TWOLAS - 08 - Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  Sulfin Evend clung to the neck of his mount, shameless with need to steady his wheeling senses. As the horse crossed the hollow and topped the next rise, the view opened ahead, the rolling hills of East Halla spread under a sky deep as indigo silk. The guarded shore of Alestron's harbour unfolded, serene, ringed by the ancient signal turrets, with the citadel sited above the dark water, notching the crest of the promontory. No torches burned there. The siege imposed cruel privation. By contrast, the Alliance tents would be lit, with hot food to offset chilled exhaustion. Anxious and tired, Sulfin Evend approached the shack that marked the far boundary of the encampment.

  The wooden shelter loomed at the roadside. No posted sentry called challenge. Another deserted check-point among many: yet on instinct, Sulfin Evend reined the horse in. A prickling pause awoke chilly foreboding. Though nothing untoward met his searching glance, an indefinable something stitched discord across the night's flawless fabric of harmony. Where the fresh horses for the outriding patrols should be picketed, not a groom was in evidence, nor even one living animal: no change, from dozens of other positions, left understaffed or abandoned. But the gelding beneath him snorted, uneasy. It pawed, reluctant, when Sulfin Evend dug in his heels.

  Then his Sighted vision snagged on the subliminal wrongness: a faint, clogging haze coiled into the air, streamered like wisps in a current. Sulfin Evend rode into that creeping fog, rocked to a shudder of dread.

  Then the gelding broke stride underneath him and stumbled, brought to its knees by a buried obstruction beneath the thick snow. Sulfin Evend pitched from the saddle and sprawled headlong into a corpse.

  Stiff hands, hoared with frost and hardened with rigor, and frozen glass eyes stared back from the caved-in drift.

  Sulfin Evend shouted in jolted recoil. No scout came running. No enemy archer fired from ambush. The eerie, unnatural quiet persisted, unbroken by bugle or drums. The night was altogether too still for a war camp that should have roused to his alarm.

  Sulfin Evend shoved upright, his frayed nerves back in hand. He had seen enough battle-field carnage; men torn apart by the uncanny predators in a grimward, and whole companies burned to wracked skeletons by Lysaer's cursed fits of destruction. He had helped dispose of the ghastly, hacked dead, with entrails picked over by vultures. Why should this sorry casualty prompt such a harrowing rush of revulsion?

  These butchered remains were beyond human suffering. The flesh was frozen to marble, and the blood, congealed from the gaping wounds. This man had been cut down from behind, slashed and stabbed in a frenzy of slaughter.

  The Light's Lord Commander was not squeamish. Yet he felt unmoored as he reeled erect. When his spur snagged on another pathetic rag bundle, he realized: the odd humps strewn about in the snow entombed other soldiers: every hapless wretch once assigned to the check-point had fallen here as a casualty.

  'Dharkaron's Black Spear!' Rage laced him, charged by the awareness: that the blued film of haze clinging over this place was the shocked essence of life, released by the untimely slaughter. As if the sprawled dead continued to bleed, subtle ether protesting the violence of their sundering.

  Unmanned by that taint, Sulfin Evend gave way, hands clutched to his belly and retching. While his horse blundered off with its fallen reins trailing, he wept, unable to grapple the dichotomy imposed by his ancestral talent. Not set against the ethereal chord that still embraced his refined senses. Spun gold and crystal, such pure exaltation should not coexist alongside this visceral wreckage: men whose vital hopes and camaraderie had been torn to ruin, untimely.

  Suspicion struck hard: that the unearthly draw of such beauty might have been unleashed for just such a cold turn of treachery.

  'Ath above! Teir's'Ffalenn, you will answer for this!' If the Master of Shadow had played him false, and spun fair lies at Sanpashir, the Light's Lord Commander would never rest. Nor would any soldier under his captaincy forsake arms, before just pursuit brought a reckoning.

  Whipped on by anguish, Sulfin Evend groped for his sword. He would swear his vengeance upon killing steel. Yet the instant his gloved hand closed on his weapon, the harmonic chord that suffused his awareness lanced his mind and woke dazzling light. He crashed to his knees, overset as a Sighted vision poured through. The unstoppable torrent was impelled by his blood-sworn obligation. The caithdein's line bred to serve Tysan's throne was not endowed with prophetic foresight. The seers of s'Gannley unveiled the past, illumined by truth fit to partner the s'Ilessid gift of royal justice . . .

  . . . the blizzard had not yet rolled in off the Cildein, and the guard stationed at the Alliance check-point had been diligent when the mystical chord of grand conjury first unfurled across the cold, morning vales of East Halla. The effect did not maze the wits of the sentries, or unstring their mindful initiative. Instead, the note sounded the key to the heart, and refined their innate discernment. Men who longed for their families laid down their weapons. Ones who craved peace left their posts. Others, whose dedicate will embraced warfare, remained dutybound without faltering. Day passed, while the war camp divided itself: some to abandon their commissions and leave, and others, to pursue the validation they sought amid conflict. The exodus was conducted with calm. No officer raised accusations for derelict duty or gave chase to prevent the desertion.

  As night fell, the snowfall closed in like a shroud, blurring the distinction between clan refugee and town-born aggressor whose faces turned homeward. The departing procession of ox drays and wagons ploughed through the rutted drifts. Laden galleys set sail down the estuary, while fishing craft and small tenders slipped from Alestron's closed harbour, towing more burdened, oared boats. The mismatched flotilla rode the ebb tide, unmolested by hostile action.

  Dawn brought the marauders. They came with an errant, inbound war fleet, crewed by men rendered deaf to the burgeoning song. They landed like wraiths on the bank of the estuary, masked by the rampaging storm. Parrien s'Brydion would seize his revenge: strike a fierce blow, and tear into the flank of the enemies who had killed his older brother. Sighted vision hid nothing. The scintillant wrongness shrilled through, that the anger driving the foray was warped. Parrien's natural rage had been skewed. The horrific taint also twisted the men he commanded. Each one drew his weapon and slew, befogged by a clouding red haze that whipped their ambush into an aberrant slaughter.

  Hanshire born, Sulfin Evend had witnessed Koriani workings enough to recognize his perception: the driving spells of compulsion laid here had been forged by the sisterhood's sigils . . .

  The horrific vision became swept aside by the urgency of one thought: that if Arithon had tried a masterbard's intervention to disarm the cursed threat on the warfront, then Selidie Prime had spiked his brave effort with an unconscionable sabotage. After the massacre done in cold blood, outraged troops would leap to retaliate. The next to fall victim was going to be Lysaer, as the cursed pawn of Desh-thiere's design. Sulfin Evend aroused, wrist deep in cold snow, seared back to resharpened focus. He shoved to his feet, ran and caught his loose mount, then vaulted astride, and abandoned the dead to their forlorn unrest. For the sake of the living, he dug in his spurs to reach the Alliance war camp.

  The hell-bent course of the Light's Lord Commander was not the only purposeful movement abroad on the dark, snow-bound vales. Wadded up in three cloaks, and puffing through the ice in his beard, the Mad Prophet closed long-suffering eyes and swore like a bull-trampled meat-packer. Frustration found him mired thigh deep in a gulch.

  'Bollocks sucked up tight as burrowing rabbits?' The insolent teen in scout's leathers beside him flashed a grin, all bright teeth underneath a draped mantle. 'Get used to the misery. We have company approaching. He's alone on the road. Mounted, and moving west at grim speed on a horse that's already spent under him.'

  Which assessment was altogether too accurate for a town-raised sprig of a boy: even one sniping sharp, and bred up to serve Alestron's warmongering field-troop.

  Dakar abandoned his tirade to stare. A
nd mage-sight delivered the shattering truth: that the chit was in fact a clanblood huntress, foisted here without anyone's asking. 'Dharkaron's thundering Chariot! Glendien! Your husband's probably choosing his knives to mince us both into weasel bait'

  'Kyrialt knows better. I look after myself,' the minx declared without conscience. Under the slouched hood, her fox-brush eyebrows shot up. 'You need my specialized talent, besides. Or you'd rather yon rider, whoever he is, climbs up your blind butt with no warning?'

  Dakar conceded her pesky point. He had no choice. Sprawled in the surrounding snow with red weapons, the murdering fools from Parrien's war fleet lay felled in the throes of spelled sleep. He had not dared to risk the exposure of asking warped minds for permission. He had just dropped them, hard, and bedamned to the hindmost for the rough salvage of their sorry lives. The penalty stung now, a lashing recoil that would only get worse, the longer he pushed without rest. He could not let up, no matter the peril his endeavour faced by exposure. The culprits of the ill-starred slaughter were stopped, but the Koriani spells of compulsion laid on them had yet to be grappled and broken.

