The Ships of Merior

But before the Prince of the West unleashed his annihilating burst, a second flight of arrows sang down. The barbarian volley chipped stone in splintering explosion under the belly of his mount. The powerful horse shied back on bunched haunches. Forced to nurse the reins and jab in spurs to curb a rear which threatened to toss him over the ledge, his royal rider lost concentration. The light-bolts he shaped dispersed in flat sheets that threw off a harmless burn of heat.

Above the scrambling hatter of hooves, Lady Maenalle voiced her ultimatum. Don’t think to try killing with your powers, Lysaer s’Ilessid. Tell your men who draw steel to stand down. Or a next round will fly and take every life in your company.’

‘Isn’t that what you planned?’ Diegan shouted, his rage torn through strangling mortification. Fighting the horse that shied under him, he snatched a glimpse down the switch-back. The trailing wagon in the column had wrenched crooked, its ox-team folded at the knees, as cleanly arrow-shot as the horses. The prince’s brash cavalcade was hemmed in from both ends and trapped at the mercy of barbarians. In a cry that rebounded through the winds above the valleys, Diegan cried, ‘What are you, woman, but the pawn of the Shadow Master, after all?’

‘I am sworn only to Tysan,’ Maenalle said, her calm like snap-frozen ice. ‘As appointed steward of the realm, my duty upholds the crown’s justice until such day as the Fellowship sorcerers declare a lawful successor.’

Lord Diegan whipped his horse straight. ‘Where’s the equity in robbery and murder?’

‘Don’t resist and no lives will be taken.’ Maenalle tipped her chin at the elder, who dismounted and passed his reins to the boy. Still vigorous despite his weathered looks, he took charge, while scouts in dust-grazed leathers deployed in fierce order to plunder. Their lady commander ended in brevity that rang like a sentence after trial: ‘Only weapons will be confiscated, and those goods offered as bribes by town mayors. Be assured, any gold that might be used to outfit an army for persecution of clan settlements will be turned to a worthier cause.’

Blade clenched in hand, Diegan dug in his spurs. His horse belted sidewards in a crab-step, frustrated and dragged offstride by a rough-looking girl with scarred hands who had managed to dart in and snatch its bridle. She jerked her head for him to dismount, while someone else with painful force laid hands on his person to disarm him.

Try a dagger in my ribs, you’ll die with me,’ Diegan gasped, struggling.

Don’t be a fool, Lord Commander,’ the prince said in glass-edged urgency. ‘I need you alive!’

The commander at arms cast a smoking glare at Maenalle. Unable to speak as the muscles in his jaw spasmed taut, barely able to breathe for the blow to his pride, he swung from his saddle. The last, grinding irony hurt the most, that the horses and the mules could not be manoeuvred past either one of the disabled wagons. Even had he wished to risk engagement, his men at arms could not bolt over sheer cliffs to find cover. While scouts poured like rats from the ridge top and divested him of jewels and purse, he hurled back insults in sweating, savage bursts. They ripped off his cloak and took the beautiful, chased belt knife bought to match his confiscated sword. Down-trail, the venomous oaths of the mercenaries marked the loss of weapons well proven in battle. The more seasoned officers curbed combative tempers before excuse could be found for barbarian arrows to make bloody end to dissent.

Maenalle’s scouts were thorough, immune as wild goats to steep rocks and bad footing. At masterful speed, Lysaer’s disabled caravan and fighting company found itself weaponless and wagonless, then abandoned afoot in the rim walled gorges that led through the ford of the river Valendale. Bitterness replaced their purloined baggage. Although no man suffered harm, and Maenalle’s matchless discipline had prevented anything worse than wisecracks and whistles to befall Lady Talith, no one inclined toward forgiveness.

The wainloads of goods that had been cursed every league across Atainia now became cause for mortal affront.

Pacing at Lord Diegan’s side, his affianced lady astride the one mount that guest oath had held sacrosanct, Lysaer stayed withdrawn. In boots not fashioned for hiking, he blistered his feet with the rest on the wretched, frost-cracked stone. That he carried the only sword among two hundred seasoned fighting men seemed not to concern him unduly. While the shadows swallowed the cliff walls and the day eased to cobalt twilight, Diegan chafed at the silence. His worried glance at his prince was met and matched by a sidelong flicker of mirth.

In no mood for jokes, he spun with such force that a fir branch switched him in the cheek. ‘Fiends and Sithaer’s fury, your Grace, whatever are you thinking?’

‘You’ve got evergreen needles in your velvets,’ Lysaer observed. He broke into a shocking, sunny smile. ‘Do you miss your horse all that much?’

Avenor’s weaponless commander at arms stared, stupefied. His spurs jangled as he kicked at a moss-coated rock, then recouped sufficient dignity to glare at the prince to whom Etarra’s lord mayor had so high-handedly awarded his service. When Lysaer absorbed his pique in brazen merriment, he frowned. ‘Ath! I’ve seen you blast trees to charcoal at the merest flick of a thought.’

Lysaer said nothing.

Jabbed to suspicion, Diegan added, ‘You pulled your strike against those archers on the slope! You planned this whole thing, didn’t you?’

A dying thread of sunlight bloodied sparkles in gold hair as Lysaer gave back the barest shrug. ‘Not precisely.’ His levity vanished and his eyes went suddenly hooded. ‘You might say I expected things might happen as they have. If I tried for a happier outcome, the end result isn’t setback. No one can say, now, that Tysan’s clans weren’t fairly offered their chance to lay due claim to s’Ilessid loyalty.’

But the issue went deeper than that, Lord Diegan saw in awed respect. As the impoverished victim of a clan raid, Lysaer s’Ilessid had bought footing for condolence. Bound on to Erdane as a charity case, not even the city’s irascible mayor might question his need to raise troops. Far from feeling threatened by the muster, his guilds would be moved to endorse it: the prince’s cause would win aid out of congenial commiseration and sympathy. Etarran enough to appreciate a master turn of statecraft, Lord Diegan laughed in the teeth of the wind.

‘By Ath,’ he said in exultant admiration. ‘You’ll have your kingship of this realm, then your army to harry out the Shadow Master. After the scale of today’s losses, the guilds and the town councils will fall over themselves to lend you their funds to raise a garrison.’

Messenger

Four days after the raid that beggared Prince Lysaer in the Pass of Orlan, a messenger was dispatched at speed from the clansmen’s mountain outpost. No matter that the hooves of his horse were dampened by late-season snow; the muffled vibration of his passage was heard and tracked by a mind a hundred leagues distant.

Through the five centuries since the Paravian races had vanished from the continent, wardenship of the tower built to guard their artefacts and culture had fallen to a Fellowship sorcerer. Most days he could be found in a black-beamed chamber that creaked in the unquiet winds, elbows braced on a library table heaped as a gull’s nest with parchments and opened books. Scrolls stuffed the niches in between, trailing moth-eaten ties, or else weighted flat at the corners by oddments of tea-stained crockery and tinted glass inkwells missing corks. Ensconced amid his clutter like a packrat, Sethvir sat with his ankles hooked on a stool. While his hair grew in untidy tufts, and his maroon robe gathered dust and loose threads, he kept and catalogued records, and tracked world events as they happened.

As long as Athera had lain fogbound, he had followed the phases of the moon through the pull of the tides. He felt the daily tramp of Etarra’s drilling armies shake the earth alongside prints in dry dust traced by fieldmice. A missive scribed in blood that had passed through flame, then rinsed off in brine from the face of a thrown bit of slate, touched him in fourfold vibration; amid the voices of a billion dropped stones, that one he noted and marked apart. He sensed the grand music of the planet’s twelve power lanes, and the warp through weft lacework of energies still channelled over land and air by the residual dance of Paravian mystery.

So long had Sethvir’s mage-sense been twined with the thunderous chord of world life-force, that his thoughts took on the patterned aspects of stone, with but tenuous hold on the present.

When at length the clang of a sword hilt against the portcullis nine storeys down echoed through the bowels of his sanctuary, Sethvir already knew the name and the errand of the courier; had been aware of both since the moment Tysan’s lady steward had dispatched her rider to his tower.

Limned in the gloom of failing day, the Warden of Althain finished a line of spidery handwriting. He leaned sidewards, rinsed his quill in the tepid dregs of a teacup, then raised eyes of pale turquoise that looked vacuous as sky; but in fact, held a relentless train of review as the interstices of this moment’s event unreeled to bear on the future.

