The Ships of Merior (81 page)

Their cries cut Lysaer to the marrow and the heart. The disaster spread before him in wreckage and in suffering was no one’s fault but his own. He resisted the urge to knuckle his eyes to ease the raw sting of windborne ash. Nor would he bend to craven need and retire from view to nurse his despair in private.

He felt a fool.

Cold, bitter fury consumed him for the lapse that had cost him his fleet. Despite the heat of conflict, a ruler’s steady reason should have prevailed:
be ought to have known at once that the attacking fleet of brigantines could be no more than illusion.
Even under direction of a sorcerer, human craftsmen at Merior could never complete so many hulls since the shipyard’s founding the past spring.

Alone among his war officers and ship captains, Lysaer had held foreknowledge to unriddle this ruse in its fiendish turn of simplicity.

Eight years past, in a grimy back alley in Etarra, he had watched his half-brother spin a toy-sized ship out of shadow for the delight of a ragged pack of children. Small as that vessel had been, a creation of whimsical fancy, her execution and design had been perfect to the last detail. On the banks of Tal Quorin, Arithon had criminally proven his regard for the young was no more than a charade to lull suspicion and buy trust.

On Minderl Bay, for stakes unconscionably higher, he had repeated his game of illusion. Except now his ploy with ships had been cast in life size to enact a bloody toll in human lives.

Lysaer let the winds snarl his hair and dam back the tears he refused to shed in remorse. Shamed beyond self-forgiveness for the towering temper that had pressured him out of control, he ached in guilt-fed silence. How well his enemy had judged him. Teased into anger, baited to a rage as mad as his father’s in Dascen Elur, he had savaged the very sky with his gifted powers to ignite that chain of fire ships, and enact the very letter of the Shadow Master’s design.

How Arithon must be laughing, the poisoned depths of his adversary’s dishonour a personal and private triumph. Lysaer slammed a fist on cold stone until his knuckles split.

At his shoulder, Lord Diegan had to speak twice before his sovereign prince heard him. ‘Your Grace, if you insist on staying out here, at least allow your valet to clothe you in warmer attire.’

Lysaer succumbed to a violent shiver. He choked back the burst of undignified laughter that clawed for escape from his throat. In fact, he wore nothing beyond a holland shirt snatched in haste from his bedside. The tails flapped like flags about his naked buttocks; before the world, he offered a ludicrous sight, standing in plain view, chapping his muscular royal thighs.

‘I shall dress.’ His words fell remote through the clamour of bells from the quayside. As a war prince, he was remiss. His people had suffered a shocking setback. Whatever the enormity of his shortcomings, their morale must become his immediate care. His sorry error in judgement and his disastrous, misled defence lent no excuse to deny them support through his presence.

The garments he donned were cut from blue velvet and gold tissue, and his jewels, the best ones he owned. Arrived at the quayside in every trapping of state rank, Prince Lysaer met the oared boats with their pitiful cargoes and dirtied, ringed hands steadying their gunwales at the wharf. From the unremitting, ugly task of dealing with the losses left by his ill-turned defence, he spared himself no hardship. Nor would he acknowledge the whispers of adulation offered by Werpoint’s populace, who insisted his gift of light had spared their city from total ruin.

If word on the streets cast the Prince of the West as a hero who had beaten back the Shadow Master, many a stranded ship’s captain had cause to curse the fires spawned by his powers of salvation.

Grim-faced and diligent, his fine clothes marred with sea water, blood, and smeared tar, Lysaer faced down every ship’s master and sailhand to confront him with incoherent rage. To their faces, he rebuked them in
bracing, selfless dignity. ‘Do you think you’re the first to suffer for the wiles of s’Ffalenn? Did I never say his shadow-bending sorcery presents an unspeakable danger? If one glancing encounter makes you quiver and turn tail, leave now and count yourselves lucky to go living. My ranