The Curse of the Mistwraith (84 page)

This man, this bastard of shadows, had no scruple, but only an unholy passion for lies of a stripe that could cajole human sympathy, and then turn and without conscience rend all decency.

Quite aside from Desh-thiere’s curse, Lysaer rededicated himself to moral purpose. His half-brother, so gifted in magecraft and so superior in unprincipled cunning, was a blight and a threat to society. With a continent riddled with encampments of barbarians, each one a ready weapon for his hands, no bound existed to the havoc Arithon might choose to create.

Lysaer stirred. Seared to numbness by the enormity of his mistake, he bent, closed his hand and retrieved his sword. The blade he cleaned on his surcoat and the scout’s banality he ignored. ‘My horse is dead,’ he said crisply. ‘I shall need another.’

‘No man goes mounted with my headhunters,’ interjected a severe voice from the side. Unseen, unnoticed, Captain Mayor Pesquil waded the last strides toward the sandspit, several scouts arrayed at his heels. The interruption in his patrol had been noticed, and reported with a zeal that suggested his underlings knew what their posts were worth.

Lysaer disregarded the impertinence. Wide and unflinching in candour, his eyes transferred to the commander of Etarra’s league of headhunters. ‘This was my mistake. Since my ignorance has led to disaster, I’m ready to listen. But in one thing, I will not be swayed. Arithon s’Ffalenn will be stopped. And killed. And if you deem it necessary to slay children to keep a weapon such as Steiven’s clansmen from his hands, I shall no longer obstruct you.’

Pockscarred and twitchy with a flame of nervous energy, Pesquil’s black eyebrows arched. If he was startled, his mocking inquisitiveness stayed unblunted. ‘Did my Lord Diegan survive?’

‘I hope so. I sent him to cover on the bank with all of the men I had time to send out of danger.’ Tartly polite, Lysaer added, ‘Is the interrogation finished?’

Now Pesquil was astonished, and not quite glib enough to hide it.

Urbanely defensive, Lysaer said, ‘If my judgement was lacking, my first duty was to see the men didn’t lose their commander by it.’

The lanky, curled braid that Pesquil wore for battle slapped his cheek as he jerked his head. ‘To Sithaer with your honour. I would ask, rather, how you got any pedigreed scion of Etarra to agree to take orders from anybody.’

Now Lysaer’s expression turned arch. ‘Simply put, there are certain advantages to being born and raised a king’s heir.’ A heartbeat later, he smiled. ‘The nasty minded sort of arrogance that stops a man being gainsaid is one of them.’

‘Hah!’ Pesquil slapped his thigh in contempt; but around him, the men who knew him best hid grins. Lysaer saw as much, and understood they had reached an agreement. And so he kept his humour when Pesquil added, ‘Well, then, prince. There won’t be much advantage if you choose to keep up bleeding, and wind up keeled over on that horse.’

Stiffly, for his dignity balked at public handling, Lysaer extended his badly-wrapped arm that by now dripped messily scarlet. The man Pesquil signalled stepped forward, and with a deft expertise took charge. The binding and split bracer beneath were pulled away; the gash examined and bandaged.

Of the men, only Pesquil dared comment. ‘You’re lucky. The cut is deep, but it runs with the line of the muscle. You’ll scar but have no loss of function.’

Neither grateful nor relieved, Lysaer half-turned his face as his collarbone also was examined, the arm he did not need for a sword slung and strapped immobile. Beneath the hauberk at his neck as they had cut away the padding to probe the bone, his pulsebeat could be seen, heavy and rapid with anger. He said in a tone almost level, ‘How many do you think survived this?’

‘None.’ Pesquil squinted across muddied waters, while snarls of brush drifted by and a corpse trailed, moored by a rack of ripped trappings. ‘There would have been deadfalls, of course. Pits and spring-traps that rip to disembowel. These are Steiven’s clans you have marched on.’

When Lysaer endured this, still steady in silence, Pesquil’s lips quirked in a sneer. ‘Ah, Gnudsog, you are thinking. Why not say so? The veteran who saw fit not to question, despite his years and experience…’ The officer who led Etarra’s headhunters through a career of blazing obsession studied Lysaer with pity. ‘You should know, about Gnudsog, that his brother and young son died at the hands of barbarians. They fell with a merchant’s train on their way to East Ward, to attend a cousin’s wedding. Etarra’s great captain got his start hunting heads, as anyone would readily tell you. He stopped, because he loved it too much. Dearer than his own life, he once told me.’ Irked now, and bristling because this prince was listening sincerely, as no scion of fine pedigree would deign to do, Pesquil curled his lip. ‘If he thought he could kill a few barbarians, old Gnudsog would’ve thrown every soldier he had to Daelion and the pits of Sithaer.’

