The Ships of Merior (76 page)

These tidings afforded great hope. If the stone were recovered, not only could the disarranged humours of her body be drawn back into balance until the trials of her succession were surmounted, but means might be restored to quell damaging storms and banish disease,
and even to throw off the suffocating constraint imposed by the Fellowship of Seven.

In heady elation, Morriel locked eyes with her First Senior.

Lirenda’s flush in the heat of stunning news showed more than exhilarated eagerness: under her varnished layer of poise flashed a spasm of unguarded anger.

Morriel seized upon that oddity. Barbed with searching power, sped to sharp force by the spell crystal still meshed with her mind, her scrutiny lanced through the First Senior’s reserve to wrest out that sand grain of dissidence. Understanding followed like a hammer blow to rock. Lirenda’s displeasure stemmed from personal betrayal, that the Waystone’s location had been bought at a cost of endangering the royal fugitive at Merior.

Proof stung, that the prime candidate’s recurrent fascination for Arithon s’Ffalenn had indeed threaded deep enough to unbalance her grasp of affairs.

Pricked spiteful in displeasure, Morriel narrowed eyes like black pebbles and snapped an immediate order.

‘First Senior, I charge you to take the Skyron focus stone. Leave for Atainia and muster a grand circle of one hundred and eight seniors. You have one task: confront Sethvir and wrest back our Great Waystone. Fail in this, come back empty-handed, and you may consider yourself unworthy of your post.’

Expressionless as sculpted alabaster before the evident censure of her Prime, Lirenda returned a polished curtsey. Her back unbent, braided hair like chiselled jet under the flicker of spelled air, she said, ‘Your will is my pleasure. I shall not disappoint you.’

Morriel watched, arranged in brittle stillness as her appointed heir arose in fervent grace and departed.

To the elder still prostrate at her feet, the Prime cast a less jaundiced eye. ‘Put aside your fear, Haltha. Arise. You acted at great risk for an end you judged to be worth any sacrifice. Your service deserves due reward, but
necessity drives me. I lay on you my request for a small, additional service.’

The beldame straightened before her mistress, head bent in submission. ‘Matriarch, I am yours to command.’

Morriel lifted an arm reduced to bone wrapped in paper-thin tissue, twitched aside her shawl, and selected an orb from the array beside the opened coffer. She set its glass weight into Haltha’s hand and said, ‘Repeat the scrying you made for Lysaer s’Ilessid, which exposed Arithon’s shipyards at Merior. Let the man whose likeness you hold be given the selfsame knowledge.’

Permitted no leave to question, the senior enchantress cupped the sphere, which held the tormented reflection of the dishonoured captain from Alestron. ‘Your will,’ she intoned.

Outside the close chamber, like a sudden, clouding omen, a child in the courtyard started wailing. Worn beyond care for any infant’s painful trials, Morriel granted the weary senior her permission to retire. Alone in the chamber as the morning’s last sunlight retreated into chill shadow, she closed her eyes to resume meditation. Her ancient heart beat unburdened by remorse for the mischief she had loosed to hound the last heir of s’Ffalenn.

Should one rancorous, whip-scarred guardsman pursue his cherished vengeance and bring the Shadow Master’s death, or if his passion for murder simply fouled s’Ffalenn machinations and caused a fatal delay for Lysaer’s war host to exploit, the difference would be moot.

Arithon dead or maimed at second hand would disentangle Lirenda from the flaw that endangered her succession to Prime power. One last detail remained.

The instant Morriel felt restored enough to resume the burdens of her office, she demanded the attendance of her errand page.

‘I have a message for the duty-watch to be sent immediately by lane current,’ she commanded. ‘Initiate
Elaira is to be found and informed that my sanction for congress with the Prince of Rathain is as of this moment withdrawn.’

Indeed, against the prospect of a restored Great Way-stone, the woman’s assignation was no longer vital. Of far weightier import, First Senior Lirenda must succeed in her contest against Sethvir. Then stronger means would lie at hand to curb her ill-founded infatuation, if through brute luck, or thrice-damnable s’Ffalenn cleverness, the subject of her weakness mastered the odds against him and survived.

