TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  'You can fight until you drop,' one antagonist baited in the butter-soft vowels of Shand. 'Or by our high earl's invitation and Prince Arithon's preference, we'll take your weapons and your word in surrender.'

  'You have my word,' Keldmar said through gritted teeth. As son of an old blood duke, he could rely on the code of ethics his ancestors shared with these descendants of the displaced clans. He tossed his sticky broadsword with a ringing, flat clash at the feet of the swordsmen who pinned him. Stubborn he might be, but never the fool to die for pointless bravado. 'I'll have my satisfaction. Your earl's fiend-plagued ally, the Master of Shadow, will curse the hour he left me alive.'

  * * *

  A clansman carried word of Keldmar's capture to Dakar in his cranny seconds later. 'We have him, blazing mad, but unharmed. We'll need time to get him clear before you raise the mist and let his troop find out he's gone missing.'

  Tucked between rocks like an uncombed hedgehog, Dakar swore with disgruntled lack of heat. He had a snarling headache, result of stressed concentration and too much svm without any beer to ease his paralysing thirst. The diversion he had spun over the s'Brydion garrison had decidedly grown out of hand. The spell-laced green mist had lured the more imaginative men-at-arms over the threshold of delirium. The air down the rise had spawned schools of pale mermaids with alluring long tresses and shell bracelets. They drifted above the incline like displaced succubi, to strains of wild music that sounded sawed from an instrument an excruciating half-pitch too flat. The occasional yelling brawl erupted through the murk as men crazed by visions of unbridled lust vied for the favours of Ath knew what sort of female. Pikes poked up at odd angles through the turbulence. The lance tip of one was festively streamered with what looked like some strumpet's scarlet petticoat.

  Dakar might have thought the sight uproarious if his skull felt less like an anvil pounded silly by a blacksmith.

  The scout who reported raised a sceptical eyebrow and burst into whooping amusement. 'You do have a touch,' he commiserated, then jumped back as Dakar swung chubby knuckles at his middle.

  'You'd better clear out,' the Mad Prophet warned. 'Those revellers down below won't stay so friendly when their women change back into rocks.'

  'You say,' gasped the scout. He slithered back to leave, all but knocked aside by an inbound runner streaming sweat from a sprint across the ridge.

  'Word from the Shadow Master,' the newcomer forced between breaths.

  'Trouble?' Dakar pushed fallen hair from his eyes, and squirmed to face the tired messenger.

  'Jaelot's divisions are stubborn as rock.' The scout braced his hands against the buttress of shale and panted through the rest of his message. 'Our archers are gutting their ranks like damned sheep. Still, they won't turn. Even stark blind in shadows, they plough up the crests and attack. We could let the whole murdering mass of them slaughter themselves on our weapons, but the tribesfolk are running out of arrows. Arithon's asked, can you clear out an opening so our people can turn in retreat?'

  Dakar stubbed a finger into his cheek and rolled spaniel eyes in forbearance. 'He's that desperate?'

  The scout straightened up, affronted. 'Need you ask? That garrison commander from Jaelot became laughingstock over something our prince exposed in a satire.

  Whatever the scandal, the man's mad for revenge. He'd kill his whole company out of spite just to even the score.'

  'The general of Jaelot's garrison?' Dakar smirked in sly malice. 'His prick wilts in bed. The wife scratched her itch with every footman and stableboy she could lure to try out her favours. She's had six sons and four daughters, no two of them by the same father. And it was Halliron Masterbard's ballad, not Arithon's.'

  'Well, for our part, that's a fine point scarcely worth standing ground to die for.' The clan scout peered at Dakar in sharp concern. 'Can you help? You look washed as a bucket of old curds.'

  'I can pray for an almighty miracle.' The Mad Prophet appended his graphic opinion of the garrison general's tartish wife.

  'Well the old wheezer could have saved himself a skinful of trouble,' the clan scout agreed in scornful earnest. 'Should've just had done and tossed the bitch off the nearest battlement.'

  'It's nobody's secret the citizens of Jaelot invented the tradition of bloody grudges.' Dakar drew in his undone shirt laces to ease the chill, since the low sunlight lost warmth to his memory of the garrison commander's treatment of the city convicts condemned to labour on the seawall.

