TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior Read online

  Sweat rolled through Dakar's fingers and snaked across his plump wrists. His breathing came now in jerks, while lard at his knees jumped and quivered.

  Eldir inclined his head toward Asandir. 'Perhaps I should wait for you without?' Mindful of his dignity, he side-stepped toward the door.

  Alone and defenceless before his master, Dakar covered his face. Through his palms, he said, 'Ath! If it's to be tracing mazes through sand grains again, for mercy, get on with your traps and be done with me.'

  'That wasn't what I had in mind.' Asandir advanced to the bedside. He said something almost too soft to hear, cut by a wild, ragged cry from Dakar that trailed off to snivelling, then silence.

  Eldir rushed his step to shut the door. But the panel was caught short before it slammed, and Asandir stepped through. He set the latch with steady fingers, turned around to regard the King of Havish, and said succinctly, 'Nightmares. They should occupy the Mad Prophet at least until sundown. He'll emerge hungry, and I sadly fear, not in the least bit chastened.' Between one breath and the next, the sorcerer recovered his humour. 'Do I owe you for more than your guardsmen's allotment of gold buttons?'

  'Not me.' Eldir sighed, strain and uncertainty returned to pull at the corners of his mouth. 'The oldest son of the town seneschal staked his mother's jewellery on bad cards, and I'm not sure exactly who started the dare. But the cook's fattened hog escaped its pen. The creature wound up in a warehouse and spoiled the raw wool consigned for the dyers at Narms. Truth to tell, the guild master's council of Ostermere is howling for Dakar's blood. My guard captain held orders to clap him in chains when the fight broke out in the kitchen.'

  'I leave my apprentice to protect you for one day and find you exhausted by a hard lesson in diplomacy.' Asandir's grin flashed like a burst of sudden sunlight. He laid a steering hand on the royal shoulder and started off down the corridor. 'From this moment, consider my apprentice removed from the realm's concerns. Your steward Machiel should be able to guard your safety well enough, since you've managed to hold Havish secure through Dakar's irresponsible worst. I've decided exactly what I shall do with our errant prophet and I doubt he takes it well.'

  'You'd punish him further?'The habits of an unassuming boyhood still with him, Eldir paused by the windowseat to gather his discarded state finery. 'What could be worse than harrowing the man with uninterrupted bad dreams?'

  'Very little.' Asandir's eyes gleamed with sharp irony. 'When Dakar awakens, you will send him from court on a travelling allowance I'll leave for his reassignment. Tell him his task is to keep Prince Arithon of Rathain from getting murdered by Etarra's new division of field troops.'

  Eldir stopped cold in the corridor. After five years, accounts were still repeated of the bloody war that had slaughtered two thirds of Etarra's garrison and left the northern clansmen feal to Arithon nearly decimated in the cause of defending his life. Motivated by a feud between half-brothers embroiled in bitter enmity; lent deadly stakes by the same powers of sorcery that had once defeated the Mistwraith; and fanned hotter by age-old friction still standing elsewhere between clanborn and townsman, the conflict had since brought the unified opposition of every merchant city in Rathain. The prince with blood-right to rule there was a marked and hunted man. Every trade guild within his own borders was eager to skewer him in cold blood.

  Havish's emphatically neutral sovereign made a sound between a cough and a grunt as he considered Dakar's penchant for trouble appended to the man called Master of Shadow, that half of the north wanted dead. 'I shouldn't presume to advise, but isn't that fairly begging fate to get Rathain a killed prince?'

  'So one might think,' Asandir mused, not in the least bit concerned. 'Except Arithon s'Ffalenn needs none of Dakar's help just now. On the contrary, he's perhaps the one man alive who may be capable of holding the Mad Prophet to heel. The match should prove engagingly fascinating. Each man holds the other in the utmost of scorn and contempt.'

  Petition

  The next event in the widening chain of happenstance provoked by the Mistwraith's bane arose at full summer, when visitors from Rathain's clan survivors sought audience with another high chieftain in the neighbouring realm to the west. Hailed as she knelt on damp pine needles in the midst of dressing out a deer, Lady Maenalle bent a hawk-sharp gaze on the breathless messenger.

