The Curse of the Mistwraith

by Janny Wurts

  ‘No.’ Come to his decision, Pesquil dispersed his scouts on a hand-signal. As they fanned out, efficiently soundless, and vanished in pursuit of lapsed duty, their leader backstepped into the shoaling waters of Tal Quorin. ‘Come, then, your Grace,’ he invited. ‘But this time, we hunt Deshans my way.’

  In stealth, they worked upriver; past the sprawled dead with their eyes and their mouths clogged with mud; past scarlet-rinsed puddles and broken swords: and the destriers, the curve of their bellies like whales on a beach, but for the straps of breastplate and saddlegirth, or the brush-jammed arch of a stirrup. Lysaer did not flinch from the carnage. When Pesquil demanded that he rip the jewels from his surcoat to kill their chance sparkle in the sunlight he obeyed; for clansmen were stationed in these woods. Upstream, less faintly as they progressed, they could hear sounds of shouting, and the high, shrill screams of dying horseflesh.

  The barbarians were still at their slaughter.

  From pale, Lysaer had gone sick white. It took every shred of self-control and a humility more demanding than courage to keep still; to stay with Pesquil, moving silent from a thicket of reeds to the shadowy pool beneath a deadfall, keeping each step shallow, so their boots did not break water and cause a splash.

  They stopped again. Lysaer clenched his teeth against the pain of his cuts and contusions, and the flaring stabs that resulted when his side or his collarbone was jostled. Movement came, ever so soft, in the fronds of a willow by the riverside. A scout returned. Head bent, Pesquil received the report.

  Lysaer could not hear the words, though in the forest, no birds called. The rush and tumble of high waters had receded also, and the gnats were swarming, bloodthirsty. They bounced off his nose and his ears in maddening circles, and inhaling, he had to struggle not to sneeze.

  From upstream, also, came silence.

  Ankle deep in flat water, Lysaer gripped himself hard to keep from shivering in a paroxysm that had nothing to do with cold or shock. Several moments passed before he became aware that Pesquil stared at him from under half closed lids.

  Under that piercing scrutiny, court training alone enabled him to speak with no reflection of urgency. ‘You have news?’

  Pesquil’s upper lip twitched, then relaxed in a one-sided smile that held no shred of joy. ‘Shadows,’ he said clearly. ‘Shadows and traps, to the west of us. More traps and archers, over the ridge to the east. The flanking divisions have not passed unscathed. But unlike those drowned by Tal Quorin, there are numbers enough to stand, fighting.’

  Arithon was here. Confirmation triggered in Lysaer a tumultuous anticipation.

  In a vice of self control tighter than anything he had needed previously, the prince stayed his sword-hand from ripping blade from scabbard in a curse-driven lust to rend and kill. Etarra’s troops were still dying of his mistakes. Their needs claimed his first responsibility. ‘Up this valley there were living men left, just a bit ago.’

  ‘I know.’ Pesquil surged ahead, lightly mocking to hide admiration. ‘We’ll pass upstream first, never worry.’

  The sun beat down and the flow of falling water subsided. Here and there, marsh reeds pricked out of beds slicked into herringbone patterns, dulled with a velvet of drying silt. The air hung thick and quiet. Lysaer chafed at this progress, which stayed slow since Pesquil insisted their advance remain cautious and covert. Tossed across the sheen of bared flats like wads from a rag picker’s pack lay the limp dead of Etarra’s garrison, conspicuously lacking both wounded and living horses. Not all had perished of drowning; not all bore macerating wounds. Lysaer paused in the act of stepping over the body of a petty officer, and the jolt of what eyesight recorded transferred like a blow to his belly.

  The man’s throat had been cut.

  Choked by an explosion of nausea, Lysaer felt a hand chop the small of his back and propel him forcibly onward. ‘Such surprise,’ Pesquil said sourly. ‘You didn’t really think, did you, that the river could’ve done for them all?’

  The heat, the swimming reflections off wet mud, the fall of drops from draggled cattails all conspired to turn Lysaer’s head. He fought back the dizziness, enraged at how long he needed to recapture the semblance of self-command. ‘Whoever did this could not have murdered two divisions without suffering one single loss.’

  ‘Damn near,’ murmured Pesquil, paused to receive yet another report from a scout. ‘Lord Diegan is alive, at least. He’s downriver, safe, but unable to fight. My surgeon is just now picking an arrowhead and sundry bits of chain mail out of the gristle of his flank.’

  But the news that Etarra’s Lord Commander had survived brought Lysaer little reprieve. ‘I’ve seen no barbarian dead.’

  ‘I have.’ The scout had silently vanished. Pesquil now scanned the wood ahead intently. ‘But precious few, my prince. No clansman will fight when he can ambush. He will not leave cover until his killing is accomplished and even then he’ll do so warily. To catch him and engage him, you must creep close and never let him sight you. And then you must lie in wait with the patience of almighty Ath.’ Pesquil suddenly froze and caught Lysaer back by the shoulder. ‘Don’t answer,’ he breathed sharply; and as the prince stiffened to his touch, ‘Don’t move.’

  His attention was trained into the shadows, away from the lit expanse of flats. Lysaer too watched the forest. Past the sun-flecked dances of gnats, under the silvered boughs of beeches that upheld their vaultings of copper leaves, he saw gaping holes torn in the ground, and the slashed earth that marked where horses had struggled as the footing gave under their forelegs. He saw the white gleam of a fallen sword; the gilt fringes torn off a caparison; he saw too the bundled dead, with arms outflung, or hands slackly curled over the shafts of the arrows that had killed them. Through the raw beat of pulse through his veins, and a fury too bitter for expression, Lysaer forced himself to exhaustive search and to read, beyond omission, in ripped brush and scarlet-tipped stakes and desecrated flesh, the fates of the men who had fled the river.

  Steiven’s clansmen had been nothing if not thorough.

  A man whimpered, unseen in the gloom. Lysaer tensed to rise, prepared to succour survivors. Pesquil snatched him back with a grasp that jarred the broken ends of his collarbone, and also the cracked ribs in his left side that the scout who strapped him had not found. Next, Pesquil’s horny palm closed over his face, stifling even the hissed air that was all his expression of pain.

  On a breath scented in garlic, Pesquil mouthed in his ear, ‘Keep silent. The wrong move, the slightest noise, and you kill us all.’ He maintained his suffocating grip, while, in cruel vindication of his warning, the unseen soldier’s suffering became cut off in mid cry.

  There followed a bubbling sigh whose cause could not be mistaken. Somewhere very close by, barbarians were yet about their business of slitting the fallen men’s throats.

  Slowly, deliberately, the headhunter captain released his restraint. Lysaer blotted his cheek where the studs of Pesquil’s bracer had gouged a scab, the look he returned a blast of stifled frustration.

  Snake silent, the commander of Etarra’s headhunters dispatched a series of hand-signals to the hidden ranks of his scouts. Then he touched Lysaer’s wrist and crept deeper into the forest.

  Progress was more cautious than before. Since deadfalls and traps might lurk unsprung between the trees with their matted mantles of creepers, Lysaer learned a headhunter’s way of probing the soil with a weapon before inching forward, and to stalk head down, careful to leave undisturbed any brush or vine or loose root that might hide the trigger for a spring trap. The scents of burgeoning summer foliage hung unsettled with the reek of recent death, and often the tufted mosses squelched under hand or knee with the wet heat of fresh-spilled blood. The gloom deepened. Ahead, his attention trained forward, Pesquil poised. With fingers pinched to steel to damp stray sound, he slowly, silently drew his blade.

  Lysaer crept abreast and followed his guide’s line of sight.

  Through a lattice of birches and bl
ack firs, a light-footed squad of boys busied themselves among Etarra’s fallen. Clad in deerskin, furtive in movement as wild creatures, they were there to pilfer weapons, Lysaer presumed; until his eye was arrested by a telltale glimmer of steel. Horrified incredulity shook him. The shaded depths of the thickets no longer masked the fact the boys’ hands were bathed scarlet to the wrists. Small fingers and sharp daggers ensured that town-bred wounded never rose. Before his stunned eyes he saw a son of Deshir’s clans end a man pleading for mercy with a practised slash across the windpipe. Other victims who sprawled unconscious, or moaned face down in their agony died as fast, of a well placed stab in the neck. The butchery was done in speed and silence, and ruthless efficiency without parallel.

  ‘The little fiends!’ Lysaer gasped softly.

  ‘Vengeance,’ Pesquil whispered. ‘This time we have them. There won’t be another trap waiting.’

  Etarra’s league of headhunters deployed with oiled care, and at length the little rise lay triply ringed with poised men. When Pesquil signalled the attack, only the inner rank charged. They cut directly for the kill and did not mind if a child or two slipped past. The outer lines would mop up any fugitives.

  At the forefront of the strike-force, Lysaer thrust his sword inside the guard of youngsters’ daggers with no more hesitation than a man might feel who stabbed rats. This was not war, but execution, the lives he destroyed of tainted stock. Royal requisites inured a man to cruel decisions; if they sickened him, it must not show, and if they softened him, he was no fit vessel to rule.

  If Arithon s’Ffalenn used children for his battles, the scar upon the conscience must be his.

  First Quarry

  On a thicketed knoll amid the valley adjacent to Tal Quorin, the half-brother that Lysaer had sworn to kill sat in a brushbrake alongside five of Steiven’s archers. Young Jieret knelt, restless, at his shoulder, wielding a bow with a nervous prowess the equal of any grown man’s. Arithon himself bore no weapon. Empty handed, he perched with his legs drawn up, his wrists dangled lax on his knees. Head bent and eyes half lidded, he appeared on the lazy edge of sleep.

  In fact, he kept his immediate senses detached out of bleakest necessity.

  Clan runners had earlier confirmed that the s’Ilessid prince had marched with the doomed divisions that advanced up Tal Quorin’s banks. His fine chestnut horse had been seen to go down, but that its rider survived both flood and deadfalls was never for an instant in doubt.

  The burning urge of Desh-thiere’s curse continued insidiously to gnaw at Arithon’s inner will. He felt it always, a tireless pressure against reason, an ache that pried between every thought and desire. The knowledge of Lysaer’s presence played on his nerves like a craving, volatile as a spark fanned dangerously close to dry tinder.

  The nightmare was too substantial, that he could not encounter his half-brother alive and retain his grip on self-will. Had Deshir’s clans not relied upon his gifts for survival, he should have been far from this place.

  ‘Here, Jieret,’ one of the scouts chided, as the boy retested the tension of his bow and at full draw pretended to take aim. ‘Don’t be wasting your shots, boy. Use up those arrows that suit you for length, and we’ve not got spit for replacements.’

  ‘I know that.’ Jieret glowered, his fingers running up and down, up and down, the new gut string of his recurve. He wore his hair tied back in a thong like the men and tried brazenly hard to hide dread. Ever since the prescient dream that slipped his recall he had been moody and difficult to manage.

  A word from Arithon might have eased him. But the Master of Shadow this moment had no shred of perception to spare anyone. No mage would willingly broadcast his finer vision across a field of war. The wrench as quickened spirits were torn from life in the bursting pain of mortal wounds could and had unhinged reason. Barriered as tightly as he had ever been through his nerve-haunted stay at Ithamon, Arithon engaged his talents with the delicate precision of a clockmaker winding the coil for a mainspring.

  Throughout the previous night, he had walked the valley barefoot, crossing and recrossing familiar ground as he laid in spell and counterspell and anchored them in fragile tension to the subliminal pull of the compass points. This oak, and that stone, and eastwards to west, a sentinel line of brush and saplings and old trees; a thousand points of landscape became his markers. Now he played his awareness across the fine-spun net of his night’s labour; he tuned his wards, or moved them, or cajoled them from strength to dormancy, the results all balanced to a hairsbreadth to spin a maze-work of shadows across the vale. To this, the strategy painstakingly wrought from the fruits of his tienelle scrying, he layered energies to warp air and deflect the natural acoustics.

  If he did not engage his talents in direct intervention to take life, the distinction was narrowly made.

  By his hand, the neat ranks of Etarra’s right flanking division blundered abruptly into darkness. The rocks, the mires, the twisted stands of runt maples broke their advance into chaos. Calls of inquiry rebounded between distressed soldiers, while the orders of officers to rally split to untrustworthy echoes and sent whole cohorts stumbling awry through rock-sided ravines and marshy dells.

  The shadows themselves defied nature. A townsman who spun round to backtrack would see his path open to clear sunshine. If he yielded to fright and instinct and fled that way in retreat, he encountered no further hindrance. But any Etarran soldiers high-hearted enough to use that reprieve to recover their bearings at next step became swallowed by darkness. Blinded and lost to direction, they thrashed through branches and bogs, twisted ankles and bruised shins on an unkindness of rocks and crooked roots. The terrain funnelled them north, where they floundered, battered and disoriented, into a dazzling brilliance of sudden sunlight.

