Warhost of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  The reference took a muddled moment to resolve through a headache into sense.

  ‘Fiends!’ Dakar cried, scaring up the gulls who had just folded wings and settled back into the waves. ‘Don’t say. It’s those Sithaer-begotten brigantines again. You promised you weren’t going to arm them!’

  ‘Complain, if you like, to Asandir,’ said the Master of Shadow, succinct. ‘If I thought it would help, I’d back you.’

  The Mad Prophet opened his mouth to speak, then poised, still agape. He swelled in a gargantuan breath of disbelief, and stopped again, jabbed back to furious thought by the stained strip of linen tied over his adversary’s left wrist. ‘Ath Creator!’ His eyes bulged as he exhaled a near-soundless whistle. ‘Asandir was here. Whatever have you done to require a blood oath before the almighty Fellowship of Seven? No such strong binding has ever been asked, and you a sanctioned crown prince!’

  Arithon shot back a glare like a rapier, hooked the last crock by his feet, and ripped the cork from the neck.

  Dakar turned desperate. ‘Have a care for your health! At least save one flask. It might be helpful, for need, in case that knife wound turns septic.’

  Awarded the Shadow Master’s cool indifference at its worst, the Mad Prophet knew when to desist. If he gave in to fury, his head would explode and, from nasty past experience, he knew better than to provoke the s’Ffalenn temper while emerging from the throes of a hangover. He would seek a patch of shade and sleep off the worst before he shouldered the risk of having his own whisky crocks thrown at him.

  He awakened much later to the bone-jarring crash of Talliarthe beating to windward. Her topsails carved in dizzy circles against a clouded sky, while winter-cold spray sheeted over him at each rearing plunge through the swell. Green in the face and long since soaked to his underclothes, Dakar groaned. He rolled, clawed upright, and staggered to the rail to be sick. The horizon showed an unbroken bar of grey and the wind in his nose was scoured salt.

  The Mad Prophet closed his eyes and retched, too miserable to curse his companion’s entrenched preference for the rigours of deep-water sailing.

  At the helm, far from cheerful, Arithon s’Ffalenn whistled a ballad about a wicked stepson who murdered to steal an inheritance. The tune held a dissonance to unravel thought. By the arrowed force behind each bar and note, Dakar resigned himself: he had no case left to argue. The renowned royal temper already burned fierce enough to singe any man in close quarters. To cross a s’Ffalenn prince in that sort of mood was to invite a retaliation in bloodshed.

  The wind scudded through a change and blew from the north, and the rains came and made passage miserable. Dakar lay below decks, too wrung to move, while the sloop ran south, her brick-coloured sails bent taut. At Perdith, Arithon concluded his business with the weapon smiths in haste. The respite in sheltered waters was too brief to allow Dakar a proper recovery. Talliarthe was under canvas and bound back offshore before he could prop himself up and crawl on all fours to find a bawdy house.

  Arithon manned the helm like a creature possessed, urgent to reach the south latitudes. He slept wrapped in oilskins beside his lashed tiller. Dakar grew inured to the thump of his step on the cabin top as he tied in fresh reefs, or shook them out at every slight shift in the breeze. The clouds loomed lower each day, until the whitecaps seemed to graze their black, swollen bellies. Rain fell in wind-whirled, spitting drizzle, barbed at times with flecks of ice. The season had turned with cruel vengeance. Hammering squalls joined forces and bred gales; in her run down the eastshore, Talliarthe weathered several that howled through two days and nights.

  The incessant cold water stung Arithon’s hands angry red. His hair tangled to white ends from dried deposits of blown salt.

  Dakar lived like a snail, crawling over the bucking deck from his berth to the sloop’s tiny galley. He brewed peppermint tea to help ease his nausea and nibbled hardtack and salt pork and cheese. When the weather blew roughest, he stayed in a prone sprawl and groaned like a man with the ague.

  Talliarthe carved into tropical waters two weeks shy of the winter solstice.

  Arithon by then was a scarecrow figure, sea-beaten and haunted hollow around the eyes. Too much wetting had infected his cut wrist. The gash scabbed and peeled, saltwater sores caused by the chafe of linen dressings swelled sullen purple underneath. Shirtless, driven, pressured sleepless by some tie to conscience that involved his recent oath to Asandir, the Shadow Master leaned on the weather shroud, a silhouette against thin, morning sunlight, his hand at his brow to cut the glare.

  Emerged from his lair to relieve himself, Dakar noted the strung tension in his adversary’s back. He spoke for the first time in days. ‘What’s amiss? If it’s whales, I wish they’d stove in this filthy bucket’s keel. Since a bath ashore at a tavern is too much to ask, I’m going to wish with all my heart to get us shipwrecked.’

  ‘Getting skewered on a beach by Alestron’s best mercenaries is by far the more likely fate.’ Arithon drummed his fingers in an irritable tattoo on the sloop’s rail. ‘We should see half-rigged masts by now. What can the labourers in my shipyard have been doing to while away three months’ time?’