Below him, marring the crystalline cry of first starlight, the swordsman continued to hammer. To Sethvir’s ear, the metallic din bespoke forge-fire, and hill steel, and centuries of unrequited bloodshed. I’m coming,’ he grumbled in a tone as tart as an old hinge. He stood up. Dust and bits of scribbled paper settled on a floor already littered with outworn quill pens and the dropped caps of inkwells. The sorcerer sneezed, peered down as if touched to unwitting delight by the faded weave of the carpet, then stumped in his over-sized fur buskins to the casement, which had been unlatched for days, banging and creaking in the gritty north gusts off the desert.

The bulwarks of Althain Tower were fashioned of granite, stark and grey, the rough-chiselled grooves of a desperate need softened under green seals of lichen. Sethvir crossed his arms on the sill, took absent notice of a hole chewed by moths in his sleeve, then leaned through the casement and peered down.

‘I’m not at all deaf,’ he chided gently.

Below him, lent an ant’s perspective, a shaggy bush pony stood with its hip cocked, its reins looped through the elbow of a man in the undyed leathers of a clansman. The shoulders energetically working flinched and stopped. The visitor glanced up, sheepish, from the tower’s locked entry and hurriedly sheathed his sword. While the reverberations from his pounding subsided to a rumble, then a whisper, he called, ‘I beg your pardon. Sethvir of Althain?’

Outlined against dusk by a halo of blowing white hair, the sorcerer grinned like a pixie. ‘Your lady wishes me to bear a message to Arithon, Prince of Rathain. No, don’t speak. I know the contents. What makes you think I’ll deliver it?’

Hotly flustered, Maenalle’s courier said, ‘The caithdein of Tysan asks. She said you were the only spirit in Athera who would know where to seek the Shadow Master.’

Sethvir hooked an ink-stained knuckle through his beard. For a moment he appeared to forget himself, as well as the anxious emissary down below. His gaze encompassed the deepening arch of the heavens as if the answers to unwritten riddles could be read in the white ice of cirrus clouds.

Deferential to the ways of great mages, the courier waited, while his pony dropped its head and cropped the weeds that grew wild over the tower’s sole door sill.

Presently, Sethvir answered. ‘I’ll commit the Lady Maenalle’s message to a parchment inscribed to Arithon s’Ffalenn. But tell her: the scroll will be delivered at the time of my choosing.’

The courier eased in relief. ‘She will be satisfied.’ He gathered up his pony’s reins, prepared to mount and ride immediately.

Sethvir’s eyebrows arched at the lapse implied in his hospitality. ‘No need to rush off. I have oats for your horse in the barn. It’s a very long road back to Camris, and tomorrow will be wretched with rain. You’d do better to weather the storm here. Have a bath, and a bed, and whatever you can scrounge from my larder. Certainly there’s plenty of good tea.’

While the clanborn courier hung poised between uncertainty and blind courage, Sethvir withdrew from the casement, his voice a diminishing echo from the unlighted cavern of the library. ‘Bide there. I’ll be down to unfasten the gates.’

He moved on at sharp speed that belied his dreamer’s appearance; take the stairs too slowly, and the courier would be mounted and gone at a pace his road-weary pony did not deserve. The company of a Fellowship sorcerer had harmed no man; but legend told of many who had emerged changed from the experience. Whether Maenalle’s appointed courier would prove exempt from fate’s handling was a fine point Sethvir was loath to promise.

Eviction

After the confiscated brown gelding, Faery-toes, kicked his stall doors to slivers, bit every groom within reach and knocked the head ostler off his feet, the alderman of Jaelot’s under-secretary at last seized the initiative to set seal to a writ to dispatch the beast to the knacker’s. He grumbled as he waited for the wax to harden. Horse hide, glue and dogmeat were not in high demand; the proceeds from the slaughter of one swaybacked head of stock could scarcely defray all the damages.

The head ostler narrowed his eyes and nursed his bruises. ‘Keep the beast, then, and rack up more costs in wrecked boards.’

The writ was slapped into his hands with the official seal still warm, while in the next room, voices of higher authority heated and flared into argument. The difficulties posed by the horse’s last owner, the fat prisoner consigned by city justice to suffer forced labour until solstice, were never as simply arranged. While the ostler retreated with the horse’s death warrant, invective assailed the secretary’s headache through the shut panels of the doorway, as it had without cease for a week: Dakar took ill in the draughty shacks where the convicts were housed. Poor food made him sick unto misery. His feet swelled from chilblains until he could not arise in the mornings without loud-voiced, piteous complaint.

