The Ships of Merior (25 page)

Thousands had died. For the sake of those lives thrown away through irresponsible haste, he must hold fast to his plan.

Arithon was ruthless, a sorcerer.

No matter how eager the troops were to fight, their
commanders must never again be left at liberty to underestimate the foe they raised arms to destroy.

Lysaer snapped away from the window to pace the carpet. Beyond the shut casement, a homeward bound drunkard riled the headhunters’ tracking dogs. The kennelled pack erupted into sharp, excited barks, answered by every alley-strayed mongrel, and the shriller yaps of a lapdog cooped up by a merchant’s wife. As frustrated by his own inactivity, vexed still by overplayed nerves, the prince caught up a dozen fresh candles and lit them one by one. Rinsed in patterns of moving flamelight, he brooded over certainties he could not put into words: that the needling, insatiable drive that ate at him day and night, to seek out the Shadow Master and see him dead, was not a force to heed reason.

He controlled the urge by iron force of will, his every act bent to serve the people whose safety was his pledged responsibility. If he weakened before the drive of antipathy, if he gave way to the exhortations of Etarra’s Lord Mayor and allowed the combined eastern garrison to march too quickly, many more lives might be ruined.

Even still, the need to wait for new gold to be levied through Rathain to fund his endeavour in Tysan chafed raw holes in his patience. The passage of solstice had spurred a restlessness in him that mounted now to a screaming ache. He started under sunlight at ordinary shadows. He sweated each minute in directionless certainty that
some
new development was afoot.

The letter just delivered by west-bound courier, that affirmed the dearth of rumour concerning any sorcerer who matched the Master’s description, did nothing to ease his conviction. Despite the unified support of Rathain’s cities, Pesquil’s headhunters had routed out no barbarian camps through the past three summers’ campaigns. Their scarcity compounded his certainty that the clans had organized as well.

Lysaer beat down his angry passion. The lesson
instilled by Tal Quorin’s massacre was his charge and his personal burden. The lack of any target to strike at was a frustration his allies must be cajoled to abide. Against the Master of Shadow, any weakness in them would be turned to grievous liability. The campaign that succeeded must have no such flaw to exploit.

Lysaer well respected the two-edged, deadly game the Teir’s’Ffalenn was wont to play.

Restored back to regal equilibrium, he caught the cloak’s rich fabric about his damp flesh. A small smile turned his lips as he reviewed the engineer’s drawings of Avenor’s proposed fortifications. However well-intentioned, his commander at arms was mistaken. A woman in his bed could never blunt his ardour to see Rathain’s prince bleed on his sword. Yet by Ath, if he had to set the example of restraint, a gesture was needed in counterbalance.

‘I shall send a rider west to Karfael tomorrow,’ Lysaer resolved. ‘Let my writ be given to the merchants’ guilds, that a thousand royals in gold will reward any man who brings back confirmed news of any unnatural event. Arithon of Rathain is a sorcerer. Sooner or later, he must make a mistake, or be forced by circumstance to show his hand. The Mayor of Etarra will send out additional couriers. Our troops can train here while Avenor’s rebuilt.’

Made aware by the stillness that his frustrated humour had transferred like contagion to his commander at arms, Lysaer tossed back gold hair and laughed. ‘Don’t you see, Diegan? Well twist even time to our advantage. The longer Arithon hides, the further he runs, the larger the army we’ll have ready on the field to slaughter him.’

‘I don’t know where you find your tolerance.’ Diegan arose in one nettled movement, jerked open a cupboard, and hooked out the flagon of wine he needed in sudden desperation. He scrounged up two goblets and poured. ‘But no doubt that’s the only way well have a net strong
and wide enough, that a conniving sorcerer can’t slip through.’

Lysaer accepted the glass he was offered. Candleflame burned hot reflections in his eyes and bloodied the depths of the wine as he touched unsmiling lips to the rim and swallowed. ‘Depend on that, Diegan. Let’s both drink a pledge to that end.’

