by Janny Wurts
‘Forgive me,’ Jieret whispered, for eight years in the past, on Tal Quorin’s greening banks, the decision had been no whit different. ‘Don’t hold me to blame in my fear for you.’
‘Wasted effort.’ Above the laboured creak of ship’s timbers, Arithon’s voice sounded easy. ‘Save your pity instead for the captains lured here in the misled belief they were threatened.’
One moment the city of Werpoint rested in stilled peace, the anchorage thatched with masts and hazed soft gold by daybreak. Menace seemed absent; unreal. No inhabitant expected the Shadow Master’s presence. Unremarked, he gave no bodily sign in warning, no showman’s flourish designed to awe or terrify his audience. Arithon s’Ffalenn simply poised with a dancer’s concentration and spun the shadow he had ruled since his birth.
The snare he designed was for Werpoint.
A giant black leopard bounded over the rim of the southern horizon. The apparition swelled to monstrous proportion, then snarled in a silent, silhouetted show of fangs and swallowed the risen disc of the sun. For an instant, two diminished slits of sky glared through its eyes; then it blinked.
Darkness clapped down, soundless, complete, unnatural as if the air compressed to felt.
No star burned, no light. Werpoint’s broad headland seemed snuffed from existence, its harbour and ships swallowed up as completely as if Daelion Fatemaster had gone berserk and unravelled the thread of creation. Banished into fell darkness, a city in its entirety lay erased.
Terror undid the brig’s captain. He screamed in muffled panic behind his gag. Across the water, unseen through that featureless dark, the fog bells of Werpoint pealed the alarm. Trumpets shrilled on the anchored galleys, their clarion distress borne downwind.
Low and urgent, Jieret spoke through the clamour. ‘My liege, at least leave the flame in the lantern. I can’t guard your reason if I’m unable to see.’
Arithon perhaps failed to hear him; or else words themselves became meaningless noise as he braced in the dark for a retaliation now beyond any power to revoke.
The bang of a thunderclap ripped the sky into light. From Werpoint, in strong defence, Lysaer s’Ilessid hurled his gift full-force into counter thrust against his sworn enemy. Bolts split the darkness like craze lines dashed through obsidian.
In a wilful, cold-blooded dance with disaster, Arithon of Rathain had wakened the curse of the Mistwraith. The need bloomed and burned, to hammer force against force, until one or both of them lay dead.
People, causes, Werpoint’s naked vulnerability the next instant came to mean nothing. His body limned in actinic bursts of glare, Arithon surged toward the stem window. His lips peeled back from bared teeth in a mask that abjured his claim to humanity. Empowered but weaponless, he sought to raise his hands. The bonds on his wrists caught him short. The jerk he tried to free them doubled his frame and an animal snarl rasped his throat.
Worried, perhaps, that the force of his fury might come to dislocate his joints, Jieret clenched his sovereign’s elbow and dealt him a violent shake. ‘Arithon! For your very life, don’t give in to this now.’
The Master of Shadow gave a scraped cry that violated mercy to witness. The fury that knotted his limbs let go. He staggered and all but fell.
Jieret caught him, while the veil of shadows that prisoned the daylight flared and flickered, weakened under Lysaer’s strike from Werpoint.
Steady as tide, Jieret murmured while the man in his hands hissed in a shuddering breath. ‘Easy, my liege. Easy. The effect of the curse can be tempered. If I didn’t believe it, I’d never have let you attempt this.’
The sounds of wind and waves acting on hull and canvas marked time amid flickering hell. Then Arithon s’Ffalenn seemed to master himself. ‘I can bide,’ he said. In the edged blue flare of Lysaer’s lightnings he looked bloodless and drawn, flesh racked to bone by sourceless agony.
A heartbeat’s hesitation, and Jieret s’Valerient released him.
Arithon turned back toward the stern window. Now, the work of the brig in the channel swell jostled his stance as he recovered his footing and gazed outward. His screen of darkness showed moth-eaten gaps, where knives of fierce light had torn through. Softly as rainfall, determined as flint, he took patent charge of his handiwork.
Timed on the next flare of sheet light that rocketed from Werpoint’s battlements, he played with the tattered edges of his veil and let its stressed fabric dissolve. To an onlooker’s eye, the shadow cloak over Minderl Bay seemed to falter, then fray, then sear off like a flame-scalded web. Sunlight and Lysaer’s blaze in riposte sheared a swathe of glare across the waves.
