TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

The full toll remained yet to tally. Diegan forced himself to think beyond blinding self-pity. Twelve thousand men in the flanking divisions dispatched by Lysaer's signal to spearhead the assault beyond the ridges might already suffer as dire a peril. Fear spurred his nerve to face downslope, to see whether his sovereign prince's company had been spared at the mouth of the vale. His first sweeping search caught the flash of moving metal. Faint through the haze, the last company under Lysaer's direct command could be seen, still standing, and engaged in a steady advance.

  Some trap would be waiting. That ripping, stark certainty shocked back Diegan's stumbling wits.

  He took swift stock, did his best to confront the inconceivable extent of his losses: scarcely a handful from the centre ranks of his company were alive. Forty-two solid veterans, one of them a wiry, tough sergeant bent already on what he could salvage. When his frustrated effort to unclog the turf lodged in the mouthpiece of his horn met with failure, he snapped off a curse, then raised a gritted shout to rally. Bruised, dirtied, a scarecrow pack of men responded. More stragglers picked themselves up off the grade of the only unscoured hillside about, the remains of the foray dispatched at the whim of black rage to quarter the knoll for hidden enemies.

  Those left unhurt showed the mettle of their training as they stumbled to rejoin the truncated remnant of their company.

  Lord Diegan spat out small bits of gravel, flicked grass chaff off his surcoat, then limped in hurried steps down the rise to reassert his authority.

  He had but one purpose, now, and that to reach Lysaer in time to reverse what damage he might. Another light bolt could be fired to signal swift retreat. If the warning was timely, the flanking companies across the ridgetops might still have a chance to seek safety.

  The beleaguered little sergeant caught sight of his Lord Commander. 'Ath bless!' He mopped his sweating lip with the back of a bleeding wrist, squared his shoulders, and awaited fresh orders.

  'Retreat,' Diegan said, his voice split with urgency. 'Now! The prince is behind, left one company to defend him. Dharkaron's truth, I don't think we've seen the end to the Shadow Master's offensive.'

  'What of the wounded?' The sergeant gestured to a scattered few figures still prone. 'We've got no wood to make litters.'

  Lord Diegan shut his eyes, every scuff and bruise and wrenched tendon combined to one screaming ache. Upslope, the decoy of pole weapons left by the enemy had been razed to charred carbon by Lysaer's light bolt. Even had alternate materials been at hand, a fast review showed what the sergeant already knew: the loosened footing and turned rock in the scar of the slide would be lethal enough without burdens. A man might break his legs on a misstep, or tumble through loose dirt into cracks and crannies where the churned-up debris had mounded over air pockets.

  'Whoever can't help themselves, leave them,' Diegan said. 'Our prince is riding into unspeakable danger and his need must outweigh all else.'

  Under the dust-smeared face of the sun, the men mustered. One dragged the sobbing squire away from the casualty with his innards torn out. Over the intermittent crack and rumble as unstable rock gave and settled, or loose boulders tore away from the knife-edged wall of sheared cliffs, his weeping appeal rang shrill. 'I won't leave him! I can't.' On a fresh note of torture, 'He's my brother!'

  'Force him,' cracked the sergeant to the man-at-arms who importuned the boy. 'If he doesn't straighten up in a hundred paces, leave him behind for carrion. Our prince's safety comes first.'

  * * *

  In a saddle between summits on the north spur of the vale, Caolle squinted through silting layers of dust to assess the moves of the enemies left standing since the landslide had razed Lysaer's first wave advance. Isolated men clustered on the fringes, battling now to regroup their ranks on firm ground. Scattered across the heights, Caolle had archers to prevent them from gaining a defensible foothold. His tight squads of clan scouts and tribesmen had the simplest of orders: shoot to kill where possible, and give ground in retreat the instant their positions became threatened.

  At this critical juncture, while Arithon and the Mad Prophet abandoned their vantage overlooking Dier Kenton and shifted the thrust of the assault against the flanking enemies beyond the ridges, Caolle remained. His assignment was to track the movements of Lysaer. He must stand as his prince's rear guard and act to forestall any unforeseen event. No chance could be left to swing the odds in favour of rousing the uncontained drive of Desh-thiere's curse.