Diverted from his course to check on the Mistwraith’s prison at Rockfell Peak, Asandir drives his black stud at urgent speed through grey dawn, over the long unused southern pass through the Skyshiels toward the lowland road that skirts Eltair Bay…

Lee-rail awash against whipping morning winds, a trim brig under command of a laughing captain threads in dancing flight between the shoals that whiten the channel through Vaststrait, while three galleys packed with armed men and bearing official requisitions for boarding and confiscation of contraband thrash to windward in futile pursuit…

Under summer noon on the arch above Erdane’s west wall, Lady Talith watches her betrothed and a picked guard of troops begin their march to the ruins of Avenor; and though her finger bears the diamonds and royal
sapphires as token of Lysaer’s pledge, she twists the jewelled ring in stiff outrage, that his will to keep her safely sheltered has compelled her to stay behind…

Armed guards swept house to house through Jaelot. The shaking pound of their boots up loft stairways, and the mailed assault of fists on wooden planking disturbed sleepers, as they banged open root-cellar doors and riffled through dusty attics in search of last night’s fugitives. Their fervour suffered frenetic confusion as city officers in charge of the hunt embroiled themselves into vociferous, fist-waving arguments. By daybreak, in cold reason, no two groups could be reconciled over the physical appearance of Halliron Masterbard’s apprentice.

The criminal fact remained that his sorcery had dismembered half their city.

Eyewitnesses from the mayor’s feast hall only convulsed the quarrel to fresh hostility, a complication that provoked disgruntled shop owners; ones whose wares had been spared from the vortex of the lane surge, only to be ransacked and turned upside-down to satisfy the suspicions of furious officials.

The prime suspect stayed undiscovered, along with Halliron and the stout convict for whom his Masterbard’s word had sworn surety.

Half the morning passed before the meaty-faced ostler
who ran the livery stables by the gatehouse was shaken awake to be questioned. Twitching straw from the clothes he had slept in, and belligerently cross from a headache, he worked his stubbled jaw around a yawn and frowned at the captain who pressured him. ‘Pony cart? Yes, one was quartered here last night. A dark man came for it, very late. A fat man was with him.’

‘Dark?’ yelped the beribboned secretary of the alderman. He bounced on his toes and flapped his hat behind a stifling press of bystanders. Since no one gave way to admit him, he jettisoned dignity and burrowed like a mole through the ranks of gawping grooms and nerve-jumpy men at arms. ‘How do you mean, dark?’

The ostler hawked, spat on the cobbles, and squinted as though at an imbecile. ‘Black hair. Do I look blind?’

‘You’re sure?’ the secretary pestered. ‘It was night. You aren’t mistaken? His colour could have been brown?’

‘Dharkaron! Do I look stupid too?’ The ostler jabbed off an obscene gesture. ‘The man was dark as coal soot. Green eyed, he was, and quick with his tongue as a flayer’s knife. Lordly bad tempered, not to be denied, and no, he didn’t say where he planned to be going!’

‘Sorcerer’s likely past the gates by now,’ yelled a drayman perched on his load of corn sacks. ‘You want him, why not chase him down?’

But none of the guardsmen on gate watch had seen any fugitives escape. Sweating over this setback in the breezeless haze of noontide, the commander of Jaelot’s garrison cleared his throat and diffidently tried to shift the blame: the minstrel and his party must have slipped out of Jaelot by boat.

Turmoil transferred to the dockside as fishing smacks were commandeered to sweep the coves and the bay. To placate the sloop captains who grumbled in disagreement, mounted patrols fanned out to scour the coastal road.

The cart and its widely-sought occupants by then lay well south, pulled up in the sticks of a hazel copse to evade the headhunter teams who rode in hot hopes of a bounty. Freckled with sun-dolloped shade and fuming biliously, Dakar the Mad Prophet straddled the driver’s seat, the lines hooked over his raised knee. Never a spirit to hold a grudge quietly, he cursed fate that relentless pursuit out of Jaelot should befoul his raw urge to pick a fight.

‘You asked for cold water?’ Sullen as a bear with a canker, he tipped his chin over his shoulder. ‘There’s a glacial stream down that gully.’

The royal personage he addressed unfurled from a tortured crouch in the wagon bed. Arithon surveyed the surrounding thicket through sweat-plastered strands of black hair. Taxed by the effort to raise himself, he climbed over the pony cart’s tailboard. The Mad Prophet observed in viperish satisfaction as he made his way downhill, ill-balanced as a man with a gut wound. The backlash he suffered was doubly well deserved, Dakar thought; the earth power wantonly channelled through Jaelot was enough to scour sanity and leave any mortal deathly sick.

Galled past forgiveness for the trick which had played him straight into Asandir’s design, the Mad Prophet curbed his impulse to bash his fist on his leg. ‘Bastard,’ he mouthed after the form that lurched down the stream bed.