Informed on the lane surge at sundown that Morriel Prime has released her charge to seek liaison with Arithon s’Ffalenn, a bronze-haired enchantress in Merior weeps in gratitude for restored honesty, and in loss for shared love that must languish unpartnered; through the quiet, resolved hour as she packs to depart, she prays for the man, that he might stay free to refound his happiness with another …

In the deeps of the night, ripped awake by an uncanny, clear dream that tells where to find the sorcerer who had fired his duke’s armoury, a bearded blond outcast scratches old whip scars, arises, and begins a journey to Merior by the Sea to enact his sworn blood vow of vengeance …

On a rocky slope above Valleygap, on the day of his twentieth year that clan custom reckons full manhood,
a red-bearded chieftain called Earl of the North bends back his black bow, sets his aim on one figure above the crews who shift rocks in hot sunlight, and lets fly an arrow inscribed with the name of the killer who brought untimely death to a father, a mother, and four sisters…

The arrow launched. The arc of its flight was vengeance, ripping down from the heart of the sun, a hissing, humming resonance of parted air no experienced man of war could mistake.

Captain Mayor Pesquil of the northern league of head-hunters pitched himself down and sideways into cover one fatal instant too late. Before he struck ground, the four-bladed steel broadhead aimed to take him slapped into the small of his back.

He landed hard enough to slam the wind from his lungs and trip a frost-rimed hail of stones into rattling descent down the slope. Their noisy, bouncing fall through stunted brush and cracked saplings caused men to glance up from their labour with wagons and shovels amidst the boulders which jammed the road below. Pesquil snatched air to shout warning of attack, then gasped, wrung mute. A spasm clamped his muscles. He could not breathe, could not speak, but only hug the flinty soil, pain-white and clammy with weakness.

Felled in a helpless, curled bundle, his hands jammed into cold earth as if by main force he could wrest back his grip on self-command, Pesquil shuddered in the gravel. If
his scouts posted on the ridge line had not seen him go down, or if the others on watch on the low ground ignored the warning set off by disturbed pebbles, they deserved to be cut down for negligence in the raid about to sweep down the defile.

Pesquil strained to hear past the hammered beat of blood in his ears. Yet no more arrows hailed down. He picked out no shouts of alarm from his carefully-posted guard of scouts.

The unbroken quiet spurred him to a rage of colossal proportion.

He had always understood the snares at Valleygap had been fashioned to take down headhunters. Now, lying agonized in the scald of his own blood, Captain Mayor Pesquil cursed with ferocity: fool that he was, he had not understood until the endplay. Jieret Red-beard had blindsided him. Pressured too hard keeping others alive, he had never once thought to imagine himself as the ultimate, targeted prey.

Ring within ring, by spring-trap and rockfall, then the suspect boredom of two quiet weeks without incident, the last ambush in these inhospitable vales had been staged to deprive Lysaer of his most effective commander.

The patrol arrived. With breathless worry, they dispatched a runner to fetch help and bring in a litter. Pesquil lay slit-eyed and gasping, cut at each shallow breath as the sawing bite of the arrow lacerated more vital tissue. Throughout the ordeal as they raised his limp weight and arranged him face-down to be carried, he mouthed silent curses against the clan name of s’Valerient.

Twilight settled early in the pit between the hills. Pesquil became aware of a dimness thick with mildewed canvas, musty wool, and the hated, dank smell of
crumbled shale that pervaded the gap’s deep ravines. The hospital reek of medicinal herbs and an uglier stink of charred flesh lifted a curl to his lips. A mauling throb in his back and the virulent sting left by cautery played over every ugly bit of trauma imposed upon his body to remove the barbarian arrow. The injury was bad. He needed no doomsaying healer to tell him.

Prone on a camp cot, hating the jelly-limbed lassitude that kept him there, Pesquil held no care at all that the coverlets cast over him were woven silk, emblazoned with the star of s’Ilessid.

The first he knew of Lysaer’s presence was a stir of movement at his bedside, inflected with a gleam of gold hair.

‘Dharkaron’s divine vengeance, Prince,’ he ground out. ‘You must have better to do.’

‘If that’s true, you’re not fit to give orders.’ Lysaer made an imperious gesture. Across the field tent, a servant shovelled out from beneath a chinking pile of horse trappings, tossed his oil rag into the lap of a hovering page, then hastened to bear his lamp to the bedside. The prince took the light, excused the man, and hung the carry ring from a chain on the ridge pole.

He seated himself again beside the cot, in no apparent hurry to depart. ‘The day brought no more attacks. Harradene’s division cleared the last debris under cover of canvas and shields. You can rest easy. The war host is intact and still in high heart, and the way through Valleygap lies open.’

