Warhost of Vastmark

Tharrick shut his eyes and threw all his weight into the pull of his oar. Better than his fugitive companions, he knew the efficiency of Alestron’s training and assault tactics. Cold horror spurred his incentive. He might suffer a fate more ruinous than flogging should his former commanders retake him. This time he would be caught beyond doubt in collusion with Arithon s’Ffalenn.

By the time the longboat slewed under the Shearfast’s sleek side, the burn scars on Tharrick’s palms were broken open with blisters. He winced through the sting as he clambered on board, then snarled curses with the seamen as he shouldered his share and caught hemp slivers hauling on halyards. The temporary masts carried no head-sails, only two yards rigged fore and aft with an unwieldy, loose-footed lugsail. The sorry old canvas made over from a wreck was patched and dingy with mildew.

The captain summed up Shearfast’s prospects with language that damned in rich epithets. ‘Bitch’ll hide herself roundly in a fogbank or storm, but lumber like a spitted pig to weather. Shame that. Hull’s built on glorious lines. Rig her out decent, she’d fly.’

‘She’ll need to fly,’ groused the deckhand who returned at speed from unshackling the mooring chain. ‘They’re onto us, busy as sharks to bloody meat.’

As the yards were hauled around squealing to brace full to the wind, Tharrick saw the oncoming galleys deploy in smooth formation, one group to give chase and harry, and a second to turn wide and flank them. In a straight race of speed, Shearfast was outmatched.

The grizzled little captain bounded aft to the helm, a whipstaff that, given time and skilled carpentry, would be replaced by cables and wheel. ‘We’ve got one advantage,’ he said, then spat across the rail in madcap malice. ‘We know the reefs. They don’t. Fiends take the hindmost. Stay their course to sound the mark, and they’ve lost us.’

Wind cracked loose canvas, then kicked sails in taut curves with a whump. Shearfast bore off and gathered way, a pressure wave of wrinkled water forced against her lee strakes as the lugsails began sluggishly to draw. The quiet, cove harbour of Merior fell behind, while east gusts spat rain through the rigging. Tharrick did not look back, nor allow himself to think of other chases in the past, when he had held a captaincy among the troops aboard the galleys.

A hare before wolves, Shearfast wore ship and spread her patched rig on a reach to drive downcoast. The men Arithon had entrusted to crew his last vessel owned the nerve to stand down Dharkaron’s Chariot. On guts and desperation, they shouldered the challenge of an untried hull, shook her down in an ill-balanced marriage with ungainly sails, set at odds with her keel and the free-running grace of her lines. The drag of the whipstaff to hold her on course would have daunted the strength of most helmsmen. Her captain bared teeth and muscled her brute pull. Mastered through wits and determination, and an unerring gut instinct for seamanship, Shearfast danced a dainty course through the reefs. She flirted with the wind and courted the lee shore like a rich maid in rags, caught slumming in dangerous company.

Behind her, voracious, the galleys chewed away her lead in a flying white thrash of timed oars.

The first of them ran aground on a coral head in a grinding, grating screech of smashed timbers. Like a back-broken insect, her looms waved and splashed in clacking disunity, then snarled in misdirected stroke. Shouts re-echoed across the open water. A bugle wailed a frantic call for aid.

‘Hah!’ Shearfast’s captain loosed a wicked laugh. ‘There’s one belly-up and another bogged down to tend her.’

In the waist, the one crewman not busy easing sheet-lines strung a bow and began wrapping tips onto fire arrows. His stripped palms bound in cloth, Tharrick passed lint and short lengths of twine to tie the wisps in place. Fitful drizzle added drops to the sweat misted over his face. Cold water fingered runnels down his collar. He leaned to the buck of the deck. The captain steered to headings as gnarled and tortuous as any chased prey, with the galleys relentlessly gaining.

A curtain of rainfall dusted hazed mercury over the narrowing span of sea left between them. The captain shot a hurried, wild glance at the clouds, leaden and low-bellied as a strumpet’s hiked petticoats above the snapped crests of the whitecaps. The squall which struck now would bring no salvation. Any gain through reduced visibility would come offset by increased risk. Underwaters frayed to froth by driving bands of precipitation, the reefs Shearfast skirted would be treacherously hidden, the greener shallows that warned of submerged sandbars and coral hammered out into uniform grey.