A slurred objection arose from the blankets nested in the wagon bed. ‘How unoriginal. If you’re minded to try insults with Arithon, you’ll need something better than a truth he’s likely bored with hearing.’

‘Halliron?’ Diverted from his angst, Dakar twisted further to find the Masterbard wakened and regarding him.

The old man looked unwell, his complexion sickly grey except where a spreading, mottled bruise blackened his cheekbone and temple. Since the appalling blow that
had felled him, he lapsed often into unconsciousness. The muscles on the battered side of his face sagged in paralysis; the opposite eye, tenuously open, was black and unnaturally dilated.

Aware such symptoms boded ill, Dakar vented his heartsick frustration against Arithon. ‘You’re an outright fool to defend him. And twice the fool, for last night. You shouldn’t have let him talk you into travelling.’

Halliron’s lips twitched in lopsided resignation. ‘Better to be uncomfortable than dead. Which we would be, make no mistake, had we tried taking cover in Jaelot. I never liked their mayor’s penchant for burning accomplices to sorcery alive on a pile of oiled faggots.’ Palsied fingers fluttered and plucked at the blankets that springtime’s moths had pricked holes in; gravely, the Masterbard added, ‘I heard what Arithon played. All of it. His art crossed the bounds of unconsciousness. There’s a greatness in him now that even you must appreciate.’

‘By force, and in wretched sobriety,’ Dakar answered, his eyes upturned and venomous, and glazed in reflection with a sun-caught matting of summer leaves. ‘There you have my troubles in a nutshell.’ He would have capped with epithets, had the passage of more mounted lancers not precluded the wisdom of retorts.

“You’re not inclined to go back either, I see,’ the Masterbard observed dryly.

Dakar lapsed into glowering silence until the object of his spite returned to nettle him. Back from the gully, stripped down to shirtsleeves and hose, Arithon held in shaking hands the tunic he had just soaked in stream water. Braced against the wagon side, he forced the concentration to fold the garment into a compress.

As he bound its wet cold to ease the Masterbard’s ugly swelling, the old man made an effort, but failed to damp the shudder of pain that recoiled through his frail body. ‘It’s poor thanks you’re getting, for winning us passage out of Jaelot.’

‘I beg your pardon.’ Pale himself as torn parchment, and scruffy from strain and lack of sleep, Arithon dredged up a smile. ‘Dakar has shown astounding generosity. He’s made six offers to abandon me, and I have accepted each one.’

‘Just wait until we reach Tharidor!’ the Mad Prophet snapped in choked fury. ‘Then I promise, you’ll see me keep my word.’

With that maddening, false complaisance which had marked his alias as Medlir, Arithon raised his head. ‘Well if that’s true, you can help by watering the pony.’ No change of stance offered warning; he shot a hand into the stores box, hooked out the leather bucket, and in pure s’Ffalenn temper pitched it at Dakar’s middle.

The Mad Prophet fumbled the catch. Smacked hard in the gut, he whooshed out a gusty belch of air that cost him the breath for rejoinder. As he stalked off in stick-snapping pique, the Master of Shadow resumed with unbroken mildness, ‘How are you feeling?’

Halliron closed his functional eye. Denied its vibrancy, his seamed skin draped like wet paper over his nose and cheekbones. His eyebrows sketched a pale smear above sockets sunken into his skull. ‘My bones don’t take kindly to knocking about,’ he admitted on a near-soundless breath.

Arithon swallowed. Sorrow overcame his spent strength. He shored up his weight on clenched fists; and for long-drawn, agonized minutes, only the fluting calls of thrushes plinked through the gurgle of brook water. Yet another company of mounted lancers thundered past the bend in the road, while below the bank of the gully, Dakar cursed and blundered to a chorus of thrashed bracken and turned stones.

‘Arithon,’ Halliron said with sudden force, the more wrenching as numbed lips slurred his speech from its trained and mellifluous clarity. ‘You must inherit my lyranthe. My left hand has lost feeling. The fingers won’t
move. Let the last song I leave to Athera be the musical tradition you continue.’

The knuckles clenched against the wagon boards flexed once in soundless protest. Beyond that, Arithon never moved. His answer came simple and steady. ‘I’d be honoured.’

Released as if cut from a wire, the Masterbard relaxed beneath the blankets. ‘Bless your directness.’ A half-smile tugged his seamed cheek. ‘You shall be great. I’m not wrong. Your skill shall surpass my best talent, perhaps restore the grace of the Paravians our troubled kingdoms have forgotten.’