by Janny Wurts
But panic had already impelled the vision to the forefront of Jieret’s awareness. The instant Arithon opened a channel to test the boy’s distress, the ties of the bloodpact took over. Jieret’s terror became his own. The prescient vision that tienelle scrying had snatched back in fragments unfolded now in entirety. The scrub-grown hillside seamed with weather-stripped gullies blurred out of vision as mage-sight unveiled another place…
…of torn earthworks and slaughtered bodies, where Pesquil’s advance troop of headhunters tracked prints across blood-rinsed earth. In swift, efficient silence they exchanged swords for daggers and cut scalps to claim bounty for their kills.
The corpses raised by the hair for the knife-cut were small, the faces smudged in leaf mould and gore unlined by life and years…
Boys, Arithon realized with a choke that all but stopped his heart. He tripped hard on a stone, felt the tug of Jieret’s grip save his balance. Present awareness slapped back, along with anguished recognition of total helplessness. The deed was done: the sons of Deshir dead. All hacked and disfigured, were the little ones Caolle had insisted be sent to dispatch the enemy wounded because men for that task could ill be spared; amid whose company Jieret would have been, if not for a bloodpact of friendship.
‘Jieret, they’re gone,’ Arithon gasped out in defeat. ‘We’re too late.’
But Jieret’s mute and furious headshake forced back unwanted recollection that the appalling scene by the riverside had failed to include the fated girl. At what point does the strong mind falter, Arithon wondered in a cascade of renewed despair. The feud between Karthan and Amroth had inspired atrocities enough to wring from him all tolerance for suffering. Between town born and clan, the hate ran more poisonous still.
Ground creepers tore at his footfalls as he fought toward the crest of the ridge. At his side, Jieret was labouring, his eyes stretched sightless and wide, as if he viewed vistas of horrors, but lacked any breath to cry protest.
At what point should the strong heart shy off, and preserve itself from wanton self-destruction? To go on was to risk every shred of integrity to the mad drives of Desh-thiere’s curse. Arithon swore in fierce anguish. He tightened grip on his sword, braced tired nerves, and cast off the protective barriers that confined his sight to Jieret’s dream. Every prudent precaution he had taken was tossed away as he reached out direct with his mage-sight.
Disciplined, efficient, too well-versed in the ways of forest clansmen to suffer delay or needless noise, Pesquil rattled off orders. His men crammed dripping trophies in their gamebags. Nearby, wiping a sword whose blade bore chased patterns of reversed runes, a strong, straight man in a ruined surcoat clenched his jaw against the hurt of cracked bones.
Framed in that place, over the bodies of slain children, that man’s lone figure imprinted stark as flame against a scorchmark, and wakened the pattern of Desh-thiere’s curse. Backlit by a slanted shaft of sunlight, the soft, feathered greenery of pine boughs knit a backdrop for disordered blond hair and a regal profile grazed and scratched, but unmarred in expression by any furrow of remorse…
Arithon gasped as if hit. His stride faltered, despite Jieret’s efforts, shouting and tugging, to urge him on. He heard nothing, felt nothing beyond nerves pitched and twisted to a geas-driven impulse to attack.
Vision and reflex merged. Alithiel’s blade sang through air. The sour, belling whine as swordsteel sheared through sticks and green bracken jolted turned senses back to reason.
Arithon stood, breathing hard, the sweat drenched over him in runnels. He caught one breath, two, the hand gripped white to his sword hilt trembling in waves of reaction. Fingers could be relaxed into stillness. The mind could be forced to shake off madness. Eyes closed, quivering as if racked by a fever, Arithon called every shred of his training to repress the screaming urge to fling aside Jieret and bolt, not to rescue, but to kill. Through him and through ran the sick recognition that he had tasted worse than his fears. He had fatally near underestimated the havoc that even indirect scrying on his half-brother could unleash through the core of his being.
Half-undone by despair, for there existed no escape from this quandary, he gathered self-command and looked up.
Attending him in staunch readiness were Jieret and eleven clansmen who had without questions left their defenceworks to support him. Enmeshed as he was in sorry fears and the unmistakable throes of wrecked dignity, their kindness offered temptations a curse-marked spirit could ill afford.