Rising winds slewed and heeled her, close-hauled. The heavy, broad lugsails made her sloppy, and the rooster tails clawed by sideslip at each gust showed the Shearfast could not maintain leeway against the coast. The mazed shoals that granted her marginal protection would turn forces and present renewed hazard. If she wrecked or ran aground, no man aboard held false hope. To be stranded ashore was to die, first run down by tracking dogs, then butchered on the swords of Skannt’s headhunters.

A second galley struck with a thud against a sandbar, this one near enough to savour the chaos as the consternation of her crewmen resounded in shrill oaths across the water. A horn pealed in warning. The ship just behind her backwatered her stroke, then glanced off her exposed side in screaming collision. Oarshafts sheared off, to the cries of crushed men as leaded beech stove their chests like so many rows of burst barrels. Blood painted streaks down the oarports, and the drummers abandoned their beat.

‘Just hope she’s beached hard enough they’ll lighten the chase manning windlasses and kedging her off,’ said the captain, licking salt off his teeth in a bent of incurable optimism.

Of fifteen galleys packed with troops that converged to tear into Shearfast, three left disabled was scarcely a change in bad odds.

‘Well, what good is moping,’ snapped the captain to the crewman who pointed this out. ‘Have to find some joy to cheer about. Not for any stinking galleyman’s fun will I pass the Fatemaster’s Wheel with a stupid, glum look on my mug.’

The pursuit had slowed behind, fleet captains warned by the two crippled vessels to thread the narrow channel with more care; the strike force split off on an oblique angle to flank and then intercept were far enough away that the blurring, heavy deluge had dulled their rapacious outlines.

‘I’d take that squall now and chance the damned reefs,’ confided one crewman to Tharrick above the hissed spray off the waves.

In blind answer, the cloudburst redoubled and drummed the decks silver. For the first moment since the galleys turned their course to give chase, there seemed a faint glimmer of hope.

Then a horn call blared above the thunder of strained canvas. Through splashing spindrift thrown off the forecastle, a shouted challenge hailed the Shearfast. ‘Heave to and surrender all hands!’

‘Over my still bleedin’ carcass,’ cracked Arithon’s game captain from the helm. ‘Old storm’s going to hide us, and those poor harried bastards hard-set on our tail have to know it.’ He yelled for the men at the braces to belay their lines and move forward. ‘Jump lively! I want bearings on every shoal you can see off our bow.’

Even as the pair raced up the forward companionway, a light bolt arced out. It scribed from the rambade of the hindmost galley, a line that unreeled like incandescent wire to a shriek of hissed protest through the thickened fall of rain.

‘It’s the Prince of the West, curse him!’ Shearfast’s helmsman dragged the whipstaff alee in last-ditch, defiant evasion.

The vessel slewed, mired by her yards and too sluggish. Lysaer’s light-cast assault struck the straining canvas of the stern lugsail and seeded a starburst of fire.

The foresail still left whole to draw wind veered the Shearfast off heading to starboard, and stempost and rudder and the timbers of her quarter slammed with a crunch into coral. Sparks showered the deck and spat answering flame from fresh oakum. Then the evil, swollen clouds opened up and unburdened. The downpour unleashed in a thundering cascade and thrashed out the burgeoning conflagration.

Through smoke and white water, the captain leaped from the helm, one arm pressed to bruised ribs. The whipstaff had taken charge upon impact and dealt him a buffeting clout. Half-stunned and labouring, he grunted phrases of blistering invective. Then, above the whining howl of wind and the battering of the squall, he dispatched swift instructions to his men. ‘She’s a loss! No use but to fire her, and damn the weather now. We’ll have to use pitch flares and torch her sorry timbers belowdecks.’

Tharrick stumbled as a crewman blundered into him and shoved the guard of a cutlass in his hand. ‘You’ll need this. It’ll be hand-to-hand when they board us. Do as you like for yourself. The rest of us agree, we don’t fancy being taken alive.’

Appalled to chills through the cataract of water, Tharrick shouted, ‘Ath in his pity! The duke’s men aren’t merciful, but hope isn’t lost. While the hull burns, the storm could still hide your escape.’

The sailhand paused, eyes narrowed with anger. ‘Won’t risk a capture. I’d rather die fighting on open water then running like a dog through the briar.’

‘If you had cover,’ Tharrick broke in, ‘if I gave you the means to delay them, you might row for the beachhead. Claim sanctuary at the hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood and no enemy of Arithon’s could touch you.’

