TWOLAS - 03 - Warhost Of Vastmark

by Janny Wurts

  'Some say so, your Grace,' the secretary whispered in diffidence.

  'Well, they must be made to see otherwise.' Lysaer surged to his feet, charged to magisterial vehemence. 'The name of no man who fought here shall be forgotten. No ally shall go unsung. The s'Brydion brothers will be ransomed by my treasury, and every survivor who leaves here shall go as my vested envoy. We who survive must spread word of the wiles and sorceries that led our best companions to ruin. Our cause is unfinished until this whole land has been raised against the Master of Shadow. When all cities stand against him, how can this Spinner of Darkness win aught but misery and failure? Our work must be diligent. Until every heart lies barred against his wiles, our enemy will have foothold to seed ruin.'

  The secretary bowed, sat, and opened his lap desk. Refigured by hope, the proud scion of s'Ilessid began his energetic dictation. The missive he sent, penned and sealed beneath his sigil, was signed, 'Lysaer, Prince of the Light.'

  When the captains were given orders to strike the royal tent, they were asked to see if Avenor's men could raise the spirit to sing through their task.

  'Become the example,' Lysaer exhorted, his stance unbowed, and his voice a ringing call of inspiration. 'If we show no despair, all others will take heart.'

  Between the collapse of the camp and the dismal, chill fall of night, the secretary spread his story of the letter written for his liege lord. His reverent account gained fresh impetus as Lysaer walked the common ranks, clad in shining gold and surrounded in a nimbus of summoned light. Where he passed, he left laughter behind him. The first, hopeful whispers of rumour began to spread. By the hour Avenor's staunch captains dispatched their sentries to stand guard at the war camp's perimeters, the password they used became the slogan, 'light over darkness'. Talk around the smoking, half-drenched embers of the firepits bandied a hopeful new title. Men found their warmth in a litany against cruel grief and despair. 'The Spinner of Darkness will one day come to fall before Lysaer, Prince of the Light.'

  Avenor's fair prince heard the murmurs. He caught the furtive, awed glances his servants bent his way when they thought his back was turned. In that moment, he realized that a greater truth could be built from the deaths at Dier Kenton. Shame and loss could be reforged into a shining beginning, as the men who looked up to him foresaw.

  The prince pledged then never to fail their brave belief. In fierce fervour, a beacon of hope against the ill-turned machinations of an enemy who had no claim to principle, Lysaer s'Ilessid rededicated his life. More than prince, greater than king, in a faith beyond mortal limits, he would labour all his days to become the example of a higher truth.

  Of all men, he alone held the gifts to lead, and to rid a helplessly pregnable land of exploitation born from misuse of sorcery.

  When the hour arrived, and the Master of Shadow was at last brought down, Lysaer resolved to leave something brighter, more enduring, than a history of war to reward the faith of his followers. Straight in his chair, his eyes alight as the concept took fire in his mind, he let a small smile turn his mouth.

  From defeat would come a monument of shining strength. His work would bequeath the five kingdoms a benefit beyond the cost of Arithon's death, and bestow upon Athera a structure of permanent protection to outlast all creeds and boundaries. For as long as men kept records and built cities, his name would be remembered for justice.

  Last Victory

  Mewed for several weeks in a shepherd's stone hut with no company except his two brothers, Keldmar s'Brydion at last gave in to boredom and agreed to shoot dice with Mearn. The breadth of his folly became apparent inside an hour when the grimy twist of paper that represented his best yearling colt was lost to a rocky round of luck.

  Gambling with Mearn was cutthroat business, an irrevocable, terrible mistake.

  Keldmar hooked a knuckle through his itchy growth of beard and hissed in glum fury at the hand-scratched symbols faced up at him, mocking, from the dice on the packed earthen floor. 'By Dharkaron's immortal arse, I swear you always cheat! No man born wins sixteen turns without losses!'

  Mearn showed his teeth in a cadaverous grin, linked his fingers above his head, and stretched until his knuckles popped. 'It's all in the flick of the wrist.'

  'Huh!' Keldmar grunted, still regarding his losing throw askance. 'The robbing way you toss?'

  'No.' Mearn twitched straight in miffed disdain, a black eye and the yellowing bruises on both cheekbones making him look more mournful than usual. 'The way I set my luck.'