‘I was the one who did that,’ Lysaer corrected with quick acerbity; the scout finished with his dressings and withdrew, embarrassed as the discussion went on as if both men were private. ‘I thought I was waiting for you to say what was left to be done. We still have the companies on our flanks.’

Pesquil laughed, but softly. ‘Do we?’

And across from him, Lysaer’s gaze wavered, as cold remembrance touched him: that bad as the river had been, they had yet to encounter any shadows. He collected himself in a breath. ‘Are you afraid to find out?’

‘No.’ Come to his decision, Pesquil dispersed his scouts on a hand-signal. As they fanned out, efficiently soundless, and vanished in pursuit of lapsed duty, their leader backstepped into the shoaling waters of Tal Quorin. ‘Come, then, your Grace,’ he invited. ‘But this time, we hunt Deshans
my
way.’

In stealth, they worked upriver; past the sprawled dead with their eyes and their mouths clogged with mud; past scarlet-rinsed puddles and broken swords: and the destriers, the curve of their bellies like whales on a beach, but for the straps of breastplate and saddlegirth, or the brush-jammed arch of a stirrup. Lysaer did not flinch from the carnage. When Pesquil demanded that he rip the jewels from his surcoat to kill their chance sparkle in the sunlight he obeyed; for clansmen were stationed in these woods. Upstream, less faintly as they progressed, they could hear sounds of shouting, and the high, shrill screams of dying horseflesh.

The barbarians were still at their slaughter.

From pale, Lysaer had gone sick white. It took every shred of self-control and a humility more demanding than courage to keep still; to stay with Pesquil, moving silent from a thicket of reeds to the shadowy pool beneath a deadfall, keeping each step shallow, so their boots did not break water and cause a splash.

They stopped again. Lysaer clenched his teeth against the pain of his cuts and contusions, and the flaring stabs that resulted when his side or his collarbone was jostled. Movement came, ever so soft, in the fronds of a willow by the riverside. A scout returned. Head bent, Pesquil received the report.

Lysaer could not hear the words, though in the forest, no birds called. The rush and tumble of high waters had receded also, and the gnats were swarming, bloodthirsty. They bounced off his nose and his ears in maddening circles, and inhaling, he had to struggle not to sneeze.

From upstream, also, came silence.

Ankle deep in flat water, Lysaer gripped himself hard to keep from shivering in a paroxysm that had nothing to do with cold or shock. Several moments passed before he became aware that Pesquil stared at him from under half closed lids.

Under that piercing scrutiny, court training alone enabled him to speak with no reflection of urgency. ‘You have news?’

Pesquil’s upper lip twitched, then relaxed in a one-sided smile that held no shred of joy. ‘Shadows,’ he said clearly. ‘Shadows and traps, to the west of us. More traps and archers, over the ridge to the east. The flanking divisions have not passed unscathed. But unlike those drowned by Tal Quorin, there are numbers enough to stand, fighting.’

Arithon
was
here. Confirmation triggered in Lysaer a tumultuous anticipation.

In a vice of self control tighter than anything he had needed previously, the prince stayed his sword-hand from ripping blade from scabbard in a curse-driven lust to rend and kill. Etarra’s troops were still dying of his mistakes. Their needs claimed his first responsibility. ‘Up this valley there were living men left, just a bit ago.’

‘I know.’ Pesquil surged ahead, lightly mocking to hide admiration. ‘We’ll pass upstream first, never worry.’

The sun beat down and the flow of falling water subsided. Here and there, marsh reeds pricked out of beds slicked into herringbone patterns, dulled with a velvet of drying silt. The air hung thick and quiet. Lysaer chafed at this progress, which stayed slow since Pesquil insisted their advance remain cautious and covert. Tossed across the sheen of bared flats like wads from a rag picker’s pack lay the limp dead of Etarra’s garrison, conspicuously lacking both wounded and living horses. Not all had perished of drowning; not all bore macerating wounds. Lysaer paused in the act of stepping over the body of a petty officer, and the jolt of what eyesight recorded transferred like a blow to his belly.

The man’s throat had been cut.

Choked by an explosion of nausea, Lysaer felt a hand chop the small of his back and propel him forcibly onward. ‘Such surprise,’ Pesquil said sourly. ‘You didn’t really think, did you, that the river could’ve done for them all?’

