Warhost of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  The haunting unease flayed his nerves, even then. Surrounded by the company of his escort, he thrashed through uncertainty, still unable to tell whether his experience in the grove had been a vision brought on by a moment of weakness, or an assault of illusion, controlled by manipulative power.

  Whichever reason answered, the implications were unpleasant. Should the adepts hold their sympathy with Arithon, their mysteries posed a force that could not be ignored if the Master of Shadow evaded the new muster of his armed host. In sharp want of a drink and the refuge of his tent, Lysaer gave hoarse commands for immediate return to his war camp.

  Behind him, in the sanctum the s’Ilessid prince had abandoned, the white-robed initiate sat in sorrow by the pool’s rim. Falling leaves caught in her lap, scarlet and rust as two bloodstains set apart in time. The branches above her held a queer, still silence. The finches and the hawks had flown. She could sense their fading energy, soaring on spread wings to the source from whence sprang all Ath’s mystery.

  From beyond the loggia doorway, muffled very little by grey rock walls carved in sigils, the voice of the Prince of the West re-echoed back in mettlesome temper. ‘Sithaer’s Furies! We’ll be the best part of the night recapturing those horses from the swamp!’

  Then his officer’s reply, hurt and sullen, declaiming, ‘Your Grace, what did you expect to come mounted to a hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood!’

  ‘They always do this?’ Lysaer blistered back. ‘Take a man’s stallion and turn it loose without leave?’

  The altercation dwindled as the company passed on foot through the gate arch into the lane. ‘Any beast in harness, your royal Grace. It’s old custom. But surely you knew that …?’

  Within the desecrated sanctuary, the lady adept reached up with shaking hands and settled her hood in soft folds over her ebon hair. She waited in sorrow until Claithen’s whispered step crossed to the pool’s edge before her.

  A moment he stood in communion. Mute in his grief, he mourned what he saw: the combined effects of a strong prince’s will, and the insidious, warped legacy the Mistwraith had made of the royal s’Ilessid birthright of true justice. The entangled ugly coil had stamped untold desecration upon a haven spun from dreams and prime power.

  Such ruin augured ill for the future.

  For the grove was not static, but a fluid play of forces susceptible to the influence of the mind and heart of any supplicant who entered. Out of need to restore a broken balance, to set right a kinked snarl in natural order, the sacred peace within had offered up its deepest well of mystery. The impact of Desh-thiere’s curse against its current had torn like a hole into darkness, as a lamp expended before extremity. Since the loss of the old races, the order’s fine knowledge was flickering, dying, reduced to mean sparks like candlewicks propped before a gale.

  No adept alive could measure tonight’s cost, nor number how many generations of strung sigils and gentle cycles of ritual had been tapped and burned away. Prince Lysaer had not been recalled to sane mind, but had only renewed the dedication which held him entrenched into blinded obsession.

  The sanctuary would take many centuries to return to the glory of its former presence, if it could be restored at all. Those spirits called to wear the white of Ath’s Brotherhood in recent years had been too few to replace ones who died.

  Bowed to despair, the lady initiate regarded the unravelled decay of her hostel’s inner sanctum. The tears that traced her face were not for the trees or the animals, but for a man royal born, warped so far outside the given pattern of his birthright, a compassionate summoning could not knit his life aura back into harmony and balance.

  The sad fact confronted the enlightened at every turn: in the dead leaves, and the absence of beasts and winged spirits, and in the trickle of water grown lifelessly sterile. The curse that afflicted this scion of s’Ilessid had become everything the Fellowship of Seven had warned and worse. The destruction of the grove offered tangible testimony: Lysaer could become a force in the land to unravel even basic, sacred order.

  ‘I fear for the future,’ Claithen murmured, a grainy, sad weight to each syllable. At his feet lay the harsh proof. The Mistwraith’s geas as it afflicted the s’Ilessid prince was a fearful aberration, entrenched enough to cloud even the connection that linked the land to Ath’s mystery. There were no precedents. With the Paravians vanished and the webwork of blessing they had invoked through grand rituals falling yearly into decay, the vital connection to prime power was fast becoming a forgotten art.

  Claithen plucked the browned oak leaf from the initiate sister’s lap and stroked its shrivelled length across his palm. ‘Our course has never been more clear,’ he sighed in resigned conclusion. ‘We must interfere with the world’s course, a little. Tharrick and Jinesse and the two sailhands who came for Ath’s sanctuary must not be left to fall into the coil of coming war.’