  Having survived the decimation of his frontal assault, the Prince of the West would be dry tinder for rage.

  If Arithon s'Ffalenn became cornered, if he lost grip on his constrained set of tactics, the plan he had formulated through augury to halt the war in Vastmark could all too easily come to naught. Enough townborn enemies remained still at large to outnumber their disparate bands of archers by a factor of eight to one.

  If Lysaer was kept pinned in Dier Kenton, the other companies from Jaelot and Alestron could be hazed off their course; once they learned their main force had been laid waste in the vale, their desire to fight could be harassed and worn away into debilitating frustration and despair.

  At present, Caolle concerned himself with the ragged remains of the centre division, a struggling, determined knot of survivors picking a reckless, hurried path across the field of rubble. Like Lysaer's elite company, advancing, these men had discovered the perils of the footing the hard way. Two of their number lay screaming behind them, pinned by a shifted mass of boulders. The scar from the slide was unstable enough that even a stray tap could dislodge the loose fill and trip off a grinding, settling thunder of crumbled shale. One mishap convinced even the most brave to make for the broken seam beneath the cliff face, where the march could be made with greater safety.

  The plan was sound enough, had shepherd archers better versed in the perils that arose after rockfalls not dogged their progress from concealment.

  Keen of vision from his years leading raids, Caolle assessed each tiny figure in turn, then paused, cut back, and singled out one whose muddied surcoat bore the gold star on white of Avenor's elite garrison.

  A low whistle hissed through his teeth. 'Fiends alive. That's Lord Commander Diegan himself.'

  A rustle of rapacious movement swept through a team of archers downslope. Some were tribesfolk, content to bide time and wait. The others were clanborn, their young officer one of Jieret's Companions, scarred since his boyhood with the undying grief left by the family slain in the debacle at Tal Quorin. He would not miss who approached their embankment; the enemy officer who had led Etarra's divisions into Strakewood would be sighted and marked for easy prey.

  Moved by sharp instinct, Caolle swore. He carried no shepherd's horn. Any shouted order could not carry against the wind. Stabbed by keen urgency, he scrambled up from the rocks, sprang out of cover in a sliding, futile dash to intercept.

  * * *

  For the Lord Commander's straggling refugees, the moment could not have been worse for a barrage of enemy arrows. Exposed amid perilous terrain, left unable to run for fear of a misstep upon uncompacted ground dangerous as dropped knives with silvered shale, they were hedged in by boulders tilted at hair-trigger angles that had already proven as lethal. Lord Diegan shouted. Around him, the men sought to fling themselves behind whatever screening cover they could find.

  He knew as a shaft bit the gravel by his foot that Lysaer was too distant to know he had allies under attack. There would be no screen of light cast to spare them.

  Diegan sought for inspiration to save his last men when the shaft thudded into his side. Its broad-bladed head pierced his surcoat and mail, ripped through the gambeson beneath and drove the last air from his lungs in a wordless, half-vocal gasp. He stumbled forward, clawing at rock to stay upright.

  The message of desperate urgency he carried must at all costs reach his prince.

  Dull, tearing pain turned him dizzy. Diegan swayed, kept his grip on broken stone until his fingers split with the effort. Weeping tears
for the punishment, he managed to stay on his feet.

  The wasp whine of the second shaft grazed through the beat of his agony. Its splintering strike caught him to the right of his breastbone, ripped him backward until the world fell away into a shimmering view of a Vastmark sky bleached with haze.

  Shock and pain winnowed him into sick dizziness. He strove to roll over, to find his knees and try to rise. If he failed, twelve thousand men stood at risk, most beloved of them all the life of Lysaer s'Ilessid.

  'Daelion preserve,' he moaned through locked teeth, though he had never been one for praying.

  Nearby, a gruff voice was shouting. 'Ath save us all, let him not be dead!'

  The accent was barbarian, Diegan noted in self-mocking surprise. An odd twist, he thought, that his foot soldiers should affect a clan dialect.

  'That was the Lord Commander!' returned a younger man in ringing protest. 'It's he, I say. The townborn who raised Etarra's garrison for the massacre that undid us all at Tal Quorin.'

