed eyes, by ear alone, he could delineate the junction of horizon and sky, while the high, sweet harmonics of stars beyond cloud chimed just outside his wakened perception.

  At that moment, Dakar snapped erect and ripped out a venomous oath.

  Rein leather hissed through the terrets. The buckskin snapped up its rain dripping head and the pony cart jerked to a stop. Yanked back to the stresses of overplayed nerves, Arithon raised his head in alarm from the wrists crossed and draped on his knees.

  But the patrol he presumed had overtaken them seemed nowhere in evidence. There arose no thunder of spurred horses, nor the shouts of exultant guardsmen. Blurred through the drizzle, the way stretched empty ahead, alive with the rasping trill of tree frogs, and the swish and drip of breezes that riffled across soaked leaves. Nothing appeared to be amiss. Except the buckskin pony stood with raised neck, black-tipped ears pricked through his sodden swag of mane.

  'Fiends plague me for a mush-brained idiot,' Dakar carped. 'I should've expected no less.' He snapped the driving lines across his palm, then cursed the more fiercely for the sting the wet leather delivered.

  Arithon blinked water from his lashes and saw, stamped in the gloom above the puddles, the blacker form of a horseman, cloaked and waiting with a statue's nerveless patience across the road in their path. The pony whickered greeting through moist drifts of steam. It fretted the bit against Dakar's hold, then stamped to a silver spray of runoff.

  The black ahead never flicked a muscle. He could have been a phantom's horse, he stood so still; until his rider's crisp speech dispelled illusion. 'Bring the cart on. There's a dry cave nearby with a fire lit where the smoke is unlikely to raise notice.'

  The voice was Asandir's.

  Arithon shut his eyes in relief, while in dire trepidation, Dakar swallowed complaint and eased his deathgrip on the pony.

  The sorcerer led the way off the road to an overhang chiselled into a hillside. Some long-dry flow of spring water had etched the floor into hollows, quilted now by the musty detritus of last year's fallen leaves. The slope of the hill and the cart parked outside broke the brunt of the wind. Asandir tended a small birch fire beneath a seam that formed a natural chimney. Beside its sweet burning warmth, Halliron rested in blankets. Throughout the labour of unloading supplies, Dakar kept the scowl that had ridden his features since Jaelot, his lips pulled into a down-turned bow as if crimped by an overtaut stitch. Too brusque to humour his grudges, Asandir summarily ordered him out to mind the horses.

  Without more delay, the sorcerer shed his dark mantle and knelt at the Masterbard's shoulder. As his light touch explored the bruised flesh and hot swelling beneath the limp fronds of white hair, he said to Arithon, 'Forgive me. Your own discomfort must wait.'

  Seated on Halliron's other side with his knees drawn up and his chin cupped, Arithon scarcely stirred an eyelash. 'Don't you think I'd help you if I could?'

  The unalloyed shame in the words gave Asandir pause. Then his hands resumed their review, while firelight played disappearing games with the creases scribed on his craggy face. Night sealed the cave in misty dark. Summer moths blundered in erratic circles through the updraughts raised by the smoke. Scorched out of flight, a delicate blue and mauve one snagged in Asandir's robe. There it battered a dying tattoo and powdered dusky crescents against the weave of the wool.

  Outside, the carol of a late-singing mockingbird entangled with Dakar's snarl at the buckskin to hold still; dampness had swollen the harness leather and jammed the tongues in the buckles. In methodical, quiet contrast, Asandir finished his examination. He touched a hand to Halliron's injured temple, and the other, fingers spread, across a forehead bruised like a plum. His gaze trained on the face of his charge as he addressed the cause behind Arithon's statement.

  'I gather that when Etarra's army attacked the clans of Strakewood, you engaged a spell of unbinding that has left your mage talents crippled.' A log settled and spat off hellish sparks. For a second the sorcerer was limned with red glare, a still figure poised in cold patience who held power to forgive or condemn. Then the shadows settled back and gentled him. Just as deceptively he seemed an old man, as worn by life's turns as Halliron. 'Just a little spell against a crossbow bolt, true enough, but your knowledge of grand conjury was abused. The consequence of that is most grave. Would you care to tell me the details?'