  Arrows met them in whispered, even flights loosed off by hidden clan marksmen. Soldiers screamed, and crumpled and died; others warned of ambush by the cries of their fallen ducked back toward the cover of the shadows, to be cut down in turn by companions too rattled to distinguish town colours from the deerskins of enemies.

  Bewildered shouts and groans of agony, all rebounded into echoes, recaptured by webs of complex conjury. Arithon sensed like ebb-tide the continuous draw on his resources. Like a killing frost out of season, the spellcraft taught by his grandfather mixed uneasily with murder. The line was most critical where mage-craft subsided and dying men spasmed like seines of dredged fish, gasping their final breaths. As though he wound silk past raw flame, Arithon worked to a perilous paradox: attuned to the outermost demands of sensitivity, while sealed still and deaf within self-imposed strictures of silence. He heard, but did not answer the quips between the archers as they sorted fresh arrows, or passed around waterskin and dipper. Pressed by doubt, and by knife-edge awareness that townborn enemies must only be allowed to break through in manageable numbers, Arithon beat back the weariness that pressed aches to the core of his flesh. Should he slip, lose track and grip on just one lancer or foot cohort, Steiven’s clansmen could be swiftly overrun. Engrossed in concentration that must target exactly which victims to release, he sensed nothing momentous as, by the river course over the east ridge, the lifeblood of Deshir’s young sons soaked on the banks of Tal Quorin.

  But young Jieret, who had Sight, cried aloud, ‘Ath, Ath, it’s Teynie!’ He threw down his bow and tugged Arithon’s shoulder in dawning, agonized horror. ‘Hurry! She’s going to betray them all.’

  Dazed and burdened with his interleaved mesh of maze-woven shadows and defence wards, Arithon neither heard the words, nor felt the boy’s urgent touch. He roused anyway. The oath lately sworn with Steiven’s son had been a blood-ritual, and for the mage-trained such things became binding beyond a mere promise; his life and the boy’s were subtly twined. Like a man slapped out of a coma he mustered back full awareness and moved; but not in time.

  Lost to panic and raw grief, Jieret shoved past the archers and vaulted the palings that served as cover.

  No chance existe
d for second remedy. Arithon dropped hold on the spells, let them collapse in a tangling cascade of frayed energies. The shadow-barriers being easiest to stabilize, he locked a lightless pall across the valley that would partially hamper Etarra’s troops. ‘You’re on your own,’ he informed in clipped apology to the archers. ‘Stand or retreat as you will, but at least send a runner to warn your fellows.’

  Then he was over the breastworks and after Jieret with his sword sliding clear in mid-air.

  Of the scouts posted with him, half remained. The rest grabbed up weapons and bows and jumped after, hailing companions as they went. ‘Jieret’s run off, the prince after him. Divide your numbers and come, they’ll need support.’

  Dodging through elders and thin brush, Arithon spared no thought for regret. Had Jieret’s spurious talent recaptured the vision that led to the slaughter of Deshir’s innocents, any futures traced through his tienelle scrying would now carry unknown outcomes.

  If Deshir’s clans were beyond saving, he had vowed that Steiven’s son be spared.

  He poured all his heart into running, slammed through a last stand of birch, and at last overtook the fleeing boy. Once abreast, he made no effort to stop, but matched stride and gently guided, bending the child’s flight toward the thicker stands of forest on high ground. ‘Easy. Up here. That’s better. Fewer pikemen, and don’t forget the swamp.’

  Jieret choked back a sob and plunged through a gully in a furious rush that tripped him up.

  Arithon caught him as he stumbled, steadied him through the moss-slicked rocks up the bank. Between heaving breaths he kept talking. ‘Explain. What about Teynie? We’re bloodsworn. It’s my oath to help.’

  ‘The tents!’ Jieret pushed through a stand of witch hazel, whose downy spines powdered his jerkin. ‘She’s going to lead headhunters to the tents!’

  Slammed by a wave of foreboding, and fending off branches that raked his face, Arithon squeezed the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t talk,’ he gasped. ‘Just think in your mind what you dreamed and imagine that I can see it too.’