  The white lady laced her long fingers in agreement. ‘By way of the mysteries, two of our brothers will be sent out with them to turn the eyes of the prince’s sentries elsewhere. Ath’s own grace will see the four safe past the cordon into the care of the caithdein of Shand.’

  The High Earl of Alland, Lord Erlien, would not impinge on their freedom to choose their own course. In his hands the man and the woman would be spared from becoming a tool to hasten the onset of bloodshed.

  Daybreak

  The hike downslope to seek the shepherd children’s family became a mutual contest of taut nerves. For the first time in Dakar’s irresponsible life, the discomforts involved with bearing burdens like a pack-horse over inhospitable terrain came second to other concerns. He and Arithon cat-footed about each other’s presence, the Mad Prophet in a brittle-edged, morbid fascination, and the Shadow Master, in the wolfish sort of reticence of a man who knew he walked weaponless.

  Neither wished to test the effects of what they had shared in the ravine.

  Midnight came and went. The stars above the Vastmark valleys scribed their set courses as pinprick sparks of scattered fire. The Kelhorn peaks rose sheer and fenced them in rim walls, etched like jagged, black glass, or spattered in hoards of midwinter ice, cupped like spilled silver in the clefts.

  Off those high snowfields, the damp, uplands cold snapped in bitter, fretful gusts, tearing at dead grass and tossing the stems of browned bracken. Dakar clenched his jaw to stop chattering teeth and sorely wished he had carried a spare cloak. Between him and Arithon, every stitch of warm clothing had been lent at need to wrap Ghedair.

  The boy rested in a makeshift sling across the Shadow Master’s shoulders, bundled up like a carpet roll fringed with a shock of pale hair. The aching throb of his ankle kept him wakeful. He whimpered at each jar and slide caused by the uneven footing.

  Tormented just as much by the sad, silent body in his arms, Dakar laboured down yet another dry gully that narrowed to a dim, dank defile. The walls were rotten stone, chinked in ferns whipped to thin, standing skeletons. Such a place might hold wyverns’ lairs in caves higher up, where the ledges folded into gnarled rock. In darkness that in warmer months would have thrummed with bats and insects, Dakar picked a jinking path over beds of slipped shale, then swore a mighty oath over the leavings of livestock as he skidded and nearly sat down in fresh sheep dung.

  From four paces off, Arithon peered at him, his guardedness loosened to amusement. ‘By that, I gather we’re somewhere near the flocks?’

  Dakar ground out a last epithet and added, ‘Stuff reeks like the vapours of Sithaer.’

  ‘Careful.’ Arithon’s teeth flashed back a fast grin. ‘Ivel the blind splicer won’t know you any more. Or else he’ll stop mistaking your presence for a beer vat left to dry in the sun.’

  ‘The blind old coot did that?’ Dakar shifted to juggle his load, then eased the lesser bite of the bowstring and the strap that hung Arithon’s lyranthe. ‘Dharkaron himself ! If that filthy-tongued whoreson had eyesight to see his own face, he’d strike himself dumb, then spend all his days with his ugly mug s
tuffed in a sack.’

  ‘Dakar! Where’s your sense of fun?’ Arithon threaded the gap through the gulch and reappeared, a burdened silhouette against the moon-washed floor of the valley. ‘Ivel’s foul gossip just happens to be the life of the shipyard. Nobody’s spared. He sets great store by his honesty.’

  ‘Ivel’s grasp of truth would steam the scales off a snake!’ Dakar tripped on a jutted chunk of rock, bashed his elbow against an outcrop, and emerged to more fluent curses onto open ground.

  He needed a moment to notice why Arithon had stopped talking. A star of yellow light bobbed and wove up the furze-cloaked side of the corrie.

  The Shadow Master gave a shout to guide the searcher, his effort broken into echoes against the inhospitable landscape. He then lengthened stride to close the distance as the flutter of the torch flame changed course.

  Mindful such haste was an excuse to avoid his close company, Dakar pumped short legs to keep pace.