  Damned, Diegan muddled in thick confusion, he was condemned for the carnage, but not for Tal Quorin, never a deed so straightforward as that. Daelion Fatemaster would see him in Sithaer for the dead killed untimely at Dier Kenton. Ironic, if he passed the Wheel in their company.

  He struggled again to rise, felt the saw of the arrows bite deeper. His breathing came laboured. Through a fearful, sucking rush of faintness, he realized the strength had bled out of him.

  Then a blurred face shadowed the blank vista of sky. Someone grey-haired and gruff shoved a supporting arm beneath his shoulder. He heard the chink of steel studs from the man's wrist bracer grind against the links of his mail. Through dust and blood, he caught the martial smells of sweat and oil, and decided his saviour had to be the sergeant who had survived the shale slide beneath the knoll.

  'Merciful Ath, you came back,' gasped Diegan. 'For my spirit, for my prince, tell them all to retreat.'

  'Don't talk,' the other replied, his consonants still stubbornly bitten. 'You've already lost too much blood.'

  Diegan resigned himself. The barbarian accents were surely cruel dream or delirium. He coughed through a hot rush of fluid. 'There was a warning,' he pressed, laboured now, desperate to get his words out. Sight came and went in tides of blackness, and the pain was spoiling thought. 'Twenty-five men brought me word from the Shadow Master. I ordered them dead lest they tell. But my prince ... he must hear .. . there's grave danger. Tell him. The light signal... retreat, before it's too late.'

  'Ath forfend!' cried the man who held him, anguished. 'That accursed misdeed was your doing! Had those twenty-five survivors from the Havens reached Lysaer, you must know. By my liege lord's clear augury and Dakar's prophecy, not a man would have marched on Dier Kenton to die.'

  Diegan gasped, unable to command fading vision to bring the face above him into focus. 'Who are you?'

  'The very last man in Athera your prince would allow a live audience.' A bitter cough of laughter presaged answer. 'I'm war captain to your sworn enemy, his Grace the Prince of Rathain.'

  The last syllable fell away, bringing horror which unravelled into a horrible, jerking spasm. Diegan squeezed his eyes closed, undone.

  'Daelion pity,' he wrenched out. The final breath past his lips ripped through tears of regret, for his bequest could never reach Lysaer s'Ilessid now. His dedicated love and devotion, every pain he had tried to spare his liege and his friend, had all passed for naught.

  * * *

  'Fatemaster witness, that was ill done,' murmured Caolle. He raised the coiffed head of Avenor's Lord Commander from his knee and laid him to rest on turned earth. Habit let him dash the wet blood from his knuckles on his leathers; no stranger to death, he watched in resignation as a fly settled on the trickle of bright scarlet that bled through teeth and lips, still twitching in spasm from a desperately fought passage out of life.

  The swathe of shadow across his shoulders shifted as the Companion scout who cast it stepped aside to spit in the dust. 'How was I to know the murdering dandy was planning to call the retreat?'

  Caolle twisted aside from Diegan's body. His hard gaze bored up into a face too young, too bitter, too scarred by early carnage to embrace the concept of mercy. 'You couldn't know, lad. Now it's too late.' Drenched in sweat and scraped in a dozen places from his mad rush down the scarp, the clan war captain completed a reflexive tally of the slain, shot down in their wretched scrabble over wrecked earth to gain firm footing. One in a squire's tunic barely showed the faintest first shading of a beard. Caolle sighed. Ath knew, he'd seen worse in his time.

  But the ending an arrow had bought his townborn counterpart now left him bitter. Burdened by queer regret, Caolle straightened up to leave.

  'I only pray you learn how to pity,' he said to Jieret's Companion. 'It might one day save your life from becoming what mine has, a futile pursuit of old hatred.'

  'You always said it's the hate that keeps us alive,' the scout returned.

  'Once, I believed that was true.' In the sad recognition he faced a younger version of himself, Caolle raked back a stickied tangle of slate-coloured hair. 'I've since learned there are better ways.' But sooner than any, he knew: if not for his service to the Prince of Rathain, the lesson would have slipped his grasp entirely.

  The war captain who had survived the brutal massacre at Tal Quorin, whose very tactics had helped decimate those ranks of Etarrans, found a priceless irony in the thought that, at the end, his hope and a citybred Lord Commander's last wish should be alike to the very bone.