‘Speak your piece and fast,’ snapped the captain, arrived that moment in the waist. ‘We have only minutes. I’ll burn this blighted vessel to her waterline with all of us aboard before she’s risked to enemies as a prize.’

So simple, Tharrick thought; the hoodwink he proposed should be obvious. He steeled his resolve and explained. ‘I was the duke’s man. I wrecked your master’s shipyard. Who could believe I would be here alive, except as Arithon’s bound prisoner?’

‘Right, aye.’ The captain grinned through the stumps of front teeth, chipped in some past scrap in a brothel. His levity faded. ‘Ye’d do this for us? It’s fair risky. The hull’s to be left blazing regardless.’

‘Do it.’ Tharrick forced reason over fear, though his nerves felt dissolved into jelly. ‘Who’s to know my loyalty ever changed? If the duke’s men find me before I burn, there’s every likely chance I can mislead them long enough for the Brotherhood to grant you Ath’s protection.’

‘Right aye, belowdecks we go, then.’ The captain snapped out his rigging knife and slashed off a sheetline for binding the volunteer victim. Like all blue-water seamen, he could tie knots in his sleep. Over his ongoing rattle of orders, and the crackle of pitch flares, and the hellish, drowning pound of rain on wooden decking, Tharrick found himself thrust down a companionway and lashed in total helplessness to a hatch ring over his head.

‘All right, listen up!’ cracked the captain. ‘I stay, and one other. We’ll draw straws to see who bids for shore leave.’

Tharrick voiced an immediate protest, cut silent as the captain yanked the sash off his waist to twist into use as a gag. ‘There has to be a sacrifice,’ he said as he tied off the cloth in desperation. ‘If we leave an empty ship, your place will be questioned. Then they’re sure to mount a search for survivors.’

A brisk hand clapped his shoulder, while the sailhands drew lots for the longboat. ‘Off we go, mate, and Dharkaron avenge.’ The captain threw Tharrick a bright-eyed, fierce wink. ‘We’ll send prayers from Ath’s sanctuary, and me from past the Wheel. Bless you for bravery. It’s grand luck yell need. Ye’ve charted fair course fer bad waters.’

Shearfast’s crewman raced light-footed from the hold. Behind, for cold necessity, they left the whispered lick of flame and a poisonous, pitch-fed haze of smoke. Tharrick coughed. His throat closed and his eyes ran. The thick fumes sickened him to dizziness. He felt as though he were falling headlong through the very gates of Sithaer. Driven senseless by the metallic taste of fear, dazed beyond reason by poisoned air, he did not remember giving way to terrified screams, muffled to whimpers by the gag. Nor did he keep any shred of raw courage as he wrenched like a beast at the rope ties.

Awareness became wrapped in an inferno. Skin knew again the blistering kiss of agony as the red snap of fire chewed through the planks overhead. The thumps of a distant scuffle made no sense, nor the mazed clang of steel, followed by the defiant last shout of the gamecock captain. ‘Kill the prisoner!’

The cry that bought Tharrick his chance for salvation rang through the steel clash of weapons. A fallen body thudded, kicking in nerve-fired death throes. Then a dying man choked out a rattling gasp and slammed through the companionway door, the blade through his chest a glistening reflection doused in fresh running blood.

‘Merciful Ath, hurry on!’ someone cried with the bite of authority. ‘They’ve got some wretch lashed in the hold!’

Two officers in gold braid kicked past the downed corpse. They staggered across canted decking and barked into bulkheads, fumbling through the murky, coiled smoke to cut his bonds. Tharrick scarcely felt the hands that grasped and steadied him onto his feet. Cramped double and choking, he lost consciousness as they dragged him like a gutted fish up a reeling companion-way into clear air and rainfall.

Whether he lay in the hands of the duke’s officers or those of the Prince of the West, he had no awareness left to care.

Landfall

Lysaer s’Ilessid set foot on the damp sands of Merior, still dissatisfied over the report sent back from the galley which had run down the fugitive vessel. Of an unknown number of enemy crewmen, two had been slain in the melee of boarding. The sole survivor brought back for questioning was himself a prisoner of the Shadow Master, notched in scars from recent cruel handling, and unconscious from fresh burns and smoke poisoning.

Duke Bransian’s crack captains had been too busy sparing the one life to mount a search of the waters for longboats.

