Stormed Fortress

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ the glib culprit quipped.

  Yet Dakar’s stiff silence refused stabbing humour. He need not respond, since the changing tide waited for nobody. Already the winkling, first riffles curled into the sucking swirl of deep eddies. The returning vessel must strike out at once, or forfeit her margin of safety.

  The determined glint in Parrien’s eyes enlivened his shout to set the men under him moving. To hear him, his fleet would part forces, as planned, with four of the prize galleys sacrificed to lend the muscle to breast the rough current.

  The loading began, to the scrape of harnessed weapons on chainmail. Amid the scramble to launch the beached tenders, Glendien elbowed her way to the fore and splashed through the shallows. Her gadding positioned her at Dakar’s heels, as the surge of the launch plunged the leading craft through the breakers.

  ‘Don’t let Parrien fool you,’ she gasped, ducking spray as the keel smacked over a tumbling crest. ‘That’s one stubborn idiot set for a mutiny, if I’m any judge of bad character.’

  Dakar blew streaming water from his moustache. ‘If you say so, child.’

  Glendien hissed an oath, not about to be patronized. ‘Watch your back, bucko. The brute will cast back off, once we’re set on the dock.’

  ‘He can try.’ The Mad Prophet turned a cold shoulder and stowed his bulk on the rocking stern seat. Since sopped cuffs posed a misery, exposed to the wind, he tucked under his cloak like a storm-rumpled owl. ‘The night’s been hard enough. I’m going to sleep.’

  The boat bobbled, as more passengers scrambled aboard. The seamen who steadied the craft waded deeper. Their practised, hard shove, which sloshed up the bilge, caught Glendien by surprise. Forest-bred, and no sailor, she reacted in time. Escaped a raw soaking, but lost her objective: Dakar slouched, already loutishly snoring. No poking jab in the ribs disrupted his complacent nap.

  ‘Pack yer hopes in, lass!’ said the grinning, armed bear who threaded his oars amidships. ‘Fat lubber won’t move. Not for anyone’s joy, short of heaving him overboard.’

  Glendien scowled. ‘Lumpish male follies don’t impress me one whit.’ But in fact, she found herself stymied as neatly as Parrien. If the spellbinder had a contingency plan, no one would disclose the arrangement.

  The white-capped crossing proceeded, unpleasant, with the open boats doused at each stroke. No one was dry when the tenders snubbed under the flagship, tossing at anchor. While the huddled occupants clambered aboard, two hardy men remained at the oars and ran out the line to the pinnace brought across from the citadel. The smaller vessel would be taken in tow, salvaged on hope, since she must be cut loose if the surge in the channel set too much drag on the galley.

  While the boatswain cried orders to man the main benches, and the drum-beat called for a backwater stroke to slacken the cable and winch up the anchor, Dakar turned green and sought refuge below to conjure his promised protections. Glendien stayed in the lee of the foredeck. While the reduced fleet prepared to part company, she trained all her forest-bred instincts upon Parrien s’Brydion.

  The fellow was nearly as tall as his brother, built to the same bulk and imposing fitness. His square, scarred fists were as well versed at arms. The grey eyes were more restless, opaque as filed iron, and the soft tread, a hungry tiger’s. Where Bransian cropped his fair hair for a mail coif, this brother liked to fight helmless. His mink-brown braid was tied in the old style, with blunt chin and squared jaw kept clean-shaven. Against leathery tan, a mariner’s squint sharpened his ornery scowl, though the family retainers showed cheerful good grace towards his barbs, reviling their interference. The slight limp, and the stiffening bruises inflicted by Selidie’s ill-usage only showed when he believed no one was watching.

  Discomfort scarcely hampered his wits, since he caught Glendien staring. ‘I’m a married man, minx! Admire the view and get over it while the shrill terror’s not here for a scolding.’

  Laughter made staying annoyed with him difficult. Glendien bared her splendid white teeth. ‘Who says I’m interested, bravo?’

  ‘The tart look in your eyes, wench. More truthful than a woman’s tongue, any day. Learned that from the wife for survival.’ If the quip covered subterfuge, his player’s mask held. Parrien’s seamanship and his handling of men maintained an exemplary standard. When the strength of the ebb tore the heart from the rowers, he jumped down and claimed a place at the bench, then hauled the oar for two back-cracking shifts, shouting bawdy jokes for encouragement.