  The torch bearer proved to be a young woman, armed with a short recurve bow and a quiver of steel-headed arrows. Lanky and agile as her nomad forebears, she crested the rise to meet them. Her caped, dun shepherd’s cloak was flung back to free her long legs, her hood blown off in the wind. The rest of her was well covered in laced boots with tasselled cuffs and a skirt loomed in patterns of saffron and cream, strapped tight at the waist with yard lengths of thong kept handy to tie sheep in emergencies. She had a sharp-chinned face rubbed to colour by the cold. Her honey-pale braids jounced and jangled, hung with clusters of bronze bells strung on yarn through each end.

  Dakar recalled vaguely that such trinkets were talismans, worn for some quirk of regional custom. Their notes tangled in dissonance as she flung up her brand and leaped the hooked bank of the streambed. ‘Ghedair? Do you have Ghedair?’

  ‘Dalwyn!’ said the boy on Arithon’s shoulder.

  ‘Ath bless!’ cried the woman on a broken, high note of relief. ‘Child, Cait herdsman has searched half the night!’ She thrust her cresset unseeing to Dakar, then pressed close to kiss the blond head which poked through the muffling cloaks.

  ‘Easy, he’s been injured.’ Buffeted by the blown folds of sheep-pungent clothing, Arithon braced his stance and stayed patient. ‘If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll lift him down. Are you kin?’

  The woman named Dalwyn stumbled back, her brown-amber eyes gone wary and wide in discovery they were not tribesmen. The lilt of her Vastmark dialect emerged to a rush of embarrassment. ‘Where’s Jilieth? Did you find Ghedair’s sister?’

  The torch left abandoned in Dakar’s hand did nothing to spare her from the bloodstained burden in his arms.

  ‘Show me mercy!’ she gasped, her chapped hands raised quickly in a gesture to turn the permanent settling of ill-luck. She glanced, imploring, back to Arithon, but his word was not needed. Already her hope ebbed away, redefining the bones that poverty and poor diet had left pressed sharp against the skin.

  Dakar scarcely saw her. His attention stayed riveted by the insight that his antagonist was tired, or half-unstrung still, to have been caught aback; else his masterbard’s training should have stepped into the breach and broken bad news with better grace.

  Then action came, belated and too late: Arithon snapped the torch from Dakar’s fist and spun his body to cast kindly shadow over the woman’s crumpled stance and flooding tears. He said, ‘We did all we could. The end, when it came, was light and painless.’

  Born of a race well-seasoned to hardship, Dalwyn scrubbed her cheeks with calloused palms. ‘The children’s mother was my sister, dead in a rockfall two years ago.’ Straightened to a sour chink of bells, she sighed, then stroked Ghedair’s head to resettle him. ‘More lasting, the sorrow of the father. He was crippled in the slide that took his wife. The children are his last family, and his only living hope for the future. Except for one bonded herdsman, he has none but me and the boy to tend his flocks.’ She flung a discomposed glance toward the bundle held clutched to Dakar’s chest. ‘As you see, the three of us aren’t enough by ourselves to mind the blessings we are charged with.’

  Arithon briskly contradicted. ‘Jilieth was headstrong, no fault of yours, and Ghedair did as much as a man could. Show us on, lady. If the father waits for news, we have a clear duty to see his son home to his side.’ He pressed the brand back into the woman’s shaky grasp, then waited for her to lead the way.

  ‘Druaithe!’ the woman swore in dialect. ‘Here’s me such a fool, I ran out without bringing a signal horn. Ill-thought, ill-luck follows. Cait will come in, I suppose, when he tires.’

  They had not far to go. The corrie opened into a narrow, sheltered valley, monochromatic under moonlight, and aflood like moiled waters with the tight-packed, jostling backs of sheep. The air between gusts hung rank with the flock’s musky odour, nipped by a darker tang of peat smoke. The angular contours of a shepherd’s tent nestled amid the rim-lit scarps. A lamp burned inside, glowing dull red through the geometrical markings dyed into its oiled felt. The lore of the Vastmark tribes was extensive, as if elaborate customs and superstitions could replace their dearth of possessions. The banded patterns in each dwelling’s weaving represented an inheritance, passed down through generations, to ward off a specific aspect of misfortune.

  The movement on the slope raised a deep-throated bay from the guard dogs. Great beasts, broad-chested and sable with heavy white ruffs at the neck, they were bred to stand down the wyvern, and trained to defend sheep from winter wolves. At the approach of strange visitors, they burst from the flocks, unravelling order like blunt instruments through a burst seam. A fierce command from the woman halted their headlong charge. Tall as a man’s waist, and fanned in a pack’s closing circle, the dogs slowed to a stiff-legged walk.

