TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  Even the memory of its sustained chord made Arithon's voice grate like gravel. 'Had my hands been free, you know very well I'd have killed you.'

  'But they weren't,' Jieret said, unequivocal. 'You made most sure that wouldn't happen.' As his sovereign still shrank in avoidance, he added, 'Shame on you, for cowardice! Did you think you suffer anything I don't feel also?'

  Already pale, Arithon went colourless to the lips. He tipped up his head. 'The bloodpact. Ath's mercy, you feel this?'

  'My liege,' Jieret begged, appalled too late for the inadvertent cost of his admission. 'Don't spurn my part. You charged me to safeguard your integrity. Whatever you say now, as caithdein, I am bound. I shall hold you to the letter of that promise.'

  'You feel this?'Arithon repeated, his tone skinned into shrill horror.

  Merciless, Jieret cut him off. 'That can't be permitted to matter! No one alive can shoulder the burden you carry. You have a job to finish, or blameless people here and in Shand will start dying.' Brutal by necessity, he seized his prince's forearm, hurled him upright and around to face the stem window. When Arithon recoiled and tried to flinch aside, Jieret wrestled him immobile in a shackling grip that spared nothing.

  Pinned still and gasping, Arithon had no choice but to behold the unalloyed impact of his handiwork.

  The conflagration touched off by Lysaer's defence still raged in coruscating flares of torched sails. Sparks and flying debris flew windborne. Passed from vessel to vessel in Werpoint's jammed harbour, the fire was having its fell feast.

  'So end what you've started,' snarled Jieret, 'and bedamned to your whining.' Then he touched the dire sword like Dharkaron's black Spear against his sovereign's quivering nape.

  Wrung, wretched, dragged back from the precipice by Jieret's edged scorn and the lacerating beauty of the wardspell instilled within his weapon, Arithon s'Ffalenn bent his head. He drew a breath. His bound hands flexed and tightened. Shamed to reclaim the scattered threads of his design, he raised his chin at last, and measured what remained to press advantage from the destruction his ruse had created.

  Turmoil reigned in Werpoint harbour. In the crush of frenzied flight and confusion, vessel collided with vessel. Bowsprits rammed broadside into galleys mired in anchor chains; luggers swept downwind and battered into ships struggling with sails caught aback as crews hauled to check their yards and claw free of the eye of the wind.

  To rack and utter ruin, Arithon added shadow spun to a fiendish edge of subtlety. He dimmed the shores of Crescent Isle to make the shoals appear more distant. He cast masking flares of darkness in the eyes of harried helmsmen through critical moments of judgement. Those few vessels brought safely underway were lured astray from the channel. Some lurched aground, to be struck in a scream of broken timbers by following ships unable to veer off. Other captains tacked in misled timing and found themselves against a lee shore, or else turned about, once again in the path of the ruinous maelstrom that stewed in Werpoint's harbour.

  The fire, wind-driven, showed mercy to none.

  Where Lysaer's opposing talents were hampered by the need to spare allies, Arithon stiffened shadow at will. Even without access to the wellspring of his mage talent, training lent advantage and finesse. He could play his gift to gossamer illusion, or snap wave crests to ice in a swift, freezing absence of light. Where the fleet fled the fire, he used cold as a weapon, to jam sails, and ice rudders in their pintles. Many a stricken quartermaster fought to clear his fouled steering, while the smaller slower luggers in their path were overtaken and mulched to wreckage beneath the trampling bows of crippled ships.

  Thin as the cries of flocking gulls, the screams of the injured carried on the breeze to Arithon's vantage at the stern window. For all his clever strategy and wilful bleak purpose, he was not unscathed by the suffering. Taxed to visible, shivering pain, he sought to spin aside again; to abjure his killing touch on those fell tides of shadow and give way at last to despair.

  Like rock behind him, Jieret forced him back with a prod of spelled steel, and never one shred of human mercy. Denied leave to turn away, Arithon could not know that Jieret was weeping. Locked against the force of a grief stifled ruthlessly silent, the clansman's knuckles on the sword's grip were rigid, marble-white, and his eyes showed the anguish of a spirit torn up piecemeal. He held unbending to his given service, the black blade ever steadfast, even as the inevitable few vessels tore free of the harbour's morass of fire and billowed ash to run the straits toward the open sea.