  The lone galley reeled onward. A snagged bone in the teeth of the vicious current, she cleaved up spray, side-slipped in her clawing effort to thread the tight channel. She battled past the creamed beach of the south point, nearly swept onto the shoaling rocks. There, the reeling pinnace was jettisoned. No one watched, as the current hurled the abandoned vessel aground in an explosion of spars. The rowers had no attention to spare, beyond driving their oars. The hissing, rushed waters wrenched their practised stroke ragged. The galley slewed, an unruly beast wreathed in spume as she breasted the mill-race between the outcrops at the sentinels’ towers.

  The change happened like the shift into dream, as the prow shot over the lowered chain and entered the anchorage. The beleaguered galley wallowed into flat water, her bilges awash, and her gasping men beaten dizzy.

  The last shift at the benches drove her, limping, through the ripple of calm waters, and brought her at last to the Sea Gate. Thrown ropes from ashore were secured to the bitts. Oars run in, the flag galley was warped to the dock.

  Her salt-crusted thwart scarcely hove alongside, when a mantled figure detached from the men cleating her fast to the bollards. A leap off the rail saw the arrival aboard, where the wind snatched back the hood of a silk-lined mantle. Streaming a banner of shining, dark hair, the slight person descended the companionway to the oar deck, side-stepped a crewman’s lecherous grab, and caught Parrien’s neck in an embrace.

  ‘You great oaf! Welcome home,’ said the woman, and fastened a lamprey’s kiss on his lips.

  The man went without air for a very long time. When he did raise his head, Glendien supposed by his curses that the wife’s presence posed a hellish nuisance.

  ‘You will disembark, now!’ he snapped, both fists working to peel himself from her locked arms. ‘Tiassa!’

  ‘Snorting ox! Muscle won’t win this. I won’t.’ Twined to him, the lady laughed in his teeth. To Glendien’s admiration, she met his challenge with taunts, as the galley’s rough company gathered to stare. ‘The harbour chain’s raised. Your brother’s left orders to keep you penned in. If you try defiance, that’s well and good, since I’m present and coming along.’

  ‘Over my carcass!’ Parrien roared.

  ‘Assuredly!’ Tiassa tossed back her loosened hair and smiled with honeyed indulgence. ‘A sensible somebody should ding your dense head with a ballast rock! Or else Prime Selidie nets you again with another pestiferous sigil.’

  While Glendien watched, the compromised husband swept his chattering wife into his arms. The deck crewmen cheered. Others slapped their knees, sniggering. Yet before outraged manhood contained her impertinence, or contrived to deposit her back on the wharf, a cold voice cut in from behind.

  ‘She stays with you, Parrien!’ The Fellowship spellbinder had come above deck, sick nausea notwithstanding. ‘On land or sea, and by her free will, Tiassa remains at your side. And before you ask, yes! I’ve held her permission to back that decision since yesterday.’

  ‘Ath above, your contingency!’ Glendien crowed, then looked on with salacious enjoyment: Dakar, upright and wobbling on rubbery legs, still managed an astonishing note of command before Parrien’s blistering fury.

  ‘Do you truly want Tiassa placed at grave risk? Outside of these walls, you cannot protect her! If the Koriani Prime turns on you again, as she will, your close ties to your wife will cause her to succumb. Your lady will share the disaster provoked by Selidie’s unclean little binding.’

  ‘Don’t
think I’ll forget this!’ Parrien threatened.

  ‘Swine! Put me down.’ Tiassa punched her mate in the shoulder until he caved in and released her. ‘Look at yourself, idiot. You reek like the slaughter-house. Plan your dastard’s revenge as you like. But for those of us liking our company civilized, spare us the horror and bathe yourself first!’

  Parrien s’Brydion glanced at his hands. Then noted the vile stains on his harness: the blood and spattered brains and dried filth left after his vicious night’s action. The unpleasant stench hit him: clothing and mail and crusted weapons, his person was wholly befouled. He could not account for the number of his slaughtered victims: persons he did not recall striking down, not in forthright battle, or anything near his right mind.

  ‘Ath’s own mercy!’ he gasped, overcome.

  Aware that he folded to heave up his guts, Tiassa grabbed hold of his elbow. Her yell summoned Vhandon’s by-standing sergeant. ‘Help get him away!’ To her reeling husband, she said gently, ‘Just let’s take you home.’

