The Curse of the Mistwraith (88 page)

Arithon moved not at all, but only closed tortured eyes.

‘Ath!’ said Madreigh. ‘Forget I ever asked.’ Then, in a queer catch of breath he caught Arithon’s wrist and clamped down. ‘Trouble’s here.’

A metallic click cut the quiet. The scout just sent off reached a distance of fifty paces then pitched in a spinning fall, a crossbow bolt through his neck.

Arithon broke free and flung Jieret violently behind him. ‘Boy, stay out of this, as your sovereign, I command you.’ His sword whistled up to guard-point, while he backed behind the thickest tree to hand, an old beech raked rough where bucks had shed their summer velvet. He pinned Steiven’s heir with his body as shield, while the clan scouts fell in around him to enclose the boy.

Their rush to reach the beleaguered women could have drawn them to spring the perfect trap. Hidden troops could lie anywhere in ambush. The crossbows were their greatest liability; shadows their surest defence. But Arithon dared not try his gift openly lest he pinpoint his presence to Lysaer, and invite an uncontrolled confrontation with the compulsions of Desh-thiere’s curse.

Three clansmen armed with recurves and full quivers began to climb the tree to snipe for the crossbowman. Arithon gave the shortest one a boost. Fast and furiously thinking, he said, ‘They have quarrels, why wait? Why don’t they drop us where we stand?’

‘They’re bounty-men.’ Madreigh showed a grim flash of teeth. ‘Arrow kills make fights over scalp claims.’

Quite probably the headhunters’ best marksmen would still be stationed on the rimrocks, or deep in the chasms of the grotto, where orders would shortly recall them.

‘The bolt had red fletching,’ Jieret added.

‘It’s Pesquil’s league that’s against us,’ another scout picked up explanation. ‘We’ll be surrounded already. They’ll attack us with numbers, hand to hand.’ He jerked his stubbled chin toward the exquisite weapon held steady in his liege lord’s grip. ‘I hope you’re good with that.’

‘We’ll know in a moment.’ Arithon withheld encouragement that his sorceries might offer them salvation. Any ward against combined assailants required time and concentration to arrange. No moment was given for response. From the glen that led toward the rimrocks, shadows flitted, and occasional chance gleams of metal. These fits and starts of movement resolved into a wave of charging foes. The instant before they closed, Arithon noticed worse: shouts, then the distant clash of steel as a skirmish broke out in the river gully farther downstream.

‘Caolle’s men?’ Alarmed, Madreigh added, ‘Ath, what could press them to strike openly? Etarra’s garrison’s still behind them. They’ll be engaged on two fronts and torn apart.’

Inarguable fact, as Arithon knew. But even Caolle’s blunt savvy could hardly stay fathers just come from discovery of the scalped and slaughtered bodies of their sons; clansmen who tracked the reivers upstream to find headhunters awaiting them in force, and who attacked without the knowledge that their families in the grotto were past saving.

‘If you pray, beg Steiven’s division won’t be with them,’ Arithon said.

Then the enemy was upon them. A rough face, a sword and a fouled set of gauntlets absorbed all of Arithon’s attention. Alithiel whined once, twice, in flurried parries. His opponent was large and heavy handed. Arithon lunged, then blocked another thrust. His riposte was controlled, an understated springboard for the feint which followed. A disengage on the next thrust finished the attacker. Arithon yanked Alithiel clear, sidestepped the headhunter’s dying thrash, and in speed that blurred, caught the next man behind in a stop thrust.

Hard-pressed himself, the adjacent clansman turned his shoulder to cover Arithon’s extended body through the moment of recovery. ‘Elwedd’s wasted a wager, I see. How’d the Masterbard know you were gifted at bladework?’

‘Escape this, and we’ll ask him,’ Arithon said.

Though joyless, the scout’s grin gave endorsement that his liege was capable enough to be entrusted with full share of Jieret’s defence.

Which fine point would shortly mean nothing, with the headhunters too thick to beat off and more of them coming by the second. Arithon saw this. Braced against the tree, forced to close-quarters, his style was cramped. Crushed moss and roots hampered footwork, and fallen enemies were adding to the hazard. The archers up the tree were less encumbered, but one of them already dangled head-down and dead in the branches. The headhunter crossbowman was still busy. Arithon could not see past the heave of the fighting to approximate his location. Another bolt whacked through green leaves and torn shreds of foliage spiralled down.