Thwarted from gaining the informant he required to dog his enemy’s trail, Lysaer clenched his jaw to rein back a savage bout of temper. Since the strike force under his personal banner was land-bound to close off the peninsula, Alestron’s mercenaries had done the boarding, a setback he lacked sovereignty to reverse. His own officers had been trained on no uncertain terms to expect the vicious style of Arithon’s pirate forebears. Seldom, if ever, had the men they commanded surrendered their vessels with crewmen still alive to be captured.

A salt-laden gust parted Lysaer’s fair hair as he trained his stormy regard up the beachhead. The rain had stopped. Mid-afternoon light shafted through broken clouds. The puddles wore a leaden sheen, and a shimmer of dipped silver played over the drenched crowns of the palm groves. Nestled in gloom as though uninhabited, the whitewashed cottages of Merior greeted his landing with wooden plank doors and pegged shutters shut fast.

The harbour stretched grey and empty as the land, choppy waters peppered with vacant moorings. The local fishing fleet would return with the dusk, as on any ordinary day. Up the strand, a sullen, black streamer of smoke spiralled on the wind from the site of Arithon’s shipyard. No fugitives had sought to cross the cordon of mercenaries that blocked Scimlade Tip from the mainland; the single lugger found setting fish traps in the bay had offered no hostilities when flagged down for questioning.

The name of the Master of Shadow had drawn a blank reaction from the crew. Also from every man and woman in the trade port of Shaddorn to the south, that advance scouts had waylaid for inquiry.

‘I wonder how long he prepared for our coming?’ Lysaer mused as Diegan strode up behind him.

The Lord Commander’s best boots were soaked from the landing, his demeanour as bleak as the surrounding landscape above chain mail and black-trimmed surcoat. ‘You know we won’t find anything. The shipworks will be a gutted ruin.’

A thorough search was conducted anyway, a party of foot troops sent to poke through the steaming embers of collapsed sheds under Diegan’s direction. Lysaer waited to one side, his royal finery concealed beneath a seaman’s borrowed oilskins, while the breakers rolled and boomed in sullen rhythm against the headland and the wind riffled wrinkles in the puddles.

‘The withdrawal was well planned,’ Avenor’s Lord Commander confirmed at length. ‘No tools were abandoned. These buildings were emptied before they were fired. We can send officers house to house through Merior all you like, but I’d lay sand to diamonds that Arithon left nothing to clue us of his intentions.’

Lysaer kicked the charred fragment of a corner post amid the rubble that remained of the sail loft. Scarcely audible, he said, ‘He left the village.’

‘You think he’ll be back?’ Prepared to disagree, Diegan pushed up his helm to scrape his damp hair off his brow.

‘No.’ Lysaer spun in a flapping storm of oilcloth and stalked to the edge of the tidemark. ‘The fugitive ship which burned before our eyes was the easiest chance we had to track him. Now that option’s lost, he’ll have the whole ocean in which to take cover. We’re balked, but not crippled. The stamp of his design can never be mistaken for merchant shipping. Wherever the Shadow Master plans to make landfall, I’ll find the means to be waiting.’

At twilight, when the fishing luggers sailed homeward to find their cove patrolled by war galleys and their shores cluttered with encampments of mercenaries, knots of shouting men and a congregation of goodwives converged upon the beaten earth of the fish market. A groomed contingent of Avenor’s senior officers turned out and met them to assure their prince would answer their complaints. By the fluttered, ruddy light of pitch torches, on a dais constructed of fish barrels and planks, the Prince of the West awaited in a surcoat edged in braided bullion. In token of royal rank he wore only a gold circlet. Against all advice, he was not armed. His bodyguard remained with the longboats, and only Alestron’s fleet admiral and two officers attended at his right hand.

Lord Diegan stood at the edge of the crowd. Surrounded by a plainly clad cadre of men-at-arms, his strict orders were to observe without interference. The restraint left him uneasy since the crowd showed defiance. Grumbles from the fringes held distinct, unfriendly overtones concerning the presumption of outsiders.

Lysaer gave such talk small chance to blossom into strife. ‘We are gathered here to begin a celebration,’ he announced.

The background buzz of speculation choked off in stiff outrage. ‘Yer war galleys scarcely be welcomed here!’ cried one of the elders from the boardinghouse.