  The lead-based talisman fashioned to break the Prime's sigils had been a nasty and difficult labour. The construct still pained him: a vicious headache, pounding the meat of his brain.

  Glendien gushed, oblivious to her outraged companions, caught blindsided by the cheeky female insinuated into their midst. 'I like mayhem, forbye.' Her taunts rang too cheerful, since her private parts scarcely suffered, groin deep in a snow-drift.

  'Not to mention,' she declared, an elbow jabbed into Dakar's plump ribs, 'we get to ding an enemy rider stark senseless. Might argue for reason to lift your dab spellcraft and wake Parrien up to defend himself.'

  Dakar wanted to strangle her. 'Try that, and you might fetch his blade through your throat. Parrien loves his fighting too well, and that sigil still warps him for slaughter.' The sleep spell that dropped the brute still stung his hands, while his bones wore the bruising reverberation.

  Glendien shrugged. Takes a rock-splitting maul to turn a s'Brydion head.' A quizzical glance unveiled ginger eyebrows arched with reproof. 'If you aren't planning to take down that horseman, I'm not laughing. Very soon, the fool's going to plough his labouring horse overtop of us.'

  "Then lie down for me, wench!' Dakar flexed his fingers, prepared to shape conjury with a mean twist to stifle her gadding impertinence. 'Yon Alliance flunkey will see us as corpses, and may an unpleasant sprawl in the snow chill the sauce off your motherless tongue!'

  Glendien snugged into her cloak fast enough to avoid the first cast - for no movement - intended to flop her face-down in the drift.

  Dakar granted the eight men that Vhandon had sent a more graceful space to prepare. Once they had settled in prostrate comfort, he widened the spell template wrought to hobble Prime Selidie's victims. When his escort rested in oblivious peace, he set about stitching a veil of illusion. Lent the grisly tableau of congealed blood on dropped weapons, his living companions soon were made to appear as cold dead on a field of brute carnage. Revulsion ought to hasten the on-coming rider away without morbid lingering.

  The Mad Prophet hunkered down in the gulch. The delay would cost dearly. Ahead lay a brutal course of tight conjury, with no guessing how long the Teir's'Ffalenn could continue to sustain Alithiel's exalted cascade. The mystical power awake in that chord remained all that suppressed Lysaer's curse-riddled instincts. No help could speed tonight's unpleasant work. The Fellowship Sorcerers had not answered the compact's charge to break the Matriarch's snare of delusion.

  'May the almighty wheels of Dharkaron's Black Chariot mill the witches to crumbling dust!' Dakar would rather suck mortified flesh as a maggot than befoul himself touching Prime Selidie's treacherous web.

  For mage-sight unmasked the vile lines of entrapment spun by her conniving. Parrien's warped passion fed itself off the light cords of affection and loyalty held between him and his fellows. The shared grief for lost comrades had been parasitized like a life-sucking network of fungus: a destructive compulsion that replaced rational thought with an insatiable thirst for ruin. The insidious weave overshadowed the worry posed by one incoming rider. Dakar could support no such minor distraction. While the talisman shielded him from falling prey to Selidie's draining compulsion, he enclosed every man of Parrien's suborned company under a protective boundary, then began the painstaking array of counterwards.

  His work was not practised. An apprentice spellbinder lacked the strait strength and experience. Each man victimized through desire for vengeance must be wrested clear, one by one. Every strangling tie isolated, then singly severed, that Dakar might turn their flow counter: run the malign energy to ground under seal, then rebalance the void with the calm intent to hold harmless. Taut focus absorbed him. A careless mistake could lay him wide open to a Koriani attack.

  Now critically engaged, he felt someone's insistent tug at his elbow. The rousting shake went on, cringing his nerves until his tranced focus upended.

  Then Glendien's whisper drilled into his ear. 'Wake up, you incompetent lard sack!'

  'Damned fool hussy!' Dakar flung out a tingling hand, snagged her wrist in a grip that hissed her caught breath through her teeth. 'Woman, why aren't you prostrate and dreaming, and what idiot mischief keeps shoving you in backside first and well over your carroty head?'