  He, too, felt that if his liege came to die, everything he had struggled to accomplish in life would be rendered brutal and meaningless.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn was young Jieret's legacy. Without him, hope died for the northern clans. Rathain's old blood could never emerge from their lives as hunted fugitives to reclaim their heritage if no prince lived to be crowned under Fellowship auspices at Ithamon.

  To the scout still stiffly awaiting orders, the war captain said in tart dismissal, 'Unless you want to become a cinder in yon upstart princeling's accursed fireballs, we'd best take cover on the ridge.'

  * * *

  Late day threw slanting, orange light across the vale of Dier Kenton. A blue-tinged, premature twilight lapped the scoured face of the scarp, cloven down to its steely flanks of shale. The surface offered only brittle footholds. All the known, safe trails to the passes were utterly scoured away.

  Of five teams of scouts sent out to seek an alternate route, two came back not at all. One pair limped in with losses and the others brought relentless bad news.

  They reined in lathered horses before Prince Lysaer s'Ilessid, chalk-faced and hawking up dust. 'No path, your Grace. The day's lost. We've been blocked in by the slide.'

  Climbers on ropes might make the attempt on the precipice, but no means existed to move armed men and eighty spent mounts over the cliffs to find the passes. Lysaer s'Ilessid regarded the sheer walls, deaf to the echoes of stamping horses, the murmurs of complaint from the ranks. No matter how determined, no matter how brave, his defeat at Dier Kenton Vale was complete.

  All the powers of his gift could not offer a way to reconnect the royal company with the troops who fought to win through, who even this moment pressed the attack to pin Arithon's forces against the mailed teeth of a war-host which no longer existed.

  One hundred men and the ninety-six odd survivors who had straggled in after the rockslide were all he had left at hand. The prince reined back a raw need to swear. A troop of a thousand in fit form would have been too few to cover such a broad sweep of open territory. The enemy could slip through their lines at whim after nightfall; Lysaer could not be everywhere with his gift, to safeguard each sentry from archers.

  The horses were spent; the men, heartsore and grieving. The bare dell where the company gathered offered neither water nor safety to pitch camp. Lysaer knew this, just as he was aware of the surreptitious glances of his officers, who fretted and watched him, but dared raise
no voice to address him.

  The look on his face hammered iron, he sat his saddle in stillness before the razed face of the rim wall.

  Never in his life had he dreamed of a downfall on this scale.

  The campaigns and the ships his royal father had wasted to s'Ffalenn predation on Dascen Elur were insignificant before today's toll of dead at Dier Kenton. Worse, perhaps, was the way his given gift of light had been hobbled and rendered helpless. Throughout, he had been unable to act in defence of his troops. Rancour stabbed deep, for that. Somewhere beyond these rotten scarps of shale, for cold surety, Arithon s'Ffalenn still worked shadows and sorcery. His heart knew no word for mercy. With total impunity, he would wreak what ruin he could upon the rest of the allied warhost.

  Diegan would have understood his liege lord's smouldering rage; Avenor's bold Lord Commander, found dead of a clan scout's arrow on the same violated earth, when Ath's own miracle had spared him untouched from the first fury of Arithon's rockfall. Lysaer felt as stone, beyond tears or regret. If this moment of grim impotence made him burn for revenge, he was never the fool to show weakness before the eyes of disheartened men.

  'Turn about,' he said, his voice burnished level, and his trappings filmed over with bitter dust. 'We must withdraw altogether from Dier Kenton Vale. Tomorrow we'll seek another route past the ridge to regroup with Lord Keldmar s'Brydion and the garrison divisions out of Jaelot.'

  Lysaer wheeled his cream charger, every inch the unconquered prince. For Arithon s'Ffalenn had not won the day, never so long as his s'Ilessid enemy was left alive to take the field and men sworn to rid the land of evil remained whole enough to muster and march.

  The officer of the royal guard had the temerity to ask whether the beaten remains of the warhost could be assured of retreat back to Forthmark.

  His question received the freezing glare of Avenor's prince front on. 'We shall not be going back. Never as long as we have living allies from Jaelot and Alestzon left to fight. What happened here was no accident.'