  'What in Sithaer's fury is the difference?' Parrien grumbled from his posture of prostration upon the hut's sole amenity, a heap of pallets made of grass ticking. These were piled against the wind-driven draughts of high altitude and spread with aged sheepskins with half the fleeces rubbed off. On nights when the weather stilled, a man could lie awake and drive himself silly listening to the rustle of the nesting population of beetles in the straw. Vermin had spun webs in the rafters, too. Parrien had poured his corrosive impatience with captivity into knocking them down with shale pebbles, until one frigid night had seen them dead.

  Most days passed in fierce bickering, with Keldmar and Parrien as deadlocked rivals, and Mearn wont to take umbrage at everything. The tribesmen assigned to guard the hut proved thick-skinned as their sheep, too patient or too dull to rise to insult themselves. They only intervened with the brothers when their fracases threatened dismemberment.

  Extracting information on their captor's intentions, the brothers had found, was like trying to pierce armoured steel with a straw stalk. After three weeks of incarceration, deprived of their daggers, all three sported flamboyant beards like the duke's. Keldmar was cursing their dead mother's wisdom for giving his two siblings birth, and Mearn was strung to a quivering storm of nerves that threatened any moment to drive him to burrow tunnels through Vastmark shale with his teeth.

  Parrien, on the pallet, waited slit-eyed for another ripping fight. Always, his younger brother's glib insults set Keldmar into a rage. In idle, seething boredom, Parrien wondered if the archers outside would use arrows through the hole in the shutter again to stop Keldmar from bashing Mearn unconscious with his fists.

  But the slimmer of the pair of combatants only sprang erect with his head cocked askance. Perceptive as a weasel, Mearn fastened on something he heard outside the door. 'Listen,' he said, urgent, and fanned a splay-fingered gesture for his other two brothers to keep quiet.

  They all heard, then. On the slope outside, blustering curses through the milder lilt of a southern clansman's accents, rang the voice of their brother, the duke.

  Parrien shot upright and coughed through a whirlwind of shed fleece. 'Ath! They've got Bransian!'

  'Better hope not,' Keldmar rebutted, chin still outthrust like a bulldog's. 'He's all that's left to get us freed.'

  The outer bar on the door was shot back. Then the massive panel wrenched open, blocked at once by the bulk of the eldest brother s'Brydion.

  'What's happened?' cried Mearn. 'Are you prisoner? Have you been mistreated?'

  Reduced by the gloom to a shadowy presence, the Duke of Alestron finished his absorbed string of oaths and crossed the threshold.

  They had a hoarded stub of candle in one corner. Mearn, who was nearest, struck a spark to the wick, his blunt fingers sheltering the quiver of new flame against the tireless draw of the draughts. Wavering light played off Bransian's bristled, tawny beard, his pebble grey eyes, and the raffish, wild fringes of a shepherd's cloak thrown over what looked like a sling. Closer study revealed a linen bandage, stained from beneath by old blood from a gashed forearm.

  'What have they done!' demanded Parrien in a grating, low whisper.

  The duke sucked in a huge breath. Dulled light caught on the scored links of mail through the gaping rents in his surcoat as he announced with bemused interest, 'They've done nothing.' His beard twitched to reveal a flash of teeth. 'That's just it, I can't fault their judgement, though Ath knows, for our folly, I've been unforgiving as
the Fatemaster himself. We've been lied to. A tidy division of our mercenaries have been thrown away for a false cause and an idiotic misunderstanding.'

  'What! Are you mad?' Mearn knocked into the candle, snatched left-handed before it toppled, then stood, the flame whipped down to a sullen, red spark as he rose with the light in his fist.

  'I didn't suffer a head wound,' Bransian protested, stung. 'Brothers, we've been fighting this war on the wrong side.'

  'You have been addled!' Parrien coiled back onto the pallet, his hot gaze fixed on his kinsman, while Keldmar, his arguments stilled to perplexity, stared openmouthed at his older brother.

  'Explain,' snapped Mearn, moving closer.

  'I say, we've been trying to kill the wrong man.' Before the fire thrust in his face torched his whiskers, Bransian snatched the candle away. 'Did you know Lysaer s'Ilessid is half-brother to Arithon s'Ffalenn?'

  Mearn started.

  Keldmar's square face showed interest. 'Who says?'