The respite proved false: for across the cleared waters to the south loomed the tanbark sails of an inbound fleet of black ships. They were brigantine rigged. Over hulls lean-lined as greyhounds, the bellied swell of headsail and spanker cupped the gusts and trampled up spray. The yards were squared to the wind. Running a relentless, downwind course, the fleet sheared in formation toward Werpoint. As a scythe set to raze through a stand of ripe grain, they spelled doom for the vessels packed at anchorage.
The bugle calk from the galleys shrilled in treble urgency. Captains screamed desperate orders and frightened crews rousted from their berths. Lines were cast off, or cut, and moorings splashed free. The chattering plink of a capstan’s pawls carried in strings on the gusts.
In Werpoint the alarm bells pealed out their call to arms; the war camps seethed black, distressed as kicked. ant-hills with the distanced forms of running men. From his unseen vantage on the wall walks, Lysaer s’Ilessid would recognize the oncoming fleet. He would see in their lines and the trim of red sails a memory resurfaced from childhood: brigantines fashioned by the hand of s’Ffalenn, built in the shipyards at Merior at sorcerous speed, and now, attacking for pillage and piracy.
Provoked as a cold point of strategy, his rage would burst all bounds.
The light bolt he launched in defence of his own slashed the dawn like a scimitar. Air shrieked. The sky flashed blinding white, then rebounded into fumes and smoke, lit to churned orange by a firestorm of raw, ignited power. The holocaust scalded across wave crests rent to steam, until the bay seemed a cauldron brewed by demons.
‘Now,’ urged Jieret Red-beard. ‘Now!’
Against the stem window, a silhouette etched into what seemed the infernos of Sithaer, Arithon quivered like a string cranked taut and then plucked, a quarter note shy of its breaking point. Perspiration gilded ribbons down his temples and jaw, and his soaked collar clung to sinews like taut cable. He seemed a man racked, or a victim tormented by a course of untenable stress.
On the berth, forgotten, the brig captain heard him snatch in a short, sobbed breath. A snarling tic twitched his cheek. He controlled it. The hands behind his back dripped clammy sweat, each finger clenched until his short-cut nails stabbed a rash of red crescents in his palms. In a brutal, contained courage, despite nerves peeled raw by the scourge of Desh-thiere’s curse, Arithon kept grip on his reason. He danced his shadows like cats-paws across the water, by turns masking his oncoming ships. In and out of the light, through glare that waxed and fled before countering darkness, his brigantines came and went like smoke. They sailed substanceless, ghostly, all the more threatening for the fact they seemed an apparition.
A clap and a boom volleyed over Werpoint. Against the massed fleet and his sworn mortal enemy, Lysaer retorted in pure light. The sky above the battlements split with the blast. Arithon’s teasing play of shadows became snuffed in one towering burst of raw force.
The bolt jagged on and struck the bay, a hammer on at anvil of waves. The inrunning fleet of brigantines exploded into crackling fire. The throaty report slammed a shock through the wind as timbers, canvas, sails and spars ignited, touched off like a torch to inferno.
Struck by the backlash of that virulent, unbridled violence, Arithon lost his last, harried hold on self-awareness. Before Jieret could react, he screamed primal rage and rammed the mullioned casement with his shoulder
. The panes shrilled and burst to flying fragments. Then the hands in restraint drove him mad. Arithon twisted like an eel, eyes wide open and wild. Glass slivers stabbed through his shirt linen and reddened his clansman’s clenched fingers.
Jieret swore, shifted grip, and gasped in retching pain from a hit to the belly. ‘No you won’t,’ he ground past a stopped bitch of breath.
Arithon thrashed free in a reeling charge that carried him toward the companionway.
Jieret rammed after in pursuit. ‘Show your face outside and you know what will happen. By your very orders, that criminal of a mate will slit your throat and claim this brig as his prize.’
The Master of Shadow flung back a mocking laugh not a man of his friends would have recognized. ‘Not if I freeze the living flesh off his bones with bindings wrought out of shadow.’
‘Dharkaron’s vengeance on your twisted bargains,’ Jieret swore. He crashed past the table and tackled his prince from behind.
From the vantage of the berth where the captain lay bound, the progression of the fight seemed unnatural. A man so much slighter should never be able to wrestle with success, hampered as he was by bound hands. The disparity in weight by itself should have forced a surrender. Paired in an insane violence, clansman and prince rolled and battered across the deck, then struggled, still locked, to their feet.
‘Arithon! My liege!’ Jieret’s cry wrung off as a kick staggered him into the gimballed lantern. Shadows flared and jumped to the swing of tipped flame. Arithon thrashed in possessed fury. Backward and forward he raged, Jieret’s efforts to contain him marked in flittering lamplight, each curse cut to grunts by the quick, starved breaths of exertion.
Jieret clamped both arms around his prince but failed again to pin him down; as well stay magma with silk thread.
A booted heel spiked his instep and rocked him backward. Fast reflex spared him a bitten wrist. In a blistering show of heart, he kept both fists clamped in rucked shirt. Bloodied from the glass, he resisted with the tenacity of a fiend through the punishment, while the pandemonium set loose against the city of Werpoint raged on unheeded outside.
Across a bay serried in restless waves, the snarled, dark tints of spent shadows stained the air, sliced through by light and fanned flame. For the fleet of fired brigantines bore downwind still, chivvied onward by the gusts into a spark-torn, twisted chain of wreckage. Every hapless, trapped captain in Werpoint’s harbour saw them come as they screamed frantic orders to crewmen half-stupid with terror. The brigantines now were unmanned, a mindless, deadly, threat against the galleys and merchant brigs striving to pull up anchor and make way. Shouts and horn blasts entangled on the gusts, overwhelmed at ragged intervals by booming blasts of light as Lysaer sought to rout his enemy’s unnatural cloak of darkness. Sails cracked out, loosed from their gaskets by sailors whipped aloft to act by main fear and urgency.
Through the dross of patched dark, through rank bad judgement and confusion as hull ground into hull, the imprisoned captain on the Savrid deciphered a shattering truth: the straggle of fired hulls had lost their clean lines. The raked masts and spars glazed in outline by fire no longer wore the shapes of the brigantines Lysaer had spent his powers to destroy.
No fleet of deadly warcraft out of Merior, this ragtag chain of hulls: the hostile vessels which closed upon Werpoint were unarmed old hulks, a derelict gaggle of fishing boats and rafts, packed with dried fir boughs and floss, which exploded in fanned sparks and flurried in the breeze, to touch alight whatever lay before them. The illusion of shadows that once masked their shapes had winnowed away to reveal the cunning trap beneath.
Anguished witness to the fate of the east-shore trade fleet, the brig’s captain wept in beaten grief. A hand’s reach away, or one thrust of a knife, the enemy responsible had his back turned. Still locked hand to hand with his clansman ally, the sorcerer showed no care for the ruin his ploy swept through Werpoint’s harbour. His deranged fit raged on unabating. While the stem cabin’s furnishings were trampled over, upset, or smashed wholesale, the brig’s captain hoped with a vindictive turn of spite that the combatants would pummel themselves to mortal injury.
Even bound, Arithon used his head, his knees, and his feet to bruise and strike. Jieret Red-beard vented pain in choked oaths. The only grip his prince could not break was the hand he held latched in black hair, and that insufficient to stay him. The clansman came aware in clear dread that Arithon manoeuvred toward the uncanny blade still left unsheathed on the chart table.
‘Ah no, my prince. Never that.’ Jieret at last resorted to blows in return. His merciless fist bashed his liege lord in the jaw. While his adversary reeled, half-stunned, he snatched up the black sword himself.
The evil in Desh-thiere’s curse roused the Paravian guardspells ingrained since its forging to defend in the cause of just conflict. Steel clove through air with a terrible, belltone keen of overlaid harmonics. Silvered runes set into its smoky length lit and blazed, sheened like mercury transformed to white light.
‘Arithon, hear me!’ Jieret screamed.
His anguished appeal went unheeded. Tortured by pity, all but unmanned, he grasped the quickened blade and in a tight, controlled cut, slashed his sovereign’s exposed shoulder.
Contact wrung a cry from the man and the elements. A flare of white sheeted through the cabin. Nothing like any weaving of Lysaer’s, the clean blast of brilliance came twined with a peal of struck sound. The resonance climbed in unbearable sweetness. Its harmony unstrung the mind. The passions of hatred and sorrow alike were dashed out in a celebration of life that made of all strife a desecration.
Smote by a longing that ached through his bones, the brig captain groaned for the sorrows of the world. Fired to unalloyed grief, stripped in a heartbeat to the dross and clay that cased the naked sum of his mortality, he heard Arithon s’Ffalenn cry aloud as if his heart had been torn from his body.