  Arithon muffled a sound against the tight-shuttered palms of his hands, then raised a bloodlessly white face. 'Daelion forgive me, I've been over and over the memory. I relive the moment in nightmare and despise myself. But I can't think what other choice I had. Young Jieret survived. That's all that seemed to matter at the time.'

  'Guilt,' Asandir said dispassionately. 'There's part of it, yes.' His next line stung like flung gravel. 'So, prince, are you guilty?'

  Balled in a knot to quell his shaking, Arithon lashed back in desperation. 'Dharkaron Avenger only knows!'

  'Then leave it there and be done with it!' His rebuke at sharp odds with his unhurried manner, Asandir moved a hand, traced a symbol on Halliron's chest, then transferred his touch to probe underneath the faded blankets. Aware that Dakar might blunder in at any moment, he added, 'As your maternal grandfather was remiss not to teach, you have only the present in your power.'

  'Oh, but I don't,' Arithon said in gritty truth. 'Let me once encounter my half-brother and I'll kill him. Certainly he's kept himself busy, training new armies to stalk me. Desh-thiere's curse wasn't cast to be selective. Or is it better I'm stripped of my mage talent? When we fight, I can't misuse such gifts to slaughter every misled wretch sent against me.'

  Behind this, the other grief sawed like dull wire: he should never have allowed his passion for music to slip his judgement in Jaelot. Had he not been overset by fury at the mayor's petty arrogance, had he not succumbed to the beguiling resonance instilled in Paravian mystery, the Mistwraith's curse might still be defanged, its geas of obsessive hatred denied any tangible target.

  But Asandir gave that fallacy short shrift. 'Since Lysaer's resolve to restore Avenor, you knew you'd soon be forced from anonymity. Sethvir saw the same. He chose to grant most of your request.' A clipped gesture indicated the satchel tucked beside the stallion's heaped saddle packs. 'Those items sent from Althain may help. Have a look. I'll see to your health the moment Halliron is comfortable.'

  While Arithon mustered his self-command to move and examine the bundle, and rain fell, and Dakar's bitten epithets shifted target to malign the black stud, Asandir raised his hands from the bard's body and traced a sigil of peace upon the air. 'How are you faring, Halliron, son of Al'Duine?'

  Eased by the sorcerer's ministrations, the bard stirred and awakened. 'I do well
enough, for a cripple.' In flamelight, his wide, opened eye appeared brighter, its pupil no longer distended; a faint blush of rose suffused the sills of his cheekbones.

  Asandir traced his fingertips down the line of jawbone, neck and shoulder. Then, very gentle, he raised and massaged the numbed arm. His gaze all the while stayed locked with the old man's, now rekindled to a frenetic spark of life. The sorcerer said with meticulous care, 'The Mayor of Jaelot will end his life badly, in pain of his own devising.'

  Halliron's slurred syllables refound their rhythm and came back in ringing sincerity. 'I'm sorry, then.'

  'You would be.' Asandir's tension broke before a fresh smile. 'You're content?'

  Neither one glanced aside as Arithon freed the last knot in the satchel and started to survey its wrapped contents.

  'Should I not be?' Halliron managed a one-shouldered shrug that somehow missed seeming awkward. 'Dakar promised. I'll live to see Innish. That's the last of my desires.'

  'The Mad Prophet claimed that?' Asandir's working fingers kept on, but his gaze assumed a jarring glint of iron. 'He's gifted with truesight. He wouldn't dare lie for your happiness.'

  'Well then,' Halliron said peacefully. 'I'm more than content. My lyranthe passes to Arithon.'

  Asandir glanced across the cleft in query.

  Engrossed, the Master of Shadow still knelt with the lists that companioned Maenalle's letter. The set of brass instruments pulled from Sethvir's emptied satchel sliced out scintillant reflections as the sorcerer cut through his thought.

  'You're fully aware of the implications, Teir's'Ffalenn?' At the unwelcome use of that title, Arithon started and looked up. 'Forgive me, implications of what?'

  'That Halliron leaves you his lyranthe.' Asandir never broke rhythm as he massaged the nerves in the bard's deadened wrist; but his eyes, fixed on Arithon, were metallically bleak and bright.

  'Our Masterbard kindly offered as much.' Arithon creased the parchment into folds between wildly trembling fingers. 'I accepted as a formality, since I hoped Sethvir might send me the instrument I lost when the coronation went wrong at Etarra. She isn't here with the charts and the cross staff.'