  'Fatemaster's justice, why now?' Bloodied to the wrists, her knife poised over a welter of steaming entrails, the woman who also shouldered the power of Tysan's regency shoved up from her knees with a quickness that belied her sixty years. Feet straddled over the half-gutted carcass, the man's leathers she preferred for daily wear belted to a waist still whipcord trim, Maenalle pushed back close-cropped hair with the back of her least' sticky wrist. She said to the boy who had jogged up a mountainside to fetch her, 'Speak clearly. These aren't the usual clan spokesmen we've received from Rathain before?'

  'Lady, not this time.' Sure her displeasure boded ill for the scouts, whose advance word now seemed negligently scant on facts, the boy answered fast. 'The company numbers fifteen, led by a tall man named Red-beard. His war captain Caolle travels with him.'

  'Jieret Red-beard? The young s'Valerient heir?' Grim in dismay, Maenalle cast a bothered glance over her gore-spattered leathers. 'But he's Deshir's chieftain, and Earl of the North!'

  A state delegation from across the water, no less; and led by Prince Arithon's blood-pacted liegeman, who happened also to be caithdein, or 'shadow behind the throne', hereditary warden of Rathain. Maenalle let fly a blistering oath.

  Then, infected by spurious, private triumph, for she despised formality and skirts, she burst into deep-throated laughter. 'Well, they'll just have to take me as I am,' she ended with a lift of dark eyebrows. 'I've got time to find a stream to sluice off ? Good. The hunting party's off down the gorge. Somebody ought to go after them and let my grandson know what's afoot.' She bit her lip, recalled to the deer, too sorely needed to abandon for scavengers to pick.

  The young messenger offered to take the knife in her stead. 'Lady, I can finish up the butchering.'

  Maenalle smiled. 'Good lad. I thought so, but really, this should be Maien's problem.'

  Her moods were fair-minded enough to let the boy relax. 'Lady, if you both meet Prince Arithon's delegation reeking of offal, s'Gannley might be called out for insult.'

  'Imp.' Maenalle relinquished her fouled blade and took a swipe at the child's ear, which he ducked before he got blood-smeared. 'Titles aside, Rathain's warden is very little older than you are. If he cries insult, I'll ask his war captain to cut down a birch switch and thrash him.'

  Which words seemed a fine and suitable retort, until Maenalle's descent from the forested plateau forced an interval for sober thought. Chilled by the premature twilight of an afternoon cut off from sunlight, she entered the hidden ravine that held her clans' summer refuge. In silence, she numbered the years that had slipped past, all unnoticed. Red-beard was not a childish nickname. Jieret s'Valerient in sober fact was but one season older than Maien; no boy any more, if not yet fully a man.

  Small wonder the young scout had stifled his smile at her mention of birch canes and thrashing.

  Hatefully tired of acting the querulous ruler, and greeting nobody she passed, Maenalle crossed the dusty compound with its stinks of sun-curing hide. She barged into the comfortless but that served as her quarters, flicked up cuffs still dripping from her stream-side ablutions and slammed back the lid of her clothes trunk.

  Her hand hesitated over the folded finery inside, then snatched in sharp resolve: not the indigo regent's tabard with its glittering gold star blazon. Instead Maenalle shook out a plain black overtunic, expensively cut, and worn but once since its making. She would don the caithdein's sable, by tradition the symbol of power deferred in the presence of her true-born sovereign.

  If she still held the regency in Tysan, the office was not hers by choice; the s'Ilessid scion forepromised by prophecy had returned to claim his royal title. But the Mistwrai
th he had lent his gift of light to help subdue had avenged itself and cursed Prince Lysaer of Tysan to undying enmity against Arithon, Master of Shadow. For that, the Fellowship sorcerers entitled to crown him had withheld their sanction for his inheritance. Grieved beyond heartbreak for the betrayals which had forced their judgement, the realm's lady steward tugged the dark garment over her dampened leathers. She belted on her sword, firm in this one defiance. Let black cloth remind the envoy sent by Arithon of Rathain that the final call on clan loyalty in Tysan was not fully hers to command, however desperate the cause they surely came here to plead.

  A brisk knock jostled her doorpanel. Maenalle raked quick fingers through hair cropped close as a fighting man's, then straightened in time to seem composed as Lord Tashan poked his white head inside.