  The crisis was broken. Once Parrien s’Brydion was dispatched ashore, the wearied crew secured the war galley. Her hatches were battened and her sea-going gear stowed without further protest. Yet when Glendien turned to congratulate Dakar on his wily strategy, she discovered the spellbinder gone.

  Only one clever man who bent, tying fenders, seemed aware of that quiet departure. ‘Fellow’s gone up to Watch Keep, at speed. Said that Prince Arithon’s faltering, and soon to come out of the uncanny trance that sustains the Paravian sword.’

  The astonishing word was signalled from the shore beacons: that the duty watch had sighted a gathering panoply surrounding Lysaer’s state galley. The glittering vessel had an assembled, armed escort, with every sign the flotilla intended to cast off and sail on the ebb still running apace down the estuary. The avatar’s boarding could not be mistaken, acclaimed as he was by a fanfare of drums and the flourish of trumpets that echoed across open water.

  For whatever reason, Lysaer s’Ilessid looked to be leaving his rabid campaign. Excitement stormed through the citadel’s streets. Set against the triumph of Parrien’s secure recovery, high feelings blazed up, incandescent.

  As the garrison upholding Alestron’s defence gave vent to explosive relief, men on guard at the walls yelled and hurled snowballs, laughing like boys. Women wept over their laundry tubs. A crew digging out drifts to clear the choked thoroughfare danced to the mad scrape of a fiddle played through a tavern window. Speculation chased rumour: without the horrific threat posed by Lysaer’s elemental light, Bransian’s troops could thrash human numbers. Rampant fears shrank, the burden of dread returned to known ground, and commonplace weapons of steel. Hope resurfaced, unquenchable, that the killing siege might be repulsed, and s’Brydion sovereignty salvaged, unbroken.

  Dakar caught wind of the momentous change as he puffed on his way towards the promontory. His effort to flag down a dray, bound uptown, nearly saw him run down by the whooping driver.

  ‘Damn all sour luck for the tits of a hag!’ Tripped onto his arse from his narrow escape, the spellbinder slapped ice from his boot cuffs and righted himself. Mage-wise, he found no cause for rambunctious joy: this manic celebration over Lysaer’s retreat was desperately premature. Urgency drove him. He must reach Watch Keep and raise Arithon’s awareness ahead of the Sunwheel flagship’s departure.

  ‘Drunk made things easier!’ he groused, wheezing onwards over iced cobbles. He hugged the verge, while the duke’s feisty officers thundered on by, mounted on horses with steel caulks to manage slick footing. When the next clattered up alongside, Dakar whirled about and accosted him. ‘Ravening lunatic! Have you people nothing worthwhile to do beyond trouncing exhausted pedestrians?’

  ‘You don’t want a ride up to the heights?’ Talvish extended a powerful, gloved hand with a second mount on a lead rein. While the upstaged Mad Prophet clambered astride, the blond captain added, concerned, ‘Can you hurry? Elaira says we’ve got trouble.’

  ‘She was much too polite!’ Dakar jabbed in his heels, clinging through the buck as the goaded horse galloped. Unashamed, that they were the high-handed riders now scattering hapless foot traffic, the spellbinder shouted as Talvish spurred alongside. ‘The channelled effect of Alithiel’s peace has a limited range of influence! If Lysaer’s recovered his natural awareness enough to stand off Desh-thiere’s geas, he’s not healed. The sword’s influence on him will fade, with distance. Brace up for the back-lash! His cleared reason will snap before his ship clears the estuary!’

  The breathless warning paused, through the swerve, as the horses plunged abreast through a postern. They broke past and pounded up the switched-back lane fronted with fieldstone houses, as Talvish captured the gist. ‘The s’Ilessid will fall prey to the curse off Adruin? He’ll have half an armed war fleet under his hand! Then you’re fretting over the fate of the escaping refugees fleeing the war front?’

  Deserted soldiers and clansfolk still would be bogged down in disordered retreat: easy prey for a battle flotilla manned for aggressive speed and hard action.

  Dakar hauled on the reins. While his scrambling mount leaped over a hand-cart, and the elderly man hauling buckets shrilled insults, he gasped, ‘Lysaer will turn and slaughter those people outright! A tragic mistake. Better such fury should fall on us here, than destroy every life that Prince Arithon’s risked untold peril trying to salvage.’

  Atop Watch Keep, the Paravian sword was still blazing. A scintillant halo of rainbows shimmered against the noon brilliance of day. Arithon’s erect stance had never changed, a miracle no less than terrifying. The more so, given the naked necessity of disrupting a channelled trance deeper than human knowledge. If the Sorcerers might have tracked his experience, none appeared for a consultation.