His fellow inmates used their fists to stop his whining. His moans and his mewling as he languished from their beating disturbed what little sleep they could scrounge after days of backbreaking labour in the mason’s yard, dressing stone blocks for the sea walls that storms crumbled down every spring. With both eyes puffed shut with bruises, Dakar could not see to swing his mallet. Stone chips flew on wild tangents. A guardsman was home with a badly gashed face and an overseer limped on smashed toes.

Packed off to solitary confinement, Dakar passed his hours of punishment with singing. Even cold sober, he had no ear for pitch. The yawling echoes created by his ballads made the prison sentries grit their teeth, then brawl among themselves in driven fits of frustration. A gag was attempted. Dakar somehow ingested the cloth. The coarse fibres gave him a bellyache, but otherwise seemed not to faze him.

The healer dispatched to examine him emerged from the depths of Jaelot’s dungeon, his tongue clicking in amazement behind the scented kerchief he carried to mask the stench. ‘The man’s crazed,’ he said in a nasal twang. He removed the linen and spat into it. After eyeing the sputum with the reflexive habit of his profession, he treated the head warden’s sallow complexion to the same disconcerting regard. ‘Thinks he’s immortal, your prisoner. Insisted he could survive a straight draught of deadly nightshade, and then offered to show me, the mad fool. Keep him chained on a diet of herb broth. Then if you take my advice, send him on to the crazy house run by the Brothers of Ath’s Initiates.’

Cocooned in fur vests to ease a chest cold, the head warder shrugged his exasperation. ‘That would be a frank relief, to be rid of him. But the judiciary’s adamant. It’s the work team for Dakar till the advent of summer, and naught short of death will shift the sentence.’

‘Well, let him lie,’ the healer said, repacking his satchel in sour humour. ‘He might get pox, or perish of rat bite. At least, by Daelion’s justice, he should catch your cough and lose his voice. Does your wife brew cailcallow tea?’

The glum warden shook his head. ‘No wife.’

‘Ah, too bad.’ The healer departed, whistling; and whatever sort of ills beset Dakar’s jailers, the prisoner proved maddeningly immune. He carolled himself hoarse in the darkness, then rasped on in a blithe and froggy baritone, while his guardsmen wore mufflers tied about their ears in an effort to dampen the dissonance.

At mid-spring, with the hemp cloth smock worn by the condemned sagged like empty sacking over his depleted belly, and skin turned mushroom pale, the Mad Prophet informed the man sent down to fetch him that he had never stayed sober for more than a fortnight, even as a babe at his mother’s knee. Three months was a lifetime record, Dakar insisted, as if astounded to still be alive.

Nobody succoured him with beer. He was prodded from his lair in the pits of Jaelot’s dungeon. The blocks shaped at the mason’s throughout the winter were now being loaded onto flat ox-wains and rolled in slow rounds to the headland. There, a team of men at arms in leather brigandines raised their bull voices to harry on a wretched line of workers. Scoured by salt-spray and the white-laced surge of high tide, bleeding from barnacle grazes and stone cuts, Jaelot’s convict labour team bent their backs to restore the torn bulkheads and jetty.

Their work was cruel and dangerous; where currents had undercut the sea wall, the granite might shift and slide. A man could break his hands or his legs, caught in an unlucky place. Incoming waves could crest and slam down without warning, and a seething froth of brine would tumble the huge blocks like knucklebones stewed in a cauldron. Men died pinched like insects, or dragged under to drown in the weight of their fetters and chain.

Dakar had no wish to end ground in shreds to be picked by the bay’s hordes of scavenger crabs.

While the wains were pulled up for unloading, he stole a moment while the watch was diverted, and behind the move of blowing on chapped hands, cast a sharp eye across the waves. His month in the dungeon had left him more time than he liked for uninterrupted concentration; his eyesight was clear as a sailor’s.

A gruff voice shouted behind him, ‘You!’ A pikestaff hit Dakar across the shoulders. ‘Back to work! And hurry on about it.’

The Mad Prophet stumbled forward, caught short of a trip as he ploughed shoulder down into the stone block in process of being jockeyed from the wagon bed onto log rollers for transport. Men swayed. The wagon creaked. The dressed mass of granite shifted, grating, then spun off-balance and dived. Those poles not instantly milled to slivers lumbered out of alignment, while men jumped clear and swore, the slowest ones nursing whacked shins.