Enraged as a scalded cat by the flaw that twisted through his character, Arithon’s first impulse was to let fly with words and send them packing, away from his reach lest he wantonly compromise their safety.
Humility stayed him, and grief. If Deshir’s wives and daughters were still threatened, these men owned their right to defend them, and he must find courage to see how.
Wordless, he turned his grip on Alithiel and pressed the hilt into Jieret’s startled hands. Then he stripped off his swordbelt and thrust it toward the nearest of the scouts. ‘Take this. Bind my ankles. Somebody else, unbend a bowstring and lash my wrists tight behind my back.’
The clansman regarded him, stupefied.
‘Do it!’ Arithon snapped. Salt sweat burned his eyes, or maybe tears. ‘Dharkaron take you, it’s necessary.’
The belt buckle swung from his fingers, flaring in bursts of caught sunlight. No one made a move to take its burden.
‘Mercy of Ath, tie my hands!’ cried their prince, his voice split and baleful with anguish. ‘I’ve a scrying to try that’s very dangerous, and I can’t say what might happen if I’m free.’ He waited no longer, but spun toward Jieret. ‘I beg you, do as I ask.’
‘Don’t put such a task on a boy!’ A blunt, scarfaced man shoved to the fore, prepared in hot outrage to intervene.
Arithon bit back retort, that worse things had been asked and done already. ‘Loop it tight,’ he insisted as the man bent, and tentatively began to lash his ankles.
‘You’ve gone mad,’ someone murmured from the sidelines.
Arithon, eyes blazing, said, ‘Yes.’
He had no time to explain. To Jieret, standing braced with the black blade cradled flat across his forearm, the Master said emphatically and calmly, ‘You’re oathsworn. Now listen to me. I’m going to try sorcery to find out what’s amiss on the riverbank. You must keep my sword and hold it ready. If my body is taken by a fit, call my name. If that fails to rouse me, or if any of these restraints breaks away, you must cut me deep enough to bleed.’
‘But why?’ a man pealed in protest.
Arithon’s attention never shifted from the child.
Under that sharpened scrutiny, Jieret s’Valerient did not waver. The steel rings sewn to his boy’s brigandine flashed in time to rapid breaths and his eyes, grey hazel, never turned. Of them all, only he and Arithon yet knew of the butchery that drenched the moss by Tal Quorin. Between bloodpacted prince and young protégé an understanding passed, that word of the atrocity must be kept from the men. The small, square chin, so like Steiven’s and the dark red hair that was Dania’s caused Arithon a spasm of grief.
‘Will you trust me?’ he asked. Man to boy, he made no effort to hide his misgiving. ‘For your family’s sake, can you do this?’
Jieret answered him, faintly. ‘I’ll try.’
For a second the severely steep planes of the s’Ffalenn face eased; straight lips bent almost to a smile. Then Arithon crossed his wrists behind his back and waited in stiff impatience while a clan archer diffidently tied him. ‘For your very lives,’ he finished in soft threat. ‘Don’t any of you change my instructions.’
The bowstring was knotted tight and tested. Far off, a woodthrush trilled a liquid cascade of arpeggios. The breeze fanned trembling through fern and birch and pale elder, and the smell of pine mulch and soil filled the senses like a mother’s embrace. Torn by the pull of such comforts, Arithon squeezed his eyes closed. He let go into trance in skittish haste, lest nerves and strength both forsake h
im. The men close-gathered around him ceased to matter, nor did he feel the touch and slide of light-patterned leaves that raked his body as his knees loosened and gave way. He slipped unceremoniously to the ground, conscious only of another place…
Buried from sight behind a thicket of fir, someone gave a retching cough. Bent over the corpse of a boy with talisman thongs braided at his neck, Pesquil jerked erect and froze listening. Around him, spattered like reivers in a stockyard, his jubilant headhunters did likewise. The sound did not repeat itself. Never patient with waiting, and apprehensive of being spotted by an unseen patrol of Steiven’s scouts, Pesquil deployed his lieutenants to secure the area and beat the brush.
Before the ring closed, a child bolted into the open, running hard. This one carried no dagger. In place of a leather jacket sewn with rings or bone discs, this youngster wore a tunic smutched with river mud and briars. Barely seven years of age, he ran in gasping panic away from the headhunters with their terrible crimsoned swords. A man-sized fox cap offered a fleeting glimpse of cinnamon as it bobbed from mottled light to forest gloom.