Other men called gruff agreement. Lysaer waited them out in elegant stillness while the piped cry of a killdeer sliced the soughing snap of the torch flames, and the air pressed rain-laden gusts to flap sullen folds in the standards of Alestron and Avenor that flanked his commanding stance upon the dais. ‘The cask for the occasion shall be provided from my stores.’

‘We had peace before ye set foot here!’ called a good-wife. ‘When our fish wagon to Shaddorn’s turned back by armed troops, I’d say that’s muckle poor cause for dancing!’

Again Lysaer waited for the shouts to die down. ‘Your village has just been spared from the designs of great evil, and the grasp of a man of such resource and cunning, none here could know the extent of his ill intentions. I speak of the one you call Arithon, known in the north as Teir’s‘Ffalenn and the Master of Shadow.’

This time when hubbub arose, Lysaer cut clearly through the clamour. ‘During his years among you, he has exploited your trust, lured blameless craftsmen into dishonest service, and spent stolen funds to outfit a fleet designed and intended for piracy. I’m here tonight to expose his bloody history, and to dispel without question every doubt to be raised against the criminal intent he sought to hide.’

The quiet at this grew profound. Muscular men in patched oilskins and their goodwives in their aprons spangled with cod scales packed into a solid and threatening body. Before the ranks of inimical faces, Lysaer resumed unperturbed. In clear, magisterial elegance, he presented his case, beginning with the wrongs done his family on his homeworld of Dascen Elur. There, the s’Ffalenn bent for sea raids had been documented by royal magistrates for seven generations. The toll of damaged lives was impressive. Stirred to forceful resolve, the fair-haired prince related his eyewitness account of the slaughter at Deshir Forest. Other transgressions at Jaelot and Alestron were confirmed by Duke Bransian’s officer. He ended with the broad-scale act of destruction which had torched the trade fleet at Minderl Bay.

The villagers remained unconvinced.

A few in the front ranks crossed their arms in disgust, unimpressed with foreign news that held little bearing upon the daily concerns of their fishing fleet.

‘Is it possible you think the man who sheltered here was not one and the same person?’ Lysaer asked. ‘Let me say why that fails to surprise me.’ He went on to describe the Shadow Master’s appearance and habits in a damning array of detail. He spoke of innocents diabolically corrupted, small children taught to cut the throats of the wounded lying helpless in their blood on the field. His description was dire and graphic enough to wring any parent to distress.

Before Lysaer’s forthright and painful self-honesty, Arithon, in retrospect, seemed shady as a night thief. Natural reticence felt like dishonest concealment, and leashed emotion, the mark of a cold, scheming mind.

‘This is a man whose kindness is drawn in sharp calculation, whose every word and act masks a hidden motive. Pity does not move him. His code is base deceit. The people he befriends are as game pieces, and if violent death suits the stripe of his design, not even babes are exempt.’

‘Now that’s a foul lie!’ objected the boardinghouse landlady. ‘The shipyard master we knew here had as much compassion for children as any man gifted with fatherhood. The young ones adored him. Jinesse there will say as much.’

Lysaer focused where the matron pointed, and picked out the figure in the dark shawl who shrank at the mention of her name: a woman on the fringes, faceless in the gloom except for the wheaten coil of hair pinned over her blurred, oval features.

‘Lady, come here,’ Lysaer commanded. He stepped down from the dais. His instinctive, lordly grace caused the villagers to part and give him way. At her evident reluctance, he waved to his officer to unsocket a torch and bring it forward. Trapped isolate amid a sudden, brilliant ring of light, the widow could do naught else but confront him.

Golden, majestic, the Prince of the West did not address her on the level of the crowd. He caught her bird-boned hand in a sure, warm grip, and as if she were wellborn and precious, drew her up the plank step to the dais. He gave her no chance for embarrassed recrimination. His gaze, blue as unflawed sky, stayed direct and fixed on her face. ‘I’m grieved indeed to see a man with no scruples delude an upright goodwife such as you.’

Jinesse heaved a tight breath, her fingers grown damp and starting to tremble. She searched the heart-stopping, beautiful male features beneath the circlet and cap of pale hair. She found no reassurance, no trace of the charlatan in the square, honest line of his jaw and the sculptured slope of his cheekbones. His unclouded eyes reflected back calm concern and unimpeachable sincerity.

‘Forgive me,’ said the prince in a gentleness very different than the mettlesome, biting irony of the Shadow Master. ‘I see I’ve struck hurtfully close to the mark. I never intended to grieve you.’