  Which short-fall Fionn Areth was swift to berate from his perch, obstructing the turnpike stair. ‘Well, what use if all that vaunted wisdom leaves us stewed in the heat of the crisis?’

  Kyrialt never paused, fingers flying as he stripped off his knives and unbuckled his sword-belt. Intent on the venture to break Arithon’s conjury, he minded the skittering edge of tuned instinct that warned him against bearing arms. ‘The Fellowship of Seven don’t plonk on their arses, doing nothing but spout off blind judgements.’

  While the grass-lander flushed, the clansman’s keen scrutiny measured the Koriani enchantress. ‘You don’t like this, lady.’

  ‘Am I transparent?’ Elaira tugged the hair she had freshly rebraided clear of her damp mantle and chafed the hands tucked back into cold gloves. Although she had slept since her brutal sea-crossing, clothes had not dried in the droughty keep. ‘I don’t like meddling outside of my depth. Who has ever experienced a living Paravian?’

  ‘I have.’

  Kyrialt whirled towards the entry, blasted by the breeze let in by the Mad Prophet’s return.

  ‘I was a child,’ Dakar qualified, fumbling to reset the latch. ‘Dragging at Asandir’s heels, and too young to fathom the commitment required of an apprenticeship. Awe can’t begin to describe the experience. I feel that way, now.’ Breathless and red from his break-neck ride, he faced the prospect ahead with shuddering trepidation. ‘Ready to faint clean away to escape. I was told, afterwards, that I stayed comatose for three days.’

  ‘You don’t have that option,’ Kyrialt declared. The sheared glance that followed speedily shifted Fionn Areth’s recalcitrant presence.

  ‘I don’t have sense!’ Dakar stated in acid correction. ‘Be certain you wish to risk yourself, Kyrialt. We are likely confronting the spun coil of fate, at the risk of ecstatic insanity.’

  But the clansman already led off up the stair, accompanied by Elaira. Dakar shuffled after them. Fresh sores on his knees made him wince. Haste in a saddle had never agreed with him. Talvish, outside, tended to the hot horses, while he, still the floundering, unstable seer, was left holding the almighty stick: a Fellowship charge to safeguard an intemperate prince, blood offshoot of three radical line
ages endowed with explosive, rogue talent. Beyond dry-mouthed terror, he settled for grumbling. ‘If I’d been Sethvir, depend on the certainty! I’d have left young Dari s’Ahelas unfit to breed fettlesome offspring.’

  ‘Won’t flourish by stalling,’ Kyrialt admonished, lost from sight up the ward-room ladder.

  ‘What can you hope to accomplish?’ snapped Dakar, huffing a lapsed distance behind.

  ‘Whatever will serve.’ Kyrialt stepped out onto the battlement, his dazzled sight masked behind a raised forearm. ‘If nothing else, I can offer my muscle if somebody needs to be carried.’ He steadied Elaira on the glaze ice, unruffled by the gust that billowed her mantle.

  Dakar emerged also, eyes scalded to tears. The beacon flare of the Paravian sword slapped flesh with near-flaying intensity. Beyond visible light, the fierce emanation knifed through skin and bone, ringing through shivering marrow. The rarefied sound defied hearing and ran tingling through the deep viscera.

  Kyrialt’s gallant courage lasted one step, before he crashed onto his knees. Elaira stayed upright, unabashedly crying, while Dakar reeled through a dizzy attempt to frame wardings. The shield failed. Alithiel’s resonance stripped away reason and muddled the most steadfast purpose. If Fionn Areth had ventured the stairwell, no one kept the resource to notice.

  The prince on his feet with the raised sword in hand seemed unreachable. Not poised on a catwalk ten paces away, under sky like an indigo canopy.

  Here, the soaring chord of grand conjury seemed to wheel the vaulting of heaven and earth. Breathing caught, whirled to melodic ecstasy, while the spirit exploded, deluged by fiery colour that burned with a hope beyond dreaming. Dakar stumbled, plunged to the wrists in chill snow. The sensation jolted his already shocked nerves. He realized, afraid, that he was played-out, too exhausted from his foray ashore to handle the requisite focus. If Kyrialt might freeze from exposure, or Elaira take harm for his failure, the urgency for saving action drained from him as so much meaningless noise.