‘Give chase,’ Pesquil clipped out. His teeth flashed in a smile that became a low whistle as the new quarry ducked a trailing vine.
The fur hat was snatched off to free a rippling banner of dark hair.
‘Daelion’s Wheel!’ exclaimed Lysaer. ‘That’s a girl!’
‘Obviously.’ Pesquil hefted his sword. ‘Come on. A scalp isn’t valued by sex and if I’m right, we’re about to find the camp Gnudsog died for.’
‘She shouldn’t be here, then?’ Lysaer braced his bandaged forearm against his side in readiness to run. ‘Not even as some sort of lookout?’
‘She probably tagged after her brother.’ Fired to haste, an unholy spark behind his humour, Pesquil gave the prince a pock flecked leer. ‘Are you going to just talk, or join the fun?’
Lysaer clamped his jaw against the ache of ribs and collarbone and grimly matched pace with the headhunters.
The scrying shattered.
A scream of crazed frustration ripped from Arithon’s throat. Pain lanced his shoulder, followed by a coruscation of white light. A ringing, pure chord of harmony exploded bleak insanity with a shock that sieved through his bones. He fell back, weeping and panting, unprepared for tearing heartbreak as the thundering brilliance of Paravian spellcraft ebbed away, leaving him hollow and desolate.
The earth felt fragile underneath him as he opened his eyes to the fast fading glimmer of the star-spell inlaid in the blade of his own weapon. Alithiel poised above him like a bar of smoked glass, edged in his own bright blood. Jieret held the grip in shaking fingers, tears tracked in streaks across his cheeks.
‘It’s all right.’ Aghast to find his larynx torn raw, Arithon need not meet the scouts’ embarrassed faces to derive that he had howled like an animal. He could tell by the burn of fresh abrasions that he had flipped and wrenched against his bonds. And nothing was right, nothing at all. The wasted lives by Tal Quorin were only the prelude to disaster. In this, his second encounter with Lysaer by scrying, only his sword’s arcane defences had arrested his reaction to Desh-thiere’s curse. For the moment he commanded his wits. As long as he kept his distance and strictly eschewed the use of mage-sense, he could hold against the urge that coursed through him, driving, needling, hounding him to rise and to run: to find his half-brother and call challenge and fight until one or both of them lay dead.
Jieret had quieted. Silent, straight, he regarded his sovereign prince in haunted trust, while a contrite scout knelt to lend assistance. The movement as Arithon was helped to sit pulled at his shoulder, but the scratch was neat and shallow, a credit to the boy’s determination.
‘The bonds can be loosened,’ Arithon said gently. He added instructions to be sent at speed to Caolle, and tried not to let them see it mattered, that nobody cared to meet his eyes.
‘Your hands, they’re ripped bloody,’ said the man who attended his wrists. ‘At least, these scars.’ He faltered, then burst out, ‘You’ve done scryings like this one before?’
The note of awed epiphany in his voice incensed Arithon to revulsion. ‘Ath, no!’ He did not qualify, but kicked the loosened belt from his ankles, surged to his feet, and took back the burden of his sword.
‘Run,’ he snapped, and then did so, fighting off acid futility. They were too far from the grotto where Deshir’s girls and women were hidden, too hopelessly distant to bring reprieve. But knowing Pesquil’s headhunters were hot in pursuit of Fethgurn’s daughter, he had to make the attempt; for when Deshir’s clansmen discovered the extent of their losses, the grief of husbands, kin and fathers would for a surety touch off another bloodbath.
Last Quarry
The girl-child flushed by Pesquil’s headhunters led them on an arduous chase upstream. Above the initial site of the ambush, the valley narrowed. Tal Quorin’s bed sliced Strakewood in a steep-walled ravine, while springs that fed whitewater currents splashed in plumed falls from high gullies. Here the late afternoon shadows slanted through serried banks of broken, sunlit rock.
Pesquil disliked any country where the least chance noise would reverberate to a dance of wild echoes. Crannies between buttressed cliffs devolved into narrow, crooked grottos, any of which might contain a hidden camp. To search each one with a strike party would be fool’s play.