  Busy with his trouser points, Dakar looked up and realized that the coast of Scimlade Tip loomed off the bow. The sloop would be moored at Merior by noon, and he could get blissfully drunk. A sigh of content eased from him, cut short by the prickling awareness that the Shadow Master glared at his back.

  ‘No.’ Clear as a glass edge, a masterbard’s voice, like a blade through the calls of white gulls and the softer susurrance of the sloop’s wake. ‘You will not indulge yourself senseless.’

  Dakar’s jerk of outrage mistimed with a gust; he swore as he almost wet his knuckles. Stuffing himself back into his trousers, hands shaking as he hurried the lacing, he spun toward the cockpit in a rage. ‘Since when are you appointed as guardian of my fate?’

  Back at the sloop’s tiller, Arithon threw her helm down. His apparent attention stayed fixed on the heading as her bow bore up and all manner of tackle slatted loose to a rattle of blocks that defied all attempt at speech. As the headsails caught aback and pressed the Talliarthe’s painted bow past the eye of the wind, the gaff-rigged main slammed taut on the opposite tack. Arithon freed the jib sheets from their cleats. The thunder as thrashed canvas bellied to the breeze finally muted to a driving sheet of spray as he hardened the lines alee.

  ‘I am master of nothing,’ he answered then on a queer, wrung note of exhaustion. ‘My own fate least of all.’

  He spent the next hour on the foredeck with a bucket of seawater, a fish knife for shaving, and soap. While he sluiced himself clean and aired out dry clothes, Dakar blistered his hands at the helm, by turns immersed in sulking, or else scowling as he weighed inveigling plots to slip beer or neat spirits past his adversary’s vigilance.

  By midday the weather turned gloomy. Winter rains curtained the beachhead at Merior like dirty, layered gauze and pocked the leaden troughs of the breakers. Soaked to the skin, the twins Fiark and Feylind quiet at his heels, their ebullience subdued by disaster, Arithon s’Ffalenn stood still as deadwood and regarded the wreckage of his shipyard.

  Of the brigantine which should have been launched and by now rigged to completion, nothing remained but a straggle of crooked ribs, scabbed to black charcoal by fire. The planked-over hull that lay adjacent gaped like a cave, her stem and forequarter burned away. The stacks of new lumber for her finishing were all charred to ash in the sand. The ropewalk was gone, a snarl of gutted boards amid the puddled runoff shed by dunes tarnished dark with rinsed carbon.

  Aghast, his face white and his frame racked to shivers, Arithon looked stricken by a deathblow as he regarded the ruin of his hope to make clean escape to blue water.

  Feylind reached up and squeezed his dripping, cold fingers. ‘Mother asked you to come home with us. She made a pot of fish soup.’

  Fiark blew plastered blond hair from his lips and chimed in, ‘You can borrow my blan
ket from the loft.’

  Arithon forced himself to stir. ‘Thank you. And thank Jinesse, too, for her kindness. Say that I’ll visit her cottage later. Now go home. She’ll greet me with scolding if she finds out I’ve let you get wet.’

  The children hared off, screaming in delight as they kicked and splashed through the puddles.

  Ignored where he waited, growing soggy in a tunic that reeked of unwashed sweat, Dakar slapped the crimped locks behind his neck to dam the water that dribbled down his collar. ‘Are we just going to stand here until we grow roots in the damp?’

  The chart loft still stood. To judge by the cries of raucous laughter ringing in muffled bursts through the boards, and the woodsmoke which trailed from the chimney, the labourers inside would at least be warm, if the beer that made them blithe had run out.

  Arithon’s stillness cracked into a purposeful stride that carried him up to the doorway. He lifted the latch, crashed the panel inward, and stood stiff-armed against the silver splash of runoff that poured off the palm-thatched roof.

  Blocked in the entry behind him, Dakar saw the uproarious company of the yard’s workers rock into stupefied stillness. Calloused hands drifted in midair, crockery beer mugs forgotten; bare feet shifted under bench boards and table. Like the rasp of a hornet’s nest disturbed in dry grass, Ivel the blind splicer chuckled in malice from his perch on a nail barrel in the corner. It’s himself come back, and early, too. What else could shrivel the tongues in yer mouths? I’d warrant a visit by Dharkaron’s Chariot would be given a saucier welcome.’

  ‘I want to know what happened,’ Arithon cut in, his bard’s trained diction never sharper. ‘Let the master shipwright stay and tell me. The steam box is whole, still. So are the tools and the sawpit. If the new wood’s a loss, the one hull not decked yet can be taken apart and used to patch up the holed one. By Ath, I don’t pay any man silver to sit on his rump sucking down beer ‘til he’s witless!’

  A galvanic stir swept the crowded tables as benches rumbled back from plank trestles. The labourers arose in guilt-fed haste and pressed to be first to crowd the doorway. Arithon stepped aside to let them pass, his burning gaze merciless on every man’s face. Only when the last cringing layabout had passed did he move to enter the sail loft. Stale air and dampness and the smell of sour lager hung heavy in the stifling heat. Reprieved at last from the misery of the rain, Dakar sidled to the stove to warm his fingers, eyes darting in prayerful search for a tankard and a broached cask.

  ‘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 f
ool, 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.’