  'Look, damn you! The rider!' Desperation broke through Glendien's welling tears for the pinching abuse to her forearm. 'Fault my scout's instinct later, he's no pesky courier!'

  Fellowship trained, and facile with Sight, Dakar unreeled an outward channel for scrying. He captured the inbound horse, very close! Then the patterned aura of the mounted man burned through complacence and dazzled: the gold that bespoke a gifted talent, laced through by the glittering, indigo strands that denoted a caithdein's oath, sworn to the Sorcerers.

  'Blazing Sithaer!' swore Dakar, appalled. His veiling illusion must blindside no less than the Light's Lord Commander himself: a creature imbued by s'Gannley descent, who would Sight-read weavings of craft and event, plain as written text on a page. Sulfin Evend could stare straight through all simple work, with the wretched lead talisman an ugly presence nigh impossible to mask from attention.

  'We're lost!' Dakar reeled for the crushing defeat that sold out every man who relied on him. His only choice was to give himself up. Negotiate, against hope, that a battle-trained officer would accept Parrien's slaughter with equanimity, and in such an improbable mood of restraint, be convinced to heed a stranger, as Fellowship emissary.

  'Craven!' snapped Glendien. 'You will not fail us, now! My lineage carries the hunter's inheritance. But I can't bend the lane flux widely enough. You'll have to extend my short reach.'

  The Mad Prophet snatched her offering. 'Take my hands! Quickly! Hide nothing more than our breathing lives and the resonance raised by this talisman.'

  Glendien gasped. 'You want Selidie's sigil-borne craft left exposed?'

  'Let rightful blame come to roost where it's due,' snapped Dakar, centred back into tranced concentration. Ath bless, that Alestron's obligation came under the Crown of Melhalla. To spare clanblood under the precepts of old law, straightforward permission must answer. He gathered the meticulous forms in the blaze of Glendien's initiative, that borrowed the semblance of stone and bare twig, then added the icy profusion of water contained into numberless snowflakes. These framed a pattern, invoked as a binding, to let the hunter blend into the natural landscape. Here became a mirror, amplified to reflect the night terrain, strewn over with corpses: the view any predator expected to see, based on the assumptions of fixated senses.

  While Glendien melded the ripples of grand conjury against the back-drop of lane flux, the spellbinder entrained his awareness to hers, then engaged his initiate knowledge to expand the mild ring of her influence. His intervention locked down just in time! The errant horseman arrived, driving fast round the bend in the road. His mount's brisk canter thudded the ground, mu
ch too close! Clods of snow churned up by shod hooves pelted over the prone men, vacant stares unresponsive to peril, and slack limbs helplessly vulnerable.

  A snarl of rife fury, the rider's gasped curse; then the whipped gelding leaped over the gulch. Dakar trembled under a shower of ice, as its blowing bulk thundered over his head and passed by, hell-bent for the Alliance war camp.

  The Sunwheel pavilion that housed the Divine Prince was lit, despite the late hour. More, the enclosure was packed with the noise of an on-going officers' conference. Men from a dozen town companies crowded against the broad trestle, spread over with tactical maps, troop counters, and the scale-model siege engines to demonstrate strategy. No such thoughtful council impelled tonight's gathering. Voices clashed, laced by insurgency. No heads turned to look, as the tent-flap twitched open. No combatant paused to notice the cloaked figure who entered, chilled yet from the saddle.

  '. . . a mad and unthinkable proposition!' shouted the westshore's ranked captain, stabbing an adamant finger. 'We must withdraw the troops. Now! Abandon this siege. Make a swift return by sea and relieve Tysan's crown seat at Avenor!'

  'Such a journey, in winter? That's fanciful folly!' The advisor assigned from Kalesh slammed the planks with a meaty fist.

  While map counters jounced and pinged like flung shot, more objection shrilled from the side-lines. 'You couldn't stage such a move! Or deploy enough men to make a damned difference before the spring.'

  That heated point became trampled by the hard-bitten Etarran, left in charge of the field at Alestron. 'Today's crisis would already be settled before our galleys sailed halfway round the continent!'

  More contenders clamoured, a deafening chorus demanding instant redress: here, a man urged retaliation for the scores of unburied dead. There, a pack of garrison captains howled for punitive action against an upsurge of desertions.