  'Erlien's clansmen told me.' Bransian tipped the wick above the nearest stone windowsill, dribbled off melted wax, then fixed the shaft upright in the puddle. 'Others from Rathain knew a good deal more besides.' He waited for hot liquid to congeal.

  In silence as the tormented flame steadied, the incarcerated brothers noticed the telling fact that their sibling still possessed all his weapons. They exchanged a long glance, while Mearn rounded back, eyes mean as a ferret's, and furious. 'Why aren't we fighting our way out of here?'

  'I gave my word,' Duke Bransian admitted. The candle had stuck upright. Undershot in gilt light, he threw off his coif and let the mail fall discarded to the floor. Then he rubbed the stiff fingers of his uninjured hand over a graze on his temple and glared at the fish-eyed suspicion of his brothers. 'You aren't listening. I've said outright. We've got reason to rethink our position.'

  'You'd forgive the blast in our armoury?' cried Mearn.

  'Forget our total rout at Dier Kenton?' echoed Keldmar, while Parrien, out of character, set his chin on his fist and looked thoughtful.

  'I don't for a second discount what's been done,' Bransian said. 'But this is a high prince sanctioned for inheritance we're speaking of! Our formal protest through the Kingdom of Melhalla's appointed regent was given over to Shand. By the laws of the realm's charters, justice was served when Lord Erlien fought the Teir's'Ffalenn at swords for our honour. Arithon bested him. The fight was a fair one. The caithdein of Shand has pardoned the grievance, satisfied.'

  Not one of three younger brothers looked reconciled. Understanding their perplexity, Bransian poked about for a stool or a chair. When he found none in evidence, he folded his giant's frame and perched on a corner of the pallet. 'Just hear this through,' he insisted. 'Lysaer ran a trumped-up campaign to finagle us into alliance.' Then he talked, while the candle burned down and grew hunchbacked in its dribbled spills of wax.

  The bloody encounter at Tal Quorin was recast to fit a less lofty pattern. By Bransian's retelling, the clansmen of Strakewood had made no attempt to vindicate the ugly details. Nor did they grant the violence born of Desh-thiere's curse with anything less than cold truth.

  'Etarra marched first. The Master of Shadow used grand conjury in defence of his feal following. He has answered for his misdeeds in the north.' In fact, by clan account, Bransian had been given to understand Rathain's prince kept no tolerance at all for masking his acts behind false ideals and self-sacrifice.

  The flame fluttered out in a drowned reel of smoke by the time Duke Bransian summed up. 'We hated the man and desired to break him because he destroyed our best armoury.'

  'So why did he?' Somewhere in darkness, Mearn spun from his pacing, twitchy as a tempered rapier blade. 'We lost men there. Our keep became gutted by sorcery, and where was the Mistwraith's provocation for that?'

  'I say, we ask him,' rumbled Bransian, emphatic. 'What's a weapon or a thousand weapons, and seven of our guardsmen? Arithon's attack on us was forthright. Lysaer inveigled our trust, then enticed men from our banner into his personal service. He used all we gave to further a cause little better than a private vendetta.'

  'Well it can't be so easy, this wish you have to parley,' Parrien broke in, doleful for the time the war had kept him from the bed of his pretty new wife. 'We've been here three weeks and never once seen this slinking royal sorcerer show his face.'

  'We will.' Bransian sounded most certain. 'His Grace will come by in the morning.' Then, as he realized the significance of what Parrien had just said, he slapped his knee with one hand and chuckled outright. 'You've been mewed up in this place for all that time? And you haven't smashed one another's skulls? Dharkaron's living bollocks, I believe I've just witnessed a true miracle!

  * * *'

  Warned by a frost-sharp tension among the clansmen standing guard on the hut, Mearn broke off his pantherish pacing and poised himself behind the door lintel. Bransian set down his crust of biscuit untasted, and Keldmar kicked Parrien awake.

  Then the panel swung open, and a neat, small-knit man stepped through. Keldmar took a guess at the number of throwing knives that might be concealed beneath the caped wool of his shepherd's cloak, and decided against trying to rush him. No strait of confinement could make him forget the quick reflexes of the spy who had demolished Alestron's armoury.

  Bound by no such reservation, Mearn sprang, seized the right arm of the prince who stepped in, and bared palm and wrist to the daylight.