‘It’s the fat idiot, again!’ screeched the pikeman appointed to attend the wain’s unloading.

Wide-eyed in affront, Dakar regarded flat folds where once he had sported a paunch. ‘Fat?’

A mailed fist fetched him a ringing thump on the jaw. ‘No talk. Just work. Or ye’ll see yourself pressed to parchment under yon mother of a rock.’

Dakar staggered on rubbery knees and fell spectacularly flat on his fundament. Prods from the pike failed to raise him.

‘Fiends plague us!’ The watch captain arrived, the higher-pitched clink of his accoutrements clear over the deeper tones of shackle chains. ‘Drag the lout into the spray! Cold water should rouse him soon enough.’

Two convicts were waved over to manhandle Dakar clear of the work crew. He lay sprawled at the edge of the sea wall, a crumpled heap in stained rags, bruised and apparently dazed; except that his face stayed raptly turned toward the surf that pounded below. At length, he stirred, not due to the needling spray that sheeted over him, but because he finally sighted the sign he sought amid the moiling whitecaps.

There were fiends in truth, out amid the breakers, riding the incoming tide to replenish themselves. Energy sprites native to Athera that drew fuel from the tumble of the waters, invisible to the eye except as crests that rose and broke, then subsided, unnaturally splashless, into the current of the bay. What the Paravian tongue named iyats, or tricksters, for their tireless penchant to make mischief.

Dakar’s lip curled in an evil smile through split and bleeding contusions. He moaned for effect, rolled over and propped himself on his forearms. Then, eyes clenched shut in a feigned fit of queasiness, he mustered his skills as a spellbinder and inwardly massed a tight, spinning core of focused energy. Sloppily, as a novice might, he let the force bleed into his aura. The miscast conjury was imperceptible, even harmless, little worse than the flash of static discharge that might jump and ground to metal in a dry freeze. But as Dakar well knew from experience, the slightest mismanagement of mage-force was irresistible fare to the appetite of an unsated fiend.

Often enough in the past he had suffered, when negligent handling of his lessons had attracted the sprites to plague him. As much as Asandir tried to castigate him, Dakar’s ways stayed incorrigible. Ever and always he remained an insatiable magnet for fiends.

He felt a shiver thrill the air as they sensed his beckoning presence. The splashless fall of the wavecrests unravelled, spouting into joyous, wild spray as the creatures arrowed from their sport and fastened upon his signature of strayed power. Never before had he revelled in the itches and small tingles that played over his skin as they spun, drinking the energy-spill off his aura. Where one came, more followed. Iyats liked travelling in packs. Prickled and lightly burned through the tuned perception of his mage-sense, Dakar judged to the second when the fiends blithely gathered to feed from his handout became charged and engorged beyond their simple needs. He groaned and groped and stood upright with just enough show to draw the eye of the watching overseer.

For once in league with shouted oaths and harsh orders, the Mad Prophet let the guardsmen prod him. Chivvied, cursed, and shoved on by impatient pike butts, he let himself be hazed into the thick of the work crew, no longer unloading carts, but labouring and groaning to lever the heavy blocks into place on the broken sea wall. The smells of salt-damp wool and sweat combined with the squeak of ropes through blocks and tackle; the grind of stone over stone. Pressed amid the heat of straining bodies, made to shoulder his share of the weight, Dakar licked crusted blood from his teeth and cut off his trickle of leaked energy.

The invisible fiends knit about him in spirals of distorted breezes. They buffeted and pinched and tweaked at his hair in signal fits of irritation. When he refused to give in and fuel their wants further, they lent themselves in their madcap way to tease, to frustrate, to annoy, that they might sip what stray spurts of emotion they could wring from whatever victims were available.

In an eyeblink, the work on the jetty erupted into chaos.

Stone chips and rocks sprang up and whirled airborne, clanging off the helms of the officers and unmercifully pelting the conscripts. Bruised and screaming in wild surprise, men heaved off the encumbrance of their loads. The massive dressed blocks misaligned and jarred awry, then dropped with a thud to quake the sea wall. Granite rasped against granite, grinding off falls of small pebbles that ripped aloft to sting flesh. Men coughed out curses and spat grit while the older blocks already mauled by storms and ice loosened, cracked, and gave way, to fall with thunderous, geysering spray into white petticoats of surf.