The heat, the swimming reflections off wet mud, the fall of drops from draggled cattails all conspired to turn Lysaer’s head. He fought back the dizziness, enraged at how long he needed to recapture the semblance of self-command. ‘Whoever did this could not have murdered two divisions without suffering one single loss.’

‘Damn near,’ murmured Pesquil, paused to receive yet another report from a scout. ‘Lord Diegan is alive, at least. He’s downriver, safe, but unable to fight. My surgeon is just now picking an arrowhead and sundry bits of chain mail out of the gristle of his flank.’

But the news that Etarra’s Lord Commander had survived brought Lysaer little reprieve. ‘I’ve seen no barbarian dead.’

‘I have.’ The scout had silently vanished. Pesquil now scanned the wood ahead intently. ‘But precious few, my prince. No clansman will fight when he can ambush. He will not leave cover until his killing is accomplished and even then he’ll do so warily. To catch him and engage him, you must creep close and never let him sight you. And then you must lie in wait with the patience of almighty Ath.’ Pesquil suddenly froze and caught Lysaer back by the shoulder. ‘Don’t answer,’ he breathed sharply; and as the prince stiffened to his touch, ‘Don’t move.’

His attention was trained into the shadows, away from the lit expanse of flats. Lysaer too watched the forest. Past the sun-flecked dances of gnats, under the silvered boughs of beeches that upheld their vaultings of copper leaves, he saw gaping holes torn in the ground, and the slashed earth that marked where horses had struggled as the footing gave under their forelegs. He saw the white gleam of a fallen sword; the gilt fringes torn off a caparison; he saw too the bundled dead, with arms outflung, or hands slackly curled over the shafts of the arrows that had killed them. Through the raw beat of pulse through his veins, and a fury too bitter for expression, Lysaer forced himself to exhaustive search and to read, beyond omission, in ripped brush and scarlet-tipped stakes and desecrated flesh, the fates of the men who had fled the river.

Steiven’s clansmen had been nothing if not thorough.

A man whimpered, unseen in the gloom. Lysaer tensed to rise, prepared to succour survivors. Pesquil snatched him back with a grasp that jarred the broken ends of his collarbone, and also the cracked ribs in his left side that the scout who strapped him had not found. Next, Pesquil’s horny palm closed over his face, stifling even the hissed air that was all his expression of pain.

On a breath scented in garlic, Pesquil mouthed in his ear, ‘Keep silent. The wrong move, the slightest noise, and you kill us all.’ He maintained his suffocating grip, while, in cruel vindication of his warning, the unseen soldier’s suffering became cut off in mid cry.

There followed a bubbling sigh whose cause could not be mistaken. Somewhere very close by, barbarians were yet about their business of slitting the fallen men’s throats.

Slowly, deliberately, the headhunter captain released his restraint. Lysaer blotted his cheek where the studs of Pesquil’s bracer had gouged a scab, the look he returned a blast of stifled frustration.

Snake silent, the commander of Etarra’s headhunters dispatched a series of hand-signals to the hidden ranks of his scouts. Then he touched Lysaer’s wrist and crept deeper into the forest.

Progress was more cautious than before. Since deadfalls and traps might lurk unsprung between the trees with their matted mantles of creepers, Lysaer learned a headhunter’s way of probing the soil with a weapon before inching forward, and to stalk head down, careful to leave undisturbed any brush or vine or loose root that might hide the trigger for a spring trap. The scents of burgeoning summer foliage hung unsettled with the reek of recent death, and often the tufted mosses squelched under hand or knee with the wet heat of fresh-spilled blood. The gloom deepened. Ahead, his attention trained forward, Pesquil poised. With fingers pinched to steel to damp stray sound, he slowly, silently drew his blade.

Lysaer crept abreast and followed his guide’s line of sight.

Through a lattice of birches and black firs, a light-footed squad of boys busied themselves among Etarra’s fallen. Clad in deerskin, furtive in movement as wild creatures, they were there to pilfer weapons, Lysaer presumed; until his eye was arrested by a telltale glimmer of steel. Horrified incredulity shook him. The shaded depths of the thickets no longer masked the fact the boys’ hands were bathed scarlet to the wrists. Small fingers and sharp daggers ensured that town-bred wounded never rose. Before his stunned eyes he saw a son of Deshir’s clans end a man pleading for mercy with a practised slash across the windpipe. Other victims who sprawled unconscious, or moaned face down in their agony died as fast, of a well placed stab in the neck. The butchery was done in speed and silence, and ruthless efficiency without parallel.