His stubbled cheek rough against the sheen of silk pillows, Pesquil tracked Lysaer’s presence with slitted eyes. He fastened unerringly on the single fact left out. ‘So my patrols found no sign of the archer. Tell Skannt to triple his sentries. When the supply train arrives, don’t trust the stores. Test the biscuit and cheese on my tracking dogs.’

‘I should have expected you’d not shirk for sick leave.’
Lysaer smiled with that grave arrogance that seemed inborn into old-blood princes. ‘Before you get wrapped up in duties that can wait, I thought you’d like the chance to study this.’ He bent, raised the limp, dry hand that trailed outside the bedclothes, and pressed a sharp object into the captain mayor’s palm.

‘The broadhead removed from your back,’ the prince said.

‘I see that.’ Pesquil turned the razor-sharp edges of the steel, nicked here and there from the healer’s probe that had grazed and slipped through the effort to draw it out. The lamplight skittered and flared across the flanges, which were not smooth, but gouged with lettering gummed black.

‘If that’s an inscription, I can’t focus just now.’ His flame of nervous energy quenched by lethargy and pain, Pesquil’s disgust emerged as a querulous snarl. ‘Too many drugs. I recall asking not to be dosed.’

The healer would never have held himself steady through your screaming,’ Lysaer said in gentle censure. ‘He had to dissect half your backside. If you hadn’t worn silk beneath your gambeson, he’d never have cleaned the wound at all.’ The prince did not share the cold truth, that no soporific posset troubled Pesquil’s concentration. Despite every effort and a brutal round of cautery, Pesquil’s sunken flesh and fevered skin affirmed the healer’s prognosis: the wound was still bleeding inside. ‘Do you wish to know what that says?’

‘I can guess, sure enough.’ But Pesquil stirred in fretful effort to pass the broadhead back.

Lysaer turned the steel blades. ‘The letters on the first blade say,
“from the son of the Earl of the North”.’

‘Jieret s’Valerient, I thought so.’ Pesquil shut his eyes, his sallow complexion paled to rubbed ivory, but without the grace of patina. His skin hung paper dry under the flutter of the lantern. ‘Go on.’

The next says,
“for my lady mother, and four sisters”
,
and the next,
“for the slaughtered innocents by Tal Quorin”.’
Lysaer trailed off into silence, his eyes, cold blue, on his injured officer, and his hands prepared to mete out a bracing restraint in case rage turned the wounded man distraught.

Pesquil stirred, impatient, a hissed breath caught through his teeth as the agony in his back snapped him short. ‘The last engraving would show my name. You’ve never seen a clan vengeance arrow? Stay lucky, my liege. Few men survive them.’

The hesitation which followed affirmed Pesquil’s suspicion, that the sucking black weakness which raked him boded no good: the prince’s long-faced healer had surely pronounced him to be dying.

‘A barbarous custom,’ Lysaer said in what seemed a disjointed interval later.

Had Pesquil been hale, he would have laughed. ‘The clans weren’t first with that practice. Townsmen during the uprising assassinated the High King of Havish with a sword engraved with his lineage.’ Too close to his pass beneath the Wheel for tact, he ended on a wisp of scorching irony, ‘You should know well, Prince - since you carry a blade specially forged to kill a sorcerer.’

The prick struck home: the sword in Lysaer’s scabbard since the hour of his march on Tal Quorin bore his enemy’s name in reverse runes.

Whatever Lysaer replied, Pesquil did not hear. The throttling pull of dizziness had dragged him too deep to unriddle spoken conversation. Like a spark whirled in downdraught toward the nadir of night, the bullish, stubborn thread of his thoughts spiralled off into emptiness. He was too tired, too thirsty, too cold. A siren song of lassitude sapped away his will to wrench the world back to clear cognizance.

And yet, one thing remained. Today’s arrow had proven that a lifelong antagonist had sired a worthy son to succeed himself; Pesquil pushed back against his
shroud of fogged wits. He gathered breath against the dreadful gnaw of pain and said, ‘Lysaer s’Ilessid, fetch your scribe.’

A horrid, fraught interval passed, while he clung to awareness and waited. Patchy vision showed him movement and a voice nearby said something urgent. A cup pressed his lips, filled with cold water and a bracing unpleasant sting of herbs.