  A harrowing yell from a victim downslope recalled his diverted attention. His spell-turned spread of mist was wearing away, torn in wide patches and thinning. That first boggled shout was followed by cried curses as several of Alestron's crack mercenaries recovered mazed senses, clinched in loving poses with buttressed chunks of knife-edged Vastmark shale. A mermaid with blue hair puddled into a haze of spent light. Then the pike flying the lacy furbelows cracked with a bang into a blackened explosion of fragments. Dakar knuckled the hair at his temples in dismay. The gnat swarm of sigils set loose to wreak havoc had gone unstable, most likely because of a seal of protection laid infinitesimally awry, or some tiny, incompatible property of nature neglected in the heat of inspiration.

  The spellbinder cringed to imagine how his Fellowship master would reprove his shoddy turn of conjury. Worse, his spreading green fogbank scarcely established a sound base for permission to ensorcel the enemy, since the duke's paid soldiers could not refuse to enter without rejecting orders from their officers. The lapse in proprieties left the spellbinder unrepentant. The only way he knew to divert the troops now was to twist the dregs of his dream binding into a mass hallucination. That Asandir might come to punish him later for chaotic intervention was a point he shrank from examining. The offered stake was the Shadow Master's life.

  Then the choice became moot. A shepherd woman scrambled in, soaked and breathless and bearing desperate news. 'The enemy's broken through from the south. We're routed and running. Arithon's thrown up shadow to screen our rear guard from bowfire. But that's not protection. We're going to need space, and quickly, to open the way to escape.'

  A breeze sharpened to a flaying, unseasonable cold snapped down off the heights, pressing damp braids to her neck and streaming the thong ties of the emptied quiver at her hip. She glanced over her shoulder, worried, and Dakar shivered. More aware than she, he knew that Arithon was driven to binding his gift of shadow with unsubtle malice. Those enemies holding a steel-handled sword, or touching bare skin to their armour were probably finding their flesh flash-frozen to chilled metal.

  The woman spun back to him, urgent. 'If you're planning to help, we haven't much time.'

  'There are some six thousand mercenaries down there!' Dakar cried in protest.

  His quandary raised not a murmur of sympathy. At the crest of the rise, frantic shouts rode the wind, twined through the belling play of steel. Shepherd archers were fleeing the ridgetop, their grey-and-dun clothing scarcely visible amid falling twilight. The Mad Prophet uttered a scatological curse upon every mother's son born in Jaelot, balled up his fists, and screwed his eyes shut.

  He ripped out three summonings, scribbled runes in cold air, then threw his vivid, disordered imagination into a vision to raise terror.

  His unpremeditated jumble of forced power cast a baleful snap of fire across the zenith.

  Dakar embellished this with his most evil remembrance of nightmares brought on by cheap gin. In garish, deafening splendour, an apparition burst from the glare, made manifest through an irresponsible explosion of spells.

  His finest rendition of Dharkaron's Chariot roared into the arc of the sky.

  The visitation was drawn in sable splendour by the Five Horses of Sithaer, harnessed in lightnings, their coats polished ebony and their nostrils flared to expose dark red linings. White-stockinged hooves struck sparks off the very roof of heaven. After them rocked the dread chariot of black lacquer and bone inlay, its narrow, spoked wheels a whirl of steel rims which sliced clouds in their pa
th like spent smoke.

  Ath's avenging angel grasped the lines in his gauntleted fist. Not by accident did the face beneath its raven hair bear resemblance to Rathain's sanctioned crown prince.

  Dharkaron opened tapered lips and laughed against the winds that streamed his silvery cloak. The blazoned Wheel of Fate spread blood scarlet on his breast as he straightened to full height and checked his steeds' wild rush. They reared in trumpeting splendour. The silhouette of their bellies darkened the afterglow of sunset. Then the Avenger brandished his ebon spear. He howled a curse of damnation upon the dream-fuddled mercenaries strewn across the shale slopes below. His team flung down, snorting. On a whipcrack shout from their master, they launched into a pounding charge straight for Alestron's disordered battle lines.

  Torn in rude fear from lascivious dreams, roused up naked and weaponless, some shaken out of sleep or raised staggering from improbable, drunken fits of gluttony, Keldmar's companies of mercenaries wailed in abject terror. They leaped up to flee, tripped and fell flat, then scrambled off hands and knees in blind panic to escape. Barefoot and shod, they trampled over shucked mail and snagged heaps of clothing, discarded boots and dropped shields. Swords and pikes were abandoned where they lay. Seized by mass fear, every war-hardened man-at-arms scattered before Dakar's unholy illusion and bolted flat out for low ground.

  None looked back, even when the chariot and horses dissolved in a flat slam of thunder over the vacated slope.

  Arithon's bands of shepherds and clan scouts were freed to slip away and disperse into the seamed hills and corries where nightfall and spun shadow could hide them.

  Severance

  Behind a locked iron door, the Prime Enchantress of the Koriani Order sat amid a bare stone chamber in the battered shell of a signal tower within the coastal city of Thirdmark. The lancet windows which commanded a strategic view of the headwaters of Rockbay harbour were masked off in stiff felt. Old dust stirred in the mouse feet of draughts. The stone smelled of mildewed mortar and sea salt, and the curtains like fusty woollens rinsed in old sweat and bog water.

  In that place, the time could have been midday or the deepest hour of night. No chink of outside sky showed through. Sound was muffled to resentful, dull silence, feathered in the subliminal resonance of old wars when the tower had withstood the battering assault of nameless, forgotten sieges.

  Morriel preferred the ambivalence. Her skin the yellow of aged, crumpled linen in the light of a single candle, she rejoiced for the freedom restored by the Great Waystone cradled in her lap. Never again need she leach borrowed energy from the diurnal rhythms of the earth. The passage of days and seasons no longer ruled her arcane might.

  The Prime Matriarch of the Koriathain traced an ivory nail over the cold arc of the stone's surface, aware as a strained current of vibration awakened to even that slight touch. The Fellowship Sorcerers had not tampered with the jewel. Its freight of stored energies, every perilous, layered contortion ingrained by generations of past spells remained twined through its shadowy depths. Any unshielded handling of the great amethyst required rigorous discipline. To command its focus demanded far more than a mastery of mind and will. The stone was deadly dangerous. The wielder who failed to channel its bright focus could be enslaved, her self-awareness broken by gibbering nightmares until her mind became consumed in madness.

  Morriel had cared for past victims during her girlhood as a novice. Left those disquieting memories, she abjured a course of unwise haste. Time and practice would be needed before the Koriani Order could remaster and wield the Waystone's full might. Perhaps a decade of exacting instruction lay ahead, before First Senior Lirenda dared the trial to engage the jewel's deep focus without the Prime's partnered guidance; years Morriel could ill afford to squander if her chosen successor proved unfit.

  Against this added demand of power and responsibility, the Prime sought her own private sureties. If the Great Waystone's properties had lent her some surcease from the crippling pain which hounded her overtaxed body, it could not extend the span of her life by even as much as one day. The burden of breathing had grown little less for the promise of the order's restored influence. Closed alone in the airless stone room, her hair unbound in waves over shoulders clothed in a robe of bleached silk, Morriel cupped the melon-sized amethyst between her spidered fingers. Her decision was set. No anomaly would be left to risk. Against the gnawing host of her doubts, she would engage a deep scrying to map the last steps to secure Lirenda's transition into prime power.

  Unlike the properties of the Skyron focus, the great amethyst met the mind which sought dominance in vast and ominous quiet. Morriel closed lightless eyes to strain her thoughts clear of distraction, then linked her awareness to the crystal. Swallowed into smothering darkness, undermined by the old, familiar dread that the Waystone's pooled malice might slip her control and unstring the coils of her sanity, she held her mind in balance. She was too old, too wise to be baited to insecurity. Neither did she ease her guard as the stone's vast quiet gentled into seductive invitation.

  The jewel she bid to master had been wielded by a thousand prime enchantresses, its latticed structure over time compounded into a vicious labyrinth of tricks.

  Morriel bided in chill patience. Ancient, she was herself well tempered in the power of stillness. She out-waited what green youth would challenge, her strength kept hidden for the moment the crystal's random currents would align themselves against dominance.

  Always the change struck without warning. Morriel gasped under the first onslaught. Pinched by a rising, twisted mesh of resistance cruel as the rake of barbed wire, she grappled. Any tapped access into the heart of the stone's focus forged a gateway into its centre; and like any portal kept guarded too long, the unquiet detritus imprinted by spent spells boiled up in charged effort to escape.

  Its hot, resentful force sieved through her sealed consciousness like a raking barrage of slivered glass. The stone's near-sentient presence probed for weakness, any flaw, any breach in her character, any bastion of self-awareness left untended. Should such opening exist, no matter how small, the pent malice of the Waystone would reach through and devour her alive. The wrong response, and she would be lost in a maelstrom of nightmare, wrought from the latent shame and guilt sown by her own past mistakes.

  Morriel stamped down the perilous instinct to flinch. She was mistress of her pain. Flesh, thought, and viscera, her body was thralled to her will. She cut through the stone's clamour of resurrected hatred, firmed against the warped cry of crystal enslaved. Her consciousness darted and thrust deeper into the web's meshes. To chain the flared spite of the Waystone's dark aspect was like using bare flesh to quench magma. Against a revulsion that raised the hair at her nape, into the rage of the jewel's matrix the Prime rammed the frigid counterspells of mastery. Hers was the sure knowledge of the primal seals to impose unconditional domination.

  As she shaped the runes and sigils in ritual configuration, she suffered the fragmented echoes of past uses to which the great amethyst had been turned: scryings of fire and smoke and bloody battle. In fleeting imprint, she smelled the putrescent reek of corpses scythed down by plague. She felt again the clean flood of healing spells raised to stem the tides of human pestilence, knew the scream of faulted earth pressed down and called to heel; the howl of tempests reined back from assault upon merchant fleets and settled shorelines. Bone and nerve thrummed to the echoes of past conflict and sweeter surcease. Morriel exalted to the might of compassion and humanity, pitted broadside against the unquiet force of nature's cruelties. For a heartbeat her inner sight was battered under the white lick of deluge and chaos.

  Struck deaf and blind to the world beyond the tower, she fought and closed the last seal.

  The scream as trained will collided with elemental bare force slammed a cry through every synapse in her mind. Momentary agony thrummed in recoil through the marrow of her bones, flicked each nerve down to her fingertips.

  Then the threshold was past, the stone'
s focus subdued. The Prime was no longer tied to a weakened vessel of aged flesh, but freed to pluck the currents of the world's winds and demand them to bend in submission. She was the thought to crack the heart of wild stone, the sand grain to drink the sea to dust. Sun and moon and stars were her servants, to yield their silvered secrets on demand.

  In that moment of ascendancy, the crone's form glowed in scintillant outline, framed in the same violet light which kindled the depths of the Great Waystone. Alone, Morriel spun the mighty axis of its focus to delve into the shadowy future.

  She expected problems. The path to prime succession was fraught with snarls, each derived from flaws in a candidate's development. No aspirant could succeed, nor survive the last test without submitting to an exhaustive, ever-narrowing course of study to cleanse her character of imperfections.

  Lirenda's training was far from complete. Scrying clearly mapped those weaknesses yet to be conquered. Morriel tracked them, methodical: the small ambitions that blinded it. Tomorrow's imperfect handling of a dispute between two novices; then the annual placement of boy wards in craftshop apprenticeships evincing a stubborn prejudice still ingrained from an overly privileged childhood. Envy of the Fellowship's sure grasp of grand conjury would give rise to a critical inattention. And like a chained snag in knit, that moment yielded in turn to a faulty understanding of a minor sigil which, another day, would fail to halt an affliction that caused stillbirths.

  For each shortcoming, Morriel marked out the corresponding lesson to enforce the desired correction. She sounded the sureties to discern which seal spells to use to impose subtle influence to curb, then realign and hone the last rough edge from Lirenda's self-awareness.

  At the last the Prime reviewed the most glaring of all drawbacks, given into her attention as warning through a long past scrying at Forthmark. The pitfall most likely to spoil Lirenda's bid for primacy was her persistent, drawing fascination for the compassion which ruled Athera's last Prince of Rathain.