Inevitably more crossbowmen must arrive; and Caolle’s men could hardly drive a foray through to rescue Steiven’s heir since they could not know he was pinned down. Arithon beat aside a blade that thrust at him and fought a slipping stance in wet leaves. A friendly arrow from above dispatched the brute in the conical helm who shoved in to grapple, and Arithon escaped with a bruise and a graze. Behind him, Jieret had out his dagger, determined to enter the fray.

‘Not now,’ said Arithon. ‘Jieret, this isn’t your fight.’

Three swords came at him. He ducked one, felt the flat of a second jar his cut shoulder and met the third in a screaming bind. Locked steel to steel with an enemy, and exposed on his left side to fate, he saw his choices reduced to the one that, in Karthan, had undone him.

He must use magecraft to kill, or allow Jieret and Steiven’s grief-crazed clansmen to die as victims of Desh-thiere’s curse.

Arithon turned the wrist above Alithiel’s guard, felt his steel catch his opponent’s crossguard.

The headhunter anticipated the wrench that would leave him disarmed. A burly man, and well trained, he gave with the pressure, then grunted in surprise as Arithon’s right-footed kick added force to his counter-move and staggered him sideways. He crashed across other headhunters who thrust through an opening no longer opportune. Slashed and half-skewered through the side he went down, two men’s steel mired in his fall, and a third man bashed off balance into the tight-pressed advance of his fellows.

While the knot in the fighting swirled momentarily backward, Arithon dropped his blade, leaped and caught a treebranch, then swung hard. His boot lashed another attacker and upended him over the foeman who engaged Madreigh. ‘Guard Jieret,’ ordered Arithon. ‘What needs to be done, I can’t accomplish from here.’

‘You’ve got spells for a miracle?’ grunted the clan scout, his blade busy. He sidestepped into his prince’s vacated position, feinted low, and cut. Blood pattered down, filming the leaves, the tree-trunk and Jieret, buffeted and jostled by his defenders as he watched his liege lord hoist himself after the archers who were now, all three, dead of crossbow bolts.

Another quarrel snicked bark by Arithon’s head. He ignored it, gave a quick smile downward to Jieret which held more worry than reassurance. A sailor’s move and a slither saw him up and then prone on a treebranch.

Below him, Madreigh fought half-blind from a gash that trickled blood off his brow and right eye. Arithon drew his belt knife, threw and took down an opportunist who bent for a low stab at Jieret.

Madreigh finished the action by stomping the fallen man’s face. He said, blade-harried, ‘If you know something that’ll save us, just do it!’

Already two more clansmen lay dying, with another one wounded about to follow. Torn that such bravery should go wasted, Arithon stilled his nerves and focused his mind to cold purpose. The crossbowman perforce must come first.

He cast about the wood, but could not pinpoint the man’s cover. That was the bitterest setback, since his purpose must be accomplished without broadscale use of shadows, or any wide sweep of illusion that might terrify an army into rout. Unless he maintained his anonymity among the clans, everything that mattered would go for naught.

Amid a battle that assaulted concentration, Arithon distanced his senses, walled off awareness of everything outside a discrete sphere of air that immediately surrounded his person. The ward snare he shaped was risky and difficult, an amalgamation of illicit magelore and inspiration he would on no account have attempted to save himself; nor had he, to spare his own father.

But to Deshir’s clansmen, he was oathbound. Steiven’s people would never have faced annihilation if not for his tie to Rathain.

The forces he tapped were forbidden by any right-thinking mage. The tiniest miscalculation, just one slipped step and the vortex he fashioned could rend himself, the tree and the last of Jieret’s defenders. Arithon pitched the far fringes of his knowledge against dependency that, with his person offered as target, the town bowman would shoot to kill. The attention must be poised like strung wire: he must not feel his cut shoulder, must not rouse at the choke of dying men, nor even spare thought to question whether his clansmen might already lie slain. Ringed in perilous energies, Arithon touched the air,
became
the air, as one with its currents and small breezes that skeined through uncounted spaded leaves.

Air did not feel death: it registered screams only as rhythms, intricately concentric as ring-ripples spread through a pool. There was peace and the terrible beauty of Ath’s order, until a rip of turbulence bored through, swift and barbed for death as only man-made ingenuity could contrive.

