Warhost of Vastmark

In response to Luhaine’s furious and silent burst of censure, Sethvir propped himself on one elbow and scrubbed at wisps of beard that had hung themselves up in his eyebrows. ‘What else could we do?’ He said in cold conclusion, ‘I couldn’t let these free wraiths come to be mewed up in Rockfell alongside Desh-thiere’s captive consciousness.’ If mishap occurred and the two halves of this monster should ever chance to recombine, there could be no end to the world’s suffering. ‘It’s all right,’ he added, then looked up and blinked, a smear of dust on his nose. Unshed tears glistened in his eyes. ‘At least through the course of a partial possession I’ve recovered true Name for these nine. It’s a pitiful start. But we now have the means to unravel the wickedness that binds them. Shall we not make an end and restore their lost path to Ath’s peace?’

By noon, restored by hot tea and a catnap, Sethvir sat huddled in furled robes in the windy niche of a window seat. Daylight mapped the whorled distortion in the grain of the tabletop where Luhaine had reconfigured the stone to create the warded flask.

The container itself stood empty beside a porcelain mug with spiderwork cracks through the glaze.

After harrowing labour, the nine enchained spirits had been given their redemption and release. The books had been tidied, the ink flasks set right, but Sethvir had not bothered with sweeping. His library floor still lay scattered with river sand, the cobwebs in the corners caught with small twists of parchment last pressed into use as his pagemarks.

Luhaine’s groomed image inhabited the apron by the hearth, unstirred by the draughts from the chimney. Kharadmon appeared as a wan, slender form perched on the stuffing of a chair. His posture was all dapper angles and elegant, attenuated bones. His spade point beard and piebald hair and narrow nose appeared as foxy as ever, but his green cloak with its ruddy orange lining tended to drift through intervals of transparency. Despite a clear outline, the force of him seemed washed and faded.

In pared, quiet phrases, the discorporate Sorcerer related what befell on his quest to the splinter worlds cut away from their link to Athera. ‘On the other side, Desh-thiere’s essence is stronger than our most dismal estimate,’ he said. ‘I’m left humbled by the power Traithe faced, to his ruin, on the day he sealed off the South Gate. I say now with certainty that he spared all life on Athera.’

Kharadmon went on to tell of Marak, where the Fellowship had once exiled those people whose curiosity prompted them to pursue the knowledge proscribed by the compact between mankind and the Paravians. In a lightless search, through a suffocating mist that shrouded that far place into darkness and an ice-ridden, desolate wasteland, no living thing had breathed or moved.

‘I narrowed my search in the gutted shells of the libraries,’ Kharadmon resumed. ‘I found records there, fearful maps of what was done.’ His image chafed its thin fingers as if to bring warmth to lost flesh. ‘As we guessed, Desh-thiere was created by frightened minds as a weapon of mass destruction. A faction on Marak built on the laws of physical science, then meddled in theories that came to unbalance the axis of prime life force. The intent was to interweave spirit with machine. These men desired to create the ultimate synergy between the human mind and a physical construct, and transcend the limits of the flesh. Well, their works went wrong. The ionized fields of mists that contained the captive spirits over time drifted their awareness out of self-alignment. The experiment turned on its creators. I can only conclude that those sorry entities tied outside of Daelion’s Wheel became warped and vicious and insane.’

The result laid two entire worlds to white waste; then the hundreds of thousands of dead from that carnage, subverted and entrapped in brutal turn.

‘I have failed in my mission,’ Kharadmon summed up in drawn sorrow. ‘No roll list of Names could I find for the original set of wraiths that comprised Desh-thiere’s first sentience. And now, those prime spirits have been joined by every other casualty they have caused. They react as a body, their mad purpose to devour life. The strength of them is deadly and far too vast for our Fellowship to grapple without help.’

Sethvir tapped the knuckle of his thumb against his teeth. ‘We’ll need the aid of the Paravians,’ he ventured. ‘Their resonance with prime power could perhaps turn those lost entities to recall their forgotten humanity.’

‘A masterbard’s talents might do the same, had we the means to isolate each individual victim from the pull of collective consciousness,’ Luhaine said.

The Warden of Althain was silent. His turquoise eyes locked on Kharadmon in recognition of the annihilating truth left unmentioned. ‘The mist sublimates away under vacuum,’ he surmised.