  By then, Arithon had recovered self-command. Every raw nerve clamped back under control, he called his own crisp order to the mate and crew above decks. Men jumped to lay the Savrid's yards until her canvas came alive to the wind. Greyed to an outline against a pall of blown smoke, she sheared off on port tack, her course laid east across the channel. She no longer sailed unaccompanied. Off her bow, arisen like phantoms, rode more ships spun out of shadow. From his pirate father on Dascen Elur, Arithon held brutal knowledge of the nautical tactics needed to execute raids in close quarters. The shadow fleet he designed to blockade the channel was formidably arrayed, bristling with weapons and archers, and flying full sail braced sharp up.

  Harried like minnows before shark's teeth, the vessels in flight wore ship, their choice to run the gauntlet between a wedge of armed vessels, or to turn behind Savrid, sailing free, and flying friendly colours from her masthead. They closed in brash confidence, their crews beaten limp from perils but narrowly averted.

  Too soon, their captains' guards were lowered; the shadows swirled and thickened, and the fire arrows, shot by clan enemies in Savrid's own crosstrees, hissed from the darkness to claim them.

  A pall of choking cinders interleaved with the gloom. The cries of sailors who leaped overboard to escape being burned alive shrilled over the crack of stressed timbers. In Werpoint the bronze bells still tolled in distress. Here and there, amid planks that flamed and hissed in the barrage of cold waves, those galleys left whole manoeuvred to spare survivors who thrashed at the mercy of the sea.

  Against maritime misfortune, Lysaer s'Ilessid had no recourse. His vast armies ashore were helpless to do aught but brandish their weapons and curse.

  The disaster to the merchant fleet played itself out, while under cover of blown smoke and shadow, the pirate crew manning the Savrid launched a longboat and slipped away. They would seize a fatter prize, the reward plucked from chaos that the Shadow Master left them for their service. Under a helmsman carefully chosen for loyalty and two crewmen hired on for risk pay, the brig rounded the headland and turned southeast, to sail closehauled down the coast. Werpoint slipped astern, eclipsed by the forested shores of Crescent Isle.

  In time, the taint cleared from the air.

  Sunlight poured untrammelled through the shattered stem window and sketched the man there in glancing light. Slowly he turned his head. In a voice grained hoarse from the aftermath of stress, he said, 'Jieret. It's safe, I think, to free my hands.'

  The ebony sword flashed, moved; the gleaming tip dropped from fixed guard. The red-haired clansman whose age, in the daylight, was not a day more than twenty, sawed through the bonds tied with cord. Then he cast down the blade as though its mere touch burned his skin. The clanging reverberation of tempered steel against the deck caused him to shiver and shrink. His hands trembled. Minutes passed as he fumbled with torn fingers to untwist the crimps in the wire.

  When the last bond gave way, he dropped to his knees, hands clasped to the ripped bracers that had scarcely spared the royal flesh beneath from the rigours of cursebound directive. He could not bear to look up, nor confront what awaited in the face of the sovereign he had obeyed to the ruin of all pride.

  'My liege lord,' he entreated. 'I beg your forgiveness.'

  In agonized remorse, he convulsed his forgers in torn fleeces. 'Rathain's justice and Dharkaron hear my case, I had no way else to keep your orders.'

  Arithon s'Ffalenn pried loose his chafed wrists. He turned around, careful i
n movement as if his bones were spun glass and his being might shatter at the jar of a wrongly-drawn breath. A moment passed while he stood with closed eyes. The running blood from his shoulder seeped through his torn shirt and tapped the white spruce of the deck. Then he stirred. He laced narrow fingers over the damp, copper crown of the caithdein who had abused him; who had broken his royal will on the point of a sword to force a cruel round of strategy to its finish.

  'Jieret,' he whispered. The tracks of his tears had dried on his face. Rucked hair flicked his cheek in the play of the breeze through the shattered panes of the stem window. 'Arise, man, I beg you. We share a brother's trust. What pride or integrity do I have left that this curse hasn't thoroughly undone?' His wounding note of compassion snapped all at once to bare a core of acid bitterness. 'If ruin and despair are any cause for satisfaction, take back your heart and stand tall. By strict count of burned planks and wrecked ships, we have rather brilliantly succeeded.'