  ‘Come ahead, they won’t trouble you.’ Dalwyn’s promise did little to reassure. The beasts sniffed at the arrivals, snarling low in their throats and glowering with wide-set, intelligent eyes.

  The woman beckoned Dakar and Arithon uphill toward the tent through the bawling, packed mass of sheep. The dogs trotted after, hackles raised and still grumbling. She sent them off with a phrase in shepherd’s dialect to bid them round up any strays, then pushed aside the painted entry flap. Light sliced the dark, yellow and blinding after black rock and grey moonlight.

  ‘My tribe bids you joy and increase,’ she said in formal welcome, a catch to her voice for the fact that her kinfolk this night lay diminished by a life.

  Discomfited by the sudden brilliance, the visitors stepped over cushioning fleeces ingrained by the rancid tang of mutton fat and leather. Propped against a hassock stuffed with straw, the family patriarch waited amid a nest of woven blankets heavy enough to serve as a hearthrug. A man old and gnarled beyond his years, he had a drooping moustache and features quarried into slanting wrinkles by ongoing years and harsh weather. His eyes were gouged deep into bone-hooded sockets by the pitiless, strong sun which, summer and winter, burnished all that lived on the shadeless slopes of Vastmark.

  Too proud to display his infirmity, too reserved to blurt anxious questions, the man regarded the strangers in iron patience, broken at once as Arithon crossed the light and lowered Ghedair onto the fleeces to clasp at his father’s knee.

  ‘Druaithe, boy, you gave us a fright,’ the tribesman said gruffly, then cuffed the child with exasperated care with the back of a horny hand.

  Dakar stood awkwardly through the stunned welcome, the stumbling, shocked questions, and finally, thankfully, the unbearable burden he had borne through the night was lifted from him by Dalwyn. A masterbard’s given duty was to ease the hearts of the bereaved. Arithon was left to deliver explanation for an event too raw for anyone else to handle with grace or diplomacy.

  The Mad Prophet sidled into a corner. No longer comfortable with the wastrel he had been, unwilling yet to measure the discontent which waited to poison his future, he peevishly wished the homes of Vastmark shepherds were not always wretchedly bare of furnishings. Not a stool or a cushion lay at h
and to ease his need to sit down.

  Winter cottages in the deep valleys might have a stone table or a few three-legged stools, but the tents taken upland to the flocks in high pastures held nothing that could not be packed and carried, or drawn on skids by a dog. Timber was scarce and precious. The most conspicuous item in any tribal household was always the bow rack, lovingly crafted with copper and bone inlay, hung with its indispensable rows of weapons: longbows for damp, inclement weather, and the powerful short recurves laminated from thin strips of horn, glue, sinew and wood, preferred for extreme range on dry days. Each unstrung weapon lay paired beside its quiver of barbed broadheads. Slung on thongs alongside were the ram’s horns carried to call warning, each one an heirloom passed down from mother to daughter and father to son, with chased silver mouthpieces, and ciphers of blessing and guard etched into their flared rims.

  The dwelling itself was cramped and close. Draughts eddied beneath the ridgepole under tugging fingers of wind, stirring the smoky reek of tallow, and sheep fleece, and the dusky must of felted wool. Dalwyn rummaged through some bundles tied with thongs and found a flawed hide to sew into a shroud. Then she stepped from the tent to heat lamb stew in the communal kettle over an outside fire. Still kneeling in his shirtsleeves, Arithon conversed with the old man. Dakar thrilled to find he could at last interpret the locked timbre of strain which burred his enemy’s replies.

  The Masterbard’s eyes wore a look of glazed weariness when he stirred at last to reclaim his lyranthe. Caution marked that exchange also.

  Arithon knew well to be chary of the hostility he had invited to stalk his naked back. Only his respect for the grieving family deterred him from the blistering stamp of dialogue he habitually used to distance himself.

  All over again, at the shaken end of his wits, he wrung from his lyranthe the exquisite measures of the signature composition first played to speed Jilieth’s dying. The catharsis left the old man bent and weeping into the blond hair of his son. Dalwyn sat in a crumple of patterned skirts against the tent’s centrepole, her elfin chin pressed into whitened knuckles, and her braids with their belled ends silenced between her linked hands.