‘Exactly.’ Kharadmon shot upright and stalked a soundless circuit of the chamber. ‘Free wraiths result, as you saw. If the ones still fogbound on Marak can unriddle the guidance traces left by that beacon spell of summoning, we could find ourselves beset beyond all recourse.’

Silence ate the seconds as the three mages pondered. The quandary of the Mistwraith had expanded to fearful dimensions. Its threat would not end with the creatures mewed up under wards in Rockfell Pit. Indeed, Athera would never be safe from predation until the trapped, damned spirits from both worlds beyond South Gate could be drawn under bindings, then redeemed.

The royal half-brothers already set in jeopardy by the curse might yet be needed to right the balance.

Recent events at Minderl Bay had effectively shown that Lysaer held no vestige of control over Desh-thiere’s aberrant geas.

Which left Arithon once again at the critical crux of responsibility.

Sethvir sighed, his crown tipped back against the tower’s chisel-cut window. In tones hammered blank by a burden just extended through trials enough to stop the heart, he said, ‘Asandir will reach the focus at Caith-al-Caen by the advent of tonight’s sundown. He can transfer to Athir’s ruin on the east shore and flag down the sloop Talliarthe. He will treat with the Shadow Master there and charge him, for the world’s sake, to stay alive. At any cost, by whatever means, the Prince of Rathain must survive until this threat beyond South Gate can be resolved.’

Beside the table, thinned to wan imprint against the varnished tiers of the bookshelves, Kharadmon blinked like a cat. ‘Not enough,’ he said in his old, stinging curtness. ‘Have Asandir bind our crown prince to his promise by blood oath.’

Luhaine stiffened to indignance and Sethvir looked aghast. ‘He is s’Ffalenn and compelled by his birth line to compassion,’ they protested in clashing chorus.

The Warden of Althain finished. ‘Since Torbrand, no scion of Rathain has ever required more than his royal promise!’

Kharadmon’s image vanished into a wisp of gloom that fanned a chill through the chamber. ‘You didn’t experience what lies behind South Gate. Heed my warning. Who can say what lengths may be necessary to save us all before this disaster is played out.’

Tharrick

Dakar the Mad Prophet snapped awake from the tail of a nightmare that involved the loss of his best spirits into the gawping jaws of a fish. The lap of wavelets against wood reminded him that he inhabited a musty berth aboard Talliarthe. He cracked open one eye and immediately groaned as light speared into his pupil from a scald of reflection which danced on the deck beams overhead.

‘Is it sunset or daybreak?’ he bellowed, then stuffed his face like a turtle back into the dark refuge of his blankets.

From his place by the stays in the stern, Arithon merely kept whistling a threnody with an odd, glancing dissonance that went ill with the aches of a hangover.

‘Ath,’ Dakar grumped. He shrugged off the suffocating layers of salt-damp wool, his pudgy hands stretched to cover his eyes and his ears, and successfully managing neither. ‘Your tune sounds like a damned fiend bane.’

Arithon nodded. His screeling measures stayed unbroken. He had seen iyats in the waves at the turn of the tide and preferred to keep his rigging unmolested. He had yet to change the ripped shirt he had worn through the affray at Minderl Bay. Bathed in the ruddy gold light that washed the misted shoreline at Athir, where his little sloop lay at anchor, he twisted the cork from the neck of another flask, then upended it over the stern rail.

Dakar screamed and shot upright as a stream of neat whisky splashed with a gurgle into the brine. The nightmare that had wakened him had been no prank of imagination, after all. ‘Dharkaron rip off your cursed bollocks!’ he howled, and added a damning string of epithets that curdled the quiet of new morning. ‘You’re dumping my last stock of spirits into the Ath-forsaken sea!’

Arithon never paused in his pursuit. ‘I wondered how long you’d take to notice.’ That icy note of warning in his tone was unmistakable to anyone who knew him.

Dakar paused in the companionway to catch his breath, take stock, and indulge in a long, thoughtful scratch at his crotch. ‘What’s changed?’

In the days since the discharge of his hired seamen, then Earl Jieret’s landing ashore for return to Caolle and his clans, the Shadow Master’s brittle temper had seemed to ease. With Lysaer’s warhost disbanded, the intolerable mood he had affected since the massive strike at Werpoint had settled out. Left to his preferred state of solitude, the Shadow Master plied the helm and set Talliarthe’s course gently south.

By the drilling intensity his green eyes held now, something had happened since last night’s sunset to upset his plans yet again.