‘Noise and numbers would wreck all our chance of surprise,’ he complained in dry annoyance to Lysaer. ‘Clansfolk holed up in this place won’t be waiting about cowering like mice.’
While Pesquil debated over a dozen nooks where clan sentries could be posted, Lysaer fought drifting concentration. He felt faint. His bruises had settled into stiffness that cased the steady ache of cracked bones. The strapping on his wrist showed a damp patch of red, and he wondered how much blood he may have lost. The ferocity had not blunted from his anger, quite the contrary; but his reserves were worn away and temper by itself was no longer enough to sustain him.
Resolved on his course of precautions, Pesquil prepared for the moment when the fleeing girl crossed back into open ground and brought his best man with a crossbow to the fore.
‘Shoot clean,’ he whispered softly. ‘I want it to seem as if she tripped.’
The marksman set his quarrel with a steadiness Lysaer could only envy, aimed his weapon and lovingly squeezed the trigger.
The click and hiss of the bow’s release blended with the susurration of tumbling water.
Up slope, the running child missed stride.
‘Perfect shot!’ Pesquil said.
The bolt had struck her lower back in the soft flesh between ribs and hip. Her outcry rang and rebounded, multiplied from rock to rock as she folded to her knees. A dragged escort of small stones marked her fall in flat arcs and dust, swept off in the leaping rush of rapids. But the girl snagged on an outcrop at the water’s edge and hung there, one limp arm swinging.
From the vantage in the thickets, her dark hair could be discerned, fanned back from her face with the trailed ends sleeked by the spray.
‘Damn!’ Pesquil wiped sweat from his cheeks then rubbed his palms on his leathers. ‘Bad luck. If she’d hit the river, they might not suspect an assassin.’
Lysaer s’Ilessid stifled any flicker of revulsion. As strategy, Pesquil’s move was unassailable; nor had his effort been wasted. High in the rocks, a leather-clad woman left cover to rescue what looked from above to be the wounded victim of a misstep.
Poised in tensioned stillness, the more explosive for the fact he dared not fidget, Pesquil spent a moment in furious thought. He waited until the clan scout negotiated the most precarious segment of her descent, then touched his marksman on the wrist. ‘Again,’ he whispered. ‘Messier, this time. Have this one die yelling.’
The bowman muffled the ratchet of his weapon under a borrowed surcoat and wound it cocked. Smooth-faced and taciturn in concentration, he selected and slicked the feathers of another bolt. Weapon raised, he nervelessly fired again.
&
nbsp; The clan woman windmilled into space, gut-struck and screaming in agony.
‘Move!’ Pesquil signalled his men. ‘Hurry, fan out, and keep close watch on the rocks.’ Beside him, the young marksman readied another quarrel, his instruction to dispatch the woman fast if her howls showed any sign of coherency.
Sweated and chafed under the quilted gambeson rucked in wet wads beneath his mail, Lysaer gritted his teeth and refrained from comment. Revulsion did not excuse responsibility. Toward his sworn purpose of destroying Arithon s’Ffalenn, he had sanctioned Pesquil’s foray against the clansfolk. No matter how unpleasant, duty demanded that he see the action through.
Again the crossbowman loosed his trigger. Quiet restored, the hiss and splash of the river once more swirled over sink holes and rocks. Pesquil picked a green stick while reports from his scouts were relayed in.
Movement had been sighted three different places along the rocks. Crouched beneath an undercut bank whose tree-trunks angled drunken reflections on broken waters, and chewing a scraping of sour bark, Pesquil sent stalkers to reconnoitre. Based on their findings, he used his stripped twig to sketch a crude map between his knees. ‘Here’s how we’ll deploy.’ The instructions he gave his lieutenants erased the last doubt he may have earned his command through any nicety of Etarran politics.
At a speed Lysaer found inconceivable, headhunter parties were called up from downriver and dispatched in wide, covert patterns that lined the canyon rims with crossbowmen. Pesquil’s design unfolded like well-oiled clockworks: the frontal attack designed to distract; the word at first engagement, that the grottos held only female defenders and small children; then Pesquil’s smirking comment to Lysaer before they crossed the river on strung ropes. ‘Man, don’t expect an easy victory. Clan bitches fight like she-devils.’