  Indeed, no army would sail upon Merior to take down the Master of Shadow.

  Reckoning

  On the smoke-hazed battlements of Werpoint, Lysaer s'Ilessid stood in freezing wind and tainted sunlight and regarded a vista of wrecked hopes. The enormity of fate seemed unreal, years of careful planning reduced to ruin within hours by one strike of diabolical cunning. Longboats plied the bay to rescue what remained to be salvaged after the Shadow Master's surprise attack on the harbour.

  Lent the outlines of embossed paper under blown drifts of smoke and cinder, tired oarsmen jagged tortured courses through clots of half-submerged timbers and steaming wreckage. They dipped skinned knuckles into raw brine and hauled in survivors who were stunned, half-dead from immersion in cold waters, or worse. Too many were brought in screaming from the hideous agony of burns, the jostling passage back to safety and shore too much for seared flesh to endure.

  Their cries cut Lysaer to the marrow and the heart. The disaster spread before him in wreckage and in suffering was no one's fault but his own. He resisted the urge to knuckle his eyes to ease the raw sting of windborne ash. Nor would he bend to craven need and retire from view to nurse his despair in private.

  He felt a fool.

  Cold, bitter fury consumed him for the lapse that had cost him his fleet. Despite the heat of conflict, a ruler's steady reason should have prevailed: he ought to have known at once that the attacking fleet of brigantines could be no more than illusion. Even under direction of a sorcerer, human craftsmen at Merior could never complete so many hulls since the shipyard's founding the past spring.

  Alone among his war officers and ship captains, Lysaer had held foreknowledge to unriddle this ruse in its fiendish turn of simplicity.

  Eight years past, in a grimy back alley in Etarra, he had watched his half-brother spin a toy-sized ship out of shadow for the delight of a ragged pack of children. Small as that vessel had been, a creation of whimsical fancy, her execution and design had been perfect to the last detail. On the banks of Tal Quorin, Arithon had criminally proven his regard for the young was no more than a charade to lull suspicion and buy trust.

  On Minderl Bay, for stakes unconscionably higher, he had repeated his game of illusion. Except now his ploy with ships had been cast in life size to enact a bloody toll in human lives.

  Lysaer let the winds snarl his hair and dam back the tears he refused to shed in remorse. Shamed beyond selfforgiveness for the towering temper that had pressured him out of control, he ached in guilt-fed silence. How well his enemy had judged him. Teased into anger, baited to a rage as mad as his father's in Dascen Elur, he had savaged the very sky with his gifted powers to ignite that chain of fire ships, and enact the very letter of the Shadow Master's design.

  How Arithon must be laughing, the poisoned depths of his adversary's dishonour a personal and private triumph. Lysaer slammed a fist on cold stone until his knuckles split.

  At his shoulder, Lord Diegan had to speak twice before his sovereign prince heard him. 'Your Grace, if you insist on staying out here, at least allow your valet to clothe you in warmer attire.'

  Lysaer succumbed to a violent shiver. He choked back the burst of undignified laughter that clawed for escape from his throat. In fact, he wore nothing beyond a holland shirt snatched in haste from his bedside. The tails flapped like flags about his naked buttocks; before the world, he offered a ludicrous sight, standing in plain view, chapping his muscular royal thighs.

  'I shall dress.' His words fell remote through the clamour of bells from the quayside. As a war prince, he was remiss. His people had suffered a shocking setback. Whatever the enormity of his shortcomings, their morale must become his immediate care. His sorry error in judgement and his disastrous, misled defence lent no excuse to deny them support through his presence.

  The garments he donned were cut from blue velvet and gold tissue, and his jewels, the best ones he owned. Arrived at the quayside in every trapping of state rank, Prince Lysaer met the oared boats with their pitiful cargoes and dirtied, ringed hands steadying their gunwales at the wharf. From the unremitting, ugly task of dealing with the losses left by his ill-turned defence, he spared himself no hardship. Nor would he acknowledge the whispers of adulation offered by Werpoint's populace, who insisted his gift of light had spared their city from total ruin.

  If word on the streets cast the Prince of the West as a hero who had beaten back the Shadow Master, many a stranded ship's captain had cause to curse the fires spawned by his powers of salvation.