  'Your visitors have passed the last check-point.' The rotten old fox was smiling. As age-worn as she through long years of shared hardship, he would guess she was flustered; and in hindsight, the blighted black cloth was a mistake that would accent any pallor born of nervousness.

  Tartly, Maenalle attacked first. 'I could go and maybe lend a semblance of decorum if you'd make way and let me pass.'

  Before Tashan could move, she brushed by, still shrugging to settle the tunic over her shoulders. Canny enough not to query her forceful choice of wardrobe, the old lord hurried his limp to flank her, while dogs barked and dust flew, and sun-browned children in scuffed deerhides ran in a game of hunters and wolves through the streamthreaded shade of the defile. Built under cover on either side, the rows of ramshackle cabins sagged with the wear of storms and weather. If unglazed windows and walls laddered green under vines seemed uncivilized, Maenalle held no bitterness. Here, surrounded by inhospitable terrain; abutments of knife-edged rock and slide-scarred crags where loose shale and boulders could give way and break legs, the persecuted descendants of Tysan's deposed liegemen kept a grim measure of safety. Even the most fanatical town enemies were deterred from ranging too zealously for fugitives. Poor as her people were, at least the mountains allowed them the security to raise children under timber roofs and to keep horses in limited herds.

  The old blood clans elsewhere had far less in the centuries since the merchant guilds had overset kingdom rule, and headhunters rode to claim bounties.

  None of Arithon's envoy travelled mounted, which explained the scout's misleading first report. Maenalle reached the palings that served as the outpost's main gate just as the arrivals from Rathain filed through. Except for the eastern inflection as one commented, 'Ath, will you look? This place could pass for a village,' the party might have blended with one of her patrols. Jieret's band were weather-worn, observant to the point of edged wariness, and dressed in leathers lacking any dyes or bright ornaments. Their weapons had seen hard use, and every last man carried scars.

  The rangy, tangle-haired red-head who stepped out to present his courtesies was no exception. Near to her grandson's age he might be, yet when he arose from his bow and towered over her, Maenalle revised her assessment. The eyes that met hers were chilly and wide, the mouth amid a gingery bristle of beard, fixed and straight. This was no green youth, but a man of seventeen years who had seen his sisters and parents die in the service of his liege. Grief and premature responsibilities left their mark: a boy of twelve had grown up with the burden of safeguarding the north against the wave of vengeancebent aggression that had dogged his people ever since the year the Mistwraith's malice had overset Rathain's peace.

  In Tysan, where the feud between townborn and clan burned hotly enough without impetus from geas-cursed princes, Lady Maenalle shrank to imagine what extremity might bring this man to leave his native glens, to abandon his people and risk an overland journey through hostile territory to seek her.

  'My Lord Earl,' she murmured. 'Forgive the lacklustre welcome, but surely you bring us bad news?' She accepted his kiss on her cheek and stepped back, unwilling to test her dignity too long against the younger man's frightening sense of presence.

  Jieret bent upon Tysan's lady steward the unsettling intuition inherited from his late mother. 'We've surprised you.' The blood on her boots did not escape him, nor the reserve behind her caithdein's black. 'Let me ease your mind. We didn't call you back from the joys of the summer hunt to beg armed support for the sake of my liege lord, Arithon.'

  'Not hers to give, if you had,' grumbled Tashan.

  The comment fell through a misfortunate lull in the racket made by curious children. Stung into movement like a bothered bear, a grizzled, fifty-ish war captain with inimical black eyes elbowed past his young chieftain's shoulder.

  'Don't flatter yourselves for restraint.' Caolle loosed a clipped laugh. 'His Grace of Rathain's quite vicious enough on points of pride without anybody's outside help. He'd spurn even gold that fell at his feet, did it come to him struck with his name on it.'

  Unsettled to learn the prince himself had not backed this surprise delegation, Maenalle forestalled the airing of issues more wisely discussed in private. 'Your war captain sounds like a traveller sorely in need of a beer.'

  'Well, beer won't help,' Caolle groused. 'Just a fair chance at gutting that blond-haired prandey who lounges in silk, and sends every trained sword in Etarra and beyond thrashing the countryside to harrow us.'

  The trail scouts who guided the visitors stiffened, and a youngster close enough to overhear shouted, 'Hey! That man called our lord prince the Shandian word for a gelded pleasure bo-'

  Maenalle spun swiftly and grabbed the child by the shoulder. 'Don't say such filth. Your mother would thrash you. And you shouldn't be concerned with your elders' speech when to my knowledge you aren't on my council.'