Still screaming, the Shadow Master folded to his knees. Blood streaked from the gash traced in flesh by Jieret’s cut. The enchanted scald of light nicked over the white bone, laid bare beneath his slashed shirt. A marring edge of scarlet flowed down the black blade, then sublimated away in the heatless burn of magics laced through immutable metal.
Jieret stood frozen. Unaware of his sticky hand on the grip, or the grazed pain of his knuckles, he shook with running tremors and wept unabashed, tear for tear in shared anguish with his prince.
‘Ath,’ Arithon moaned, crumpled finally to lean in sobbing weakness against his liegeman. He hid his face. ‘Spare me. I beg you. Desh-thiere’s works are too strong, too much for any born man to fight sanely.’
Earl Jieret showed him no quarter. ‘You have no choice. Stand up!’ He raised the sword, the singing flare of spellcraft now diminished to a fast-fading whisper.
Even the memory of its sustained chord made Arithon’s voice grate like gravel. ‘Had my hands been free, you know very well I’d have killed you.’
‘But they weren’t,’ Jieret said, unequivocal. ‘You made most sure that wouldn’t happen.’ As his sovereign still shrank in avoidance, he added, ‘Shame on you, for cowardice! Did you think you suffer anything I don’t feel also?’
Already pale, Arithon went colourless to the lips. He tipped up his head. ‘The bloodpact. Ath’s mercy, you feel this?’
‘My liege,’ Jieret begged, appalled too late for the inadvertent cost of his admission. ‘Don’t spurn my part. You charged me to safeguard your integrity. Whatever you say now, as caithdein, I am bound. I shall hold you to the letter of that promise.’
‘You feel this?’ Arithon repeated, his tone skinned into shrill horror.
Merciless, Jieret cut him off. ‘That can’t be permitted to matter! No one alive can shoulder the burden you carry. You have a job to finish, or blameless people here and in Shand will start dying.’ Brutal by necessity, he seized his prince’s forearm, hurled him upright and around to face the stem window. When Arithon recoiled and tried to flinch aside, Jieret wrestled him
immobile in a shackling grip that spared nothing.
Pinned still and gasping, Arithon had no choice but to behold the unalloyed impact of his handiwork.
The conflagration touched off by Lysaer’s defence still raged in coruscating flares of torched sails. Sparks and flying debris flew windborne. Passed from vessel to vessel in Werpoint’s jammed harbour, the fire was having its fell feast.
‘So end what you’ve started,’ snarled Jieret, ‘and bedamned to your whining.’ Then he touched the dire sword like Dharkaron’s black Spear against his sovereign’s quivering nape.
Wrung, wretched, dragged back from the precipice by Jieret’s edged scorn and the lacerating beauty of the wardspell instilled within his weapon, Arithon s’Ffalenn bent his head. He drew a breath. His bound hands flexed and tightened. Shamed to reclaim the scattered threads of his design, he raised his chin at last, and measured what remained to press advantage from the destruction his ruse had created.
Turmoil reigned in Werpoint harbour. In the crush of frenzied flight and confusion, vessel collided with vessel. Bowsprits rammed broadside into galleys mired in anchor chains; luggers swept downwind and battered into ships struggling with sails caught aback as crews hauled to check their yards and claw free of the eye of the wind.
To rack and utter ruin, Arithon added shadow spun to a fiendish edge of subtlety. He dimmed the shores of Crescent Isle to make the shoals appear more distant. He cast masking flares of darkness in the eyes of harried helmsmen through critical moments of judgement. Those few vessels brought safely underway were lured astray from the channel. Some lurched aground, to be struck in a scream of broken timbers by following ships unable to veer off. Other captains tacked in misled timing and found themselves against a lee shore, or else turned about, once again in the path of the ruinous maelstrom that stewed in Werpoint’s harbour.
The fire, wind-driven, showed mercy to none.
Where Lysaer’s opposing talents were hampered by the need to spare allies, Arithon stiffened shadow at will. Even without access to the wellspring of his mage talent, training lent advantage and finesse. He could play his gift to gossamer illusion, or snap wave crests to ice in a swift, freezing absence of light. Where the fleet fled the fire, he used cold as a weapon, to jam sails, and ice rudders in their pintles. Many a stricken quartermaster fought to clear his fouled steering, while the smaller slower luggers in their path were overtaken and mulched to wreckage beneath the trampling bows of crippled ships.