Too sore for subtlety before balking silence, Dakar repeated his question a plaintive half pitch higher.

Arithon stabbed the cork back into the emptied crock, teeth bared in a wince as the movement troubled some hurt beneath a bandage on his forearm. The injury had not existed the day before. ‘We’re going on to Perdith to visit the forges, and here forward you’ll need to stay sober.’

The reference took a muddled moment to resolve through a headache into sense.

‘Fiends!’ Dakar cried, scaring up the gulls who had just folded wings and settled back into the waves. ‘Don’t say. It’s those Sithaer-begotten brigantines again. You promised you weren’t going to arm them!’

‘Complain, if you like, to Asandir,’ said the Master of Shadow, succinct. ‘If I thought it would help, I’d back you.’

The Mad Prophet opened his mouth to speak, then poised, still agape. He swelled in a gargantuan breath of disbelief, and stopped again, jabbed back to furious thought by the stained strip of linen tied over his adversary’s left wrist. ‘Ath Creator!’ His eyes bulged as he exhaled a near-soundless whistle. ‘Asandir was here. Whatever have you done to require a blood oath before the almighty Fellowship of Seven? No such strong binding has ever been asked, and you a sanctioned crown prince!’

Arithon shot back a glare like a rapier, hooked the last crock by his feet, and ripped the cork from the neck.

Dakar turned desperate. ‘Have a care for your health! At least save one flask. It might be helpful, for need, in case that knife wound turns septic.’

Awarded the Shadow Master’s cool indifference at its worst, the Mad Prophet knew when to desist. If he gave in to fury, his head would explode and, from nasty past experience, he knew better than to provoke the s’Ffalenn temper while emerging from the throes of a hangover. He would seek a patch of shade and sleep off the worst before he shouldered the risk of having his own whisky crocks thrown at him.

He awakened much later to the bone-jarring crash of Talliarthe beating to windward. Her topsails carved in dizzy circles against a clouded sky, while winter-cold spray sheeted over him at each rearing plunge through the swell. Green in the face and long since soaked to his underclothes, Dakar groaned. He rolled, clawed upright, and staggered to the rail to be sick. The horizon showed an unbroken bar of grey and the wind in his nose was scoured salt.

The Mad Prophet closed his eyes and retched, too miserable to curse his companion’s entrenched preference for the rigours of deep-water sailing.

At the helm, far from cheerful, Arithon s’Ffalenn whistled a ballad about a wicked stepson who murdered to steal an inheritance. The tune held a dissonance to unravel thought. By the arrowed force behind each bar and note, Dakar resigned himself: he had no case left to argue. The renowned royal temper already burned fierce enough to singe any man in close quarters. To cross a s’Ffalenn prince in that sort of mood was to invite a retaliation in bloodshed.

The wind scudded through a change and blew from the north, and the rains came and made passage miserable. Dakar lay below decks, too wrung to move, while the sloop ran south, her brick-coloured sails bent taut. At Perdith, Arithon concluded his business with the weapon smiths in haste. The respite in sheltered waters was too brief to allow Dakar a proper recovery. Talliarthe was under canvas and bound back offshore before he could prop himself up and crawl on all fours to find a bawdy house.

Arithon manned the helm like a creature possessed, urgent to reach the south latitudes. He slept wrapped in oilskins beside his lashed tiller. Dakar grew inured to the thump of his step on the cabin top as he tied in fresh reefs, or shook them out at every slight shift in the breeze. The clouds loomed lower each day, until the whitecaps seemed to graze their black, swollen bellies. Rain fell in wind-whirled, spitting drizzle, barbed at times with flecks of ice. The season had turned with cruel vengeance. Hammering squalls joined forces and bred gales; in her run down the eastshore, Talliarthe weathered several that howled through two days and nights.

The incessant cold water stung Arithon’s hands angry red. His hair tangled to white ends from dried deposits of blown salt.

Dakar lived like a snail, crawling over the bucking deck from his berth to the sloop’s tiny galley. He brewed peppermint tea to help ease his nausea and nibbled hardtack and salt pork and cheese. When the weather blew roughest, he stayed in a prone sprawl and groaned like a man with the ague.

Talliarthe carved into tropical waters two weeks shy of the winter solstice.