  The miscreant gasped an apology, darted an enraged glance at Caolle, then sidled away as his lady chieftain released him. To the red-bearded caithdein and his grinning, insolent war captain, the steward of the Kingdom of Tysan finished in flat exasperation, 'By Ath, this visit of yours had better justify the aggravation.'

  To which Earl Jieret s'Valerient said nothing. That the two gifted men who had restored Athera's sunlight were entrapped in an enmity which bent their bright and deadly talents against each other was a havoc too heartsore for reason.

  Neither was he inclined to dwell on ceremony. Minutes later, seated by an untouched glass of wine across the planks of the outpost's scarred council table, he pulled a letter from the breast of his tunic. The dispatch was speckled with bloodstains. Since affairs between clans were never committed to writing, Maenalle's eyes flicked at once to discern which town seal impressed the broken wax.

  Deshir's youthful earl saw her interest. 'The seal was royal, and Tysan's.' A reluctant pause, then his quick movement as he offered the missive across the trestle. 'This was captured from a guild courier riding the Mathorn Road under heavy escort. A state copy, you'll see, bound for official record with the trade guilds at Erdane. Clan lives were lost to intercept it. We must presume the original reached its destination.'

  Maenalle accepted the folded parchment, its ribbons and gilded capitols done in the ornate style of Etarran scribes. She verified her kingdom's star blazon in its couch of indigo wax. Her glance at the flamboyant heading raised a flash-fire rush of antagonism. 'But our prince was disbarred from royal privilege! Why should he presume to write under Tysan's crown seal importuning the Mayor Elect of Korias?'

  'Read,' growled Caolle.

  White in dismay, Maenalle scanned down the lines, growing tenser and angrier, until even Lord Tashan's drywitted tolerance snapped. 'What's in that?'

  'A petition.' Jieret all but spat on the beaten earth floor. 'From a prince denied right of sovereignty demanding title and grant to lands and city. By claim of birth, Lysaer s'Ilessid seeks leave to restore Tysan's capitol at Avenor.'

  'He'll never get it,' Tashan said, halfway to his feet in indignation. 'Never mind that the merchant guilds won't stand a royal presence, the palace is ruins, now. Not one stone stands upright on a foundation since the rebellion wrecked the old order
. Past fears will prevail. Not a townborn mason would set foot there, haunted as they believe the site to be. And no clan in this kingdom can endorse a s'Ilessid claim without lawful sanction from the Fellowship.'

  'But that's half the point,' Jieret said, too emphatically calm for a man under twenty years of age. 'The trade guilds in West End have nothing to lose. If the old land routes are rejoined with the Camris roads, they'll gain profits. The Mayor Elect in Korias will draw up the documents just for the chance to slight royalty. He's isolated enough not to know your deposed prince has the finesse to create the impossible. Daelion as my witness, in just five years Lysaer's reconciled Etarra's stew of rival factions. He's got guild ministers and town councilmen kissing like brothers, and every independent city garrison in the Kingdom of Rathain conniving to exterminate my clansmen. If Lysaer can whip up armies to challenge a shadow master and a sorcerer, do you think he can't get walls and barbicans built around the shades of a few thousand ghosts?'

  'Royal sanction or not, your prince won't lack funds for his enterprise,' broke in Caolle. 'The towns are bothered to panic. To curry favour with the man whose gift of light offers protection against wild fears of Arithon's shadows, every trade guild owing notes to Etarra has offered their gold to fund armies. What townsman would pause to sort the difference between Arithon's feal liegemen and clanborn everywhere else?' Caolle slammed opened hands on the table, causing the thick planks to jump. 'Fiends! They're not so damned stupid, citybred fools though they be. If his Grace of Rathain turned up in any clan haven asking guest right, what chieftain would refuse him hospitality?'

  'Havish's, under High King Eldir, would be wise to.' Maenalle shut her eyes, her fist with the letter bunched hard at her temple, and her free hand nerveless on the tabletop.

  Unless and until the Fellowship sorcerers unriddled a way to break the blood feud engendered by Desh-thiere's revenge, the perils were too dire to deny.