  Grim-faced and diligent, his fine clothes marred with sea water, blood, and smeared tar, Lysaer faced down every ship's master and sailhand to confront him with incoherent rage. To their faces, he rebuked them in bracing, selfless dignity. 'Do you think you're the first to suffer for the wiles of s'Ffalenn? Did I never say his shadow-bending sorcery presents an unspeakable danger? If one glancing encounter makes you quiver and turn tail, leave now and count yourselves lucky to go living. My ranks have no place for faint hearts.'

  In brisk, snatched moments between assignment of shelter and arranging care for the injured, Lysaer dispersed patrols of headhunters with tracking dogs. These scoured the southern coastline for sign of the fugitive crews who must have manned the enemy fleet of fire ships.

  To the wounded who cried aloud for vengeance, he bent his bright head. 'Stay alive,' he entreated. 'Any man hale enough to fight shall claim his due right to justice.' The maimed were promised a haven for themselves and their families at Avenor. For the dying, the prince gave solace: on his knees in the blood-rinsed bilges of open boats, and on the docks, beneath the shadows of soldiers set to work hefting litters.

  Premature twilight dimmed the sullied, ash-silted air. Relaunched under torch light, the longboats rowed now to recover a freight of cold corpses. Officers laboured under lamplight to tally the full count of casualties and to list any ship that repairs could restore and make seaworthy.

  Then the headhunter patrols returned on lathered horses from their southbound sweep of the countryside, exhausted and worn at their failure.

  'Sorcery,' the heavyset rider appointed as spokesman insisted to Captain Mayor Skannt. He cast uneasy glances at the shadows to each side of him, while his tired horse blew and dripped sweat. 'We found no track, no sign. Not so much as the cinders from a campfire. If those fire ships were crewed by living men and not demons, then some trick of fell sorcery built them a bridge to escape across the face of the sea. Had they trodden the honest earth, we'd have scared up some sign of them.'

  Inclined to treat such fear as hare-brained fancy, Skannt gave the prince and the town council his report in the dockside warehouse set up as headquarters, his rapid-fire speech at odds with his slouched posture against the door lintel. 'Had to have hidden a few dories under shadow, and a fishing smack to pick up swimmers,' he summed up, succinct. 'Your fugitives escaped by sail. Had they once come ashore, there's no living way they'd have slipped past the noses of my tracking dogs.'

  Lysaer silenced Diegan's intrusive comment with a placa
ting touch of one hand. 'I didn't expect the patrols to take prisoners. Arithon's by far too clever to provide us loose ends and mistakes. But our sea captains needed the belief that we tried. The ones left unsatisfied with the result of your search will become the more diligent to pursue the criminals back to Merior.'

  Skannt took his leave with a disdainful smile, the spark of the fanatic masked under lazy, half-lidded lashes.

  The interrupted council resumed the grinding long list of its agenda.

  'What use to give chase?' cried Werpoint's withered harbourmaster. 'The winter's upon us.' Crumpled on his chair like a heap of mouldered rags, he held onto manners through biting contempt, and managed not to spit while in the royal presence. 'We've nary a handful of vessels not holed, and hulls with charred masts won't sail anywhere. What armies you move must now go on by land, and the bay road's a rough march as the weather turns.'

  The grim knot of men in charge of supply lines exchanged glances in freezing lack of comment. The decision was going to have to be given within hours to disband the proud war host from Etarra. Ath's storms would hold for no man's just cause, and soldiers brought to starving could not fight. Stockpiles in Werpoint were already drained from the prior demands of the fleet. No righteous need could change fact. The city had no more resource to spare the muster against Arithon s'Ffalenn.

  As the mayor's council heated into chin-jutting argument, and officers shouted and banged tables, Lysaer jumped erect and burst apart declaiming factions in a bristling show of royal outrage. 'Will you not stop? Our men at arms are living! That's reason enough to give thanks to Ath, that we'll have them to fight again at need. We are reduced to sad choices, but all is not lost. Let us act well and use reason, and salvage whatever we may. Unless we wish to cede the Master of Shadow an easy victory, we must review what resource we have left and seek the one alternative that might make the next campaign unnecessary!'

  And so began the sober process of remapping the assault over the wreckage of old plans.