Arithon by then was a scarecrow figure, sea-beaten and haunted hollow around the eyes. Too much wetting had infected his cut wrist. The gash scabbed and peeled, saltwater sores caused by the chafe of linen dressings swelled sullen purple underneath. Shirtless, driven, pressured sleepless by some tie to conscience that involved his recent oath to Asandir, the Shadow Master leaned on the weather shroud, a silhouette against thin, morning sunlight, his hand at his brow to cut the glare.

Emerged from his lair to relieve himself, Dakar noted the strung tension in his adversary’s back. He spoke for the first time in days. ‘What’s amiss? If it’s whales, I wish they’d stove in this filthy bucket’s keel. Since a bath ashore at a tavern is too much to ask, I’m going to wish with all my heart to get us shipwrecked.’

‘Getting skewered on a beach by Alestron’s best mercenaries is by far the more likely fate.’ Arithon drummed his fingers in an irritable tattoo on the sloop’s rail. ‘We should see half-rigged masts by now. What can the labourers in my shipyard have been doing to while away three months’ time?’

Busy with his trouser points, Dakar looked up and realized that the coast of Scimlade Tip loomed off the bow. The sloop would be moored at Merior by noon, and he could get blissfully drunk. A sigh of content eased from him, cut short by the prickling awareness that the Shadow Master glared at his back.

‘No.’ Clear as a glass edge, a masterbard’s voice, like a blade through the calls of white gulls and the softer susurrance of the sloop’s wake. ‘You will not indulge yourself senseless.’

Dakar’s jerk of outrage mistimed with a gust; he swore as he almost wet his knuckles. Stuffing himself back into his trousers, hands shaking as he hurried the lacing, he spun toward the cockpit in a rage. ‘Since when are you appointed as guardian of my fate?’

Back at the sloop’s tiller, Arithon threw her helm down. His apparent attention stayed fixed on the heading as her bow bore up and all manner of tackle slatted loose to a rattle of blocks that defied all attempt at speech. As the headsails caught aback and pressed the Talliarthe’s painted bow past the eye of the wind, the gaff-rigged main slammed taut on the opposite tack. Arithon freed the jib sheets from their cleats. The thunder as thrashed canvas bellied to the breeze finally muted to a driving sheet of spray as he hardened the lines alee.

‘I am master of nothing,’ he answered then on a queer, wrung note of exhaustion. ‘My own fate least of all.’

He spent the next hour on the foredeck with a bucket of seawater, a fish knife for shaving, and soap. While he sluiced himself clean and aired out dry clothes, Dakar blistered his hands at the helm, by turns immersed in sulking, or else scowling as he weighed inveigling plots to slip beer or neat spirits past his adversary’s vigilance.

By midday the weather turned gloomy. Winter rains curtained the beachhead at Merior like dirty, layered gauze and pocked the leaden troughs of the breakers. Soaked to the skin, the twins Fiark and Feylind quiet at his heels, their ebullience subdued by disaster, Arithon s’Ffalenn stood still as deadwood and regarded the wreckage of his shipyard.

Of the brigantine which should have been launched and by now rigged to completion, nothing remained but a straggle of crooked ribs, scabbed to black charcoal by fire. The planked-over hull that lay adjacent gaped like a cave, her stem and forequarter burned away. The stacks of new lumber for her finishing were all charred to ash in the sand. The ropewalk was gone, a snarl of gutted boards amid the puddled runoff shed by dunes tarnished dark with rinsed carbon.

Aghast, his face white and his frame racked to shivers, Arithon looked stricken by a deathblow as he regarded the ruin of his hope to make clean escape to blue water.

Feylind reached up and squeezed his dripping, cold fingers. ‘Mother asked you to come home with us. She made a pot of fish soup.’

Fiark blew plastered blond hair from his lips and chimed in, ‘You can borrow my blanket from the loft.’

Arithon forced himself to stir. ‘Thank you. And thank Jinesse, too, for her kindness. Say that I’ll visit her cottage later. Now go home. She’ll greet me with scolding if she finds out I’ve let you get wet.’

The children hared off, screaming in delight as they kicked and splashed through the puddles.

Ignored where he waited, growing soggy in a tunic that reeked of unwashed sweat, Dakar slapped the crimped locks behind his neck to dam the water that dribbled down his collar. ‘Are we just going to stand here until we grow roots in the damp?’

The chart loft still stood. To judge by the cries of raucous laughter ringing in muffled bursts through the boards, and the woodsmoke which trailed from the chimney, the labourers inside would at least be warm, if the beer that made them blithe had run out.