Arithon closed the net of a ward just finished, but not yet tested for weaknesses. Too fast for care, too late for regrets, too utterly final to abort, the headhunter’s quarrel whistled in.

A small thing, the dart, comprised of a handspan of wood and steel, wound string, glue and dyed feathers; but a shaft notched and barbed, that sped with a force to pierce mail. Each particle of its substance had Name; each grain of its mass, an energy signature for which Arithon had subverted Ath’s order and patterned a banespell.

By nature, any snare of unbinding held a lawless compulsion to annihilate. Counter to the Major Balance and in parallel with chaos, frail strictures bent to harness the ungovernable were wont to spin dangerously awry.

In raw fact, Arithon’s effort was only plausible through a tangle of tricks and paradox, a loophole in the world’s knit that hinged on a theoretical blend of fine points: that the object to be over mastered was itself made for death, and that its uninterrupted natural action must set forfeit the conjurer’s life.

Everything,
everything
depended upon the headhunter crossbowman having scored a lethal hit.

And if the man was such a marksman and his aim did not drift, and the baneward successfully intercepted his bolt before the instant it broached living flesh, the result offered perilous instability. The safeguards contrived to limit the unbinding’s ill effects were by no means infallibly sure.

Doubts were all Arithon had, and stark fear, when the quarrel hissed into his defences.

To unmake any particle of Ath’s Creation came at hideous cost. Arithon shuddered, then blocked a scream with his knuckles as the mote he had captured exploded in a battering burst. Tied to his conjury, his body convulsed in a spasm that seemed to crush out his marrow as law and matter unravelled in a whistling rush of wild energies. Arithon felt the nexus of his uncreation graze his protections, burning for entry to twist, tear and unravel his whole flesh as well as any other thing that lay within range of its reach. Inflamed as though he noosed magma, he flung out the shielding second stage of his counterspell.

He deflected his ugly package of wrecked order through air, back along the disturbed eddies traced by the quarrel’s first flight path, then trailed with a stop-ward set to the resonance of wrought steel.

A hiss arced through space above the skirmishers that partnered no physical projectile. Arithon opened his eyes, running sweat and winded as if he had been whipstruck. With every nerve screaming he waited.

Until, behind a thin screen of alder, the crossbow exploded in the hands of its wielder.

Splinters and wound wire and metal burst like shrapnel and flayed the headhunter’s face. He dropped, choking, holes torn through his chest and his abdomen, and blood spattered like thrown ink across the bleached trees. The only bit of his weapon not fragmented was the trigger latch, the first steel to contact the spell and engage its limited safeward.

That stricture at least had worked and cancelled the unholy destruction. Arithon shivered in relief. Let there be no more archers among the enemy, he hoped, gasping as he clung to the treebranch. If there were, then Deshir’s clans were finished. He lacked stomach to repeat those defences. Torn by nerve-sick reaction, he regretted the victim, whose death was not needed, but who could not in the pinch of the moment be distanced from the means that destroyed his weapon.

Below the beech tree fighting still raged. Casualties mounted ferociously. Only five clansmen remained standing. Madreigh battled on one knee, his right arm useless and his blade in his left hand, parrying. Jieret had taken up Alithiel in braced readiness for the moment when his last adult defenders should be cut down.

Again, Arithon stamped back the temptation to grasp at the easiest expedient. Whoever he might spare by using shadow he could later kill without compunction in the grip of Desh-thiere’s curse. No risk was worth the chance he might draw Lysaer. Hedged by untenable choices, Arithon recouped a concentration that felt as if sloshed through a sieve. Need drove him again to abjure safe limits and to further violations of integrity that were going to cost bitterly later.

He must not think of that. Now, all that mattered was the preservation of Jieret’s life and after him, any other clansman who could be saved.

Clammy with chills, hollowed by weakness that sapped like the aftermath of fever, Arithon rested his cheek on the tree limb. He closed his eyes, inhaled the peppery scent of damp bark, and let that fuse with his being. He quieted. His clasped hands settled and sensitized to the languorous flow of sap. His thoughts became the whisper of leaves, the sunlit flight of pollinating bees, the unfurling of green shoots that thickened with each season’s turn, into stately crown and mighty wood branches. His consciousness spiralled down to encompass the thick black depths of earth, the firm anchored network of tap roots.