  Half-blind in transition from dawn to the peat smoke dimness of the hut, Arithon offered no resistance. While the disfiguring welt left by the light bolt that had delivered Desh-thiere's curse suffered Mearn's devouring scrutiny, he said in slightly strained greeting, 'A sensational birthmark, I agree, but there could be a more polite way of admiring it.'

  Mearn released the royal wrist as if stung. 'That's no birthmark.'

  Arithon twitched down his cuff, reached under his leathers, and produced a brace of fresh candles. Silent, thoughtful, he proceeded to light them in succession, while the brothers s'Brydion regarded the sorcerer who had fired their keep three years before. Seen under flame glow, removed from the harried press of action, the face beneath its ink-dark hair retained an unforgettable severity. More tired, perhaps, more drawn from wear and strain, the features held the reticence of cut glass. Plain shepherd's dress masked a highly bred frame that lent a deceptive impression of fragility to what was actually tough and murderously agile: the brothers s'Brydion had excellent cause to remember.

  'What moves you to keep us trapped here like flies?' Menace edged Mearn's accusation. 'We already know you're practised at skulking. If you took this long to raise the courage to face us, how long will you take to arrange our release?'

  Arithon wedged the last candle beside the wreckage of Bransian's breakfast, then stepped back to assume an unruffled stance by one wall. Without thought for insult, he said, 'First, I need your advice to curb your lordship's strayed guard of lancers.'

  Taken aback, Mearn maintained silence, but the duke blew crumbs from his beard, stabbed his dagger in the earthen floor, and peered up in bearish irritation. 'What's the problem?'

  Arithon met the huge man's agitation with a shrug. 'It's scarcely urgent. But since my war captain managed your capture, they've been picking the very mountains apart. The herdsmen are tired of stampeding their flocks clear, and my clan scouts are getting out of sorts running fools beneath the Wheel who persist long beyond the point of folly.'

  'Why shouldn't our lancers fight you?' Parrien demanded. 'Prince Lysaer's got a warhost here to back them.'

  'I forgot,' Arithon admonished. 'You're behind on the news. Erlien's clansmen weren't fooled for a second, once your duke pulled Alestron's support from the supply lines. Rather than starve, Lysaer's captains have been forced to withdraw. If you want any crofters left to tend your barley next season, we'll need to pack your lancers off home. They're scouring the hills with determined thoughts of your rescue, but of course, until the last allied divisions have l
eft Vastmark, the tribesfolk can't afford to see you freed.'

  Unshaken from the subject, Mearn glared at the impassive face of the s'Ffalenn prince poised before him. 'Our men-at-arms never farm.'

  Arithon showed bland surprise. 'Well, since Lysaer has appropriated your best band of mercenaries, you're going to need to restore your city's field troop from somewhere. You can either train lancers who spin, sew, and wear skirts, or else you'll have to settle for mustering up recruits among your farmhands.'

  Mearn snarled an obscenity.

  Parrien broke into bull-chested laughter. 'Fiends! You've got a brass tongue, for a mountebank. I admit it's refreshing after Keldmar swooned like a dupe over Prince Lysaer's pious mouthings at Etarra.'

  While his rival shoved off fleeces to defend this rank insult, Parrien flushed to blustering purple. 'Well, you admit we never fought for the mealy-mouthed scruples. It's been feud for our armoury all along.'

  Before abrasive slanging could compound into fisticuffs, Arithon stepped in between. 'I came to discuss terms for your ransom,' he cut through in his masterbard's diction.

  'Ransom!' Now Bransian uncoiled from the floor and spat. 'You're still an enemy, but Alestron no longer serves Lysaer. The sooner that's noised abroad, the better.'

  Arithon raised expressive, dark eyebrows. 'Who spoke of service?' From under his cloak, he drew out a parchment tied with official layers of ribbons and crusted by a weight of royal seals. He slapped the document into the duke's calloused grasp with the insouciant comment, 'I merely thought Alestron's coffers deserved compensation for the losses imposed for misplaced causes. How much can we wring from Avenor's lord treasurer to have you back hale and whole?'

  'Dharkaron!' yelled Keldmar. 'You'd give us the gold?'

  While Mearn snatched the document from the duke's fist to read, Arithon grinned at the stupefied faces of the older brothers s'Brydion. 'I thought to keep half, for my troubles. But yes. If you've decided to withdraw your support from the invasion here in Vastmark, do everyone the favour of calling your stray lancers back to heel.'