Arithon’s stillness cracked into a purposeful stride that carried him up to the doorway. He lifted the latch, crashed the panel inward, and stood stiff-armed against the silver splash of runoff that poured off the palm-thatched roof.

Blocked in the entry behind him, Dakar saw the uproarious company of the yard’s workers rock into stupefied stillness. Calloused hands drifted in midair, crockery beer mugs forgotten; bare feet shifted under bench boards and table. Like the rasp of a hornet’s nest disturbed in dry grass, Ivel the blind splicer chuckled in malice from his perch on a nail barrel in the corner. It’s himself come back, and early, too. What else could shrivel the tongues in yer mouths? I’d warrant a visit by Dharkaron’s Chariot would be given a saucier welcome.’

‘I want to know what happened,’ Arithon cut in, his bard’s trained diction never sharper. ‘Let the master shipwright stay and tell me. The steam box is whole, still. So are the tools and the sawpit. If the new wood’s a loss, the one hull not decked yet can be taken apart and used to patch up the holed one. By Ath, I don’t pay any man silver to sit on his rump sucking down beer ‘til he’s witless!’

A galvanic stir swept the crowded tables as benches rumbled back from plank trestles. The labourers arose in guilt-fed haste and pressed to be first to crowd the doorway. Arithon stepped aside to let them pass, his burning gaze merciless on every man’s face. Only when the last cringing layabout had passed did he move to enter the sail loft. Stale air and dampness and the smell of sour lager hung heavy in the stifling heat. Reprieved at last from the misery of the rain, Dakar sidled to the stove to warm his fingers, eyes darting in prayerful search for a tankard and a broached cask.

‘No beer left,’ rasped Ivel from his cranny. Scathelessly smug before Arithon’s flicked glance, and crafty enough to anticipate, he tipped his grizzled beard toward the tread that advanced and shrugged his bony shoulders. His large, seamed hands with their thumbs worn shiny from years of twining hemp gleamed red against shadow as Dakar fiddled open the gate of the iron stove and prodded the embers inside.

‘Rope store’s full burnt,’ the splicer quipped in brassy cheer. ‘Can’t make me work in yon rain without materials.’ He tilted his narrow head, impertinent as a gossip. ‘What’ll ye do? That gold store of yers, lad, she’s bound to be played right low.’

Arithon swept aside a litter of sticky crockery, kicked a bench closer, and sat. ‘I’ll thank you not to comment until the master shipwright has explained himself.’

Ivel leaned aside and shot a neat stream of spit at a bowl on the trestle by his elbow. ‘Master shipwright’s run off. He feared to face yer temper, and some lass in Shaddorn took him in. You want to know what happened, I’ll tell it. Else you can try out yer touch with the wretch who torched the yard. The men hazed him like butchers. He won’t talk.’

Arithon straightened, his wet fingers clenched and his eyes icy sparks in the gloom. ‘One man?’

‘Aye.’ Ivel’s grin revealed gapped, yellow teeth. ‘Hates yer living guts. Hid in the brush till the lads all got drunk, then launched on his merry bit of sabotage.’

‘He knows who I am?’ Arithon asked in a dead, level voice. ‘He told the labourers?’

A cracking, high cackle split from Ivel’s throat. He hugged his knees to his chest on his barrel, a dried-up, corded little monkey of a man who lived and breathed to stir up malice. ‘He told the men nothing, for all the hide they singed off him. What I ken, I got because I took him water when he raved. But your secret’s full safe with me, prince.’

Arithon snapped up a chipped flagon and hurled it. The smash of unglazed crockery against the board floor raised a storm of clay dust and chinking fragments. ‘Secret?’ He laughed in a brittle, thin irony more bitter than the splicer could match. ‘The whole of the north knows precisely where I am, and I find my ships burned to ashes.’

Still by the stove, polished ruddy by the coals, Dakar rubbed sweaty knuckles over his rumpled tunic. ‘You say the man who did this is held captive?’

Ivel rocked off a nod. ‘Aye, he is. Bound and locked in the boiler shed. The master joiner guards the key.’

The wood fire had been lit to heat the steam box again. Aware of the rain as a drummed, liquid trickle off the thatch and the erratic, spaced hiss as a leak dripped onto the hot copper vat, the prisoner curled on his side in abject misery. The damp, sand floor made him shiver. Hungry, thirsty, fevered down to his bones, at first he presumed the footsteps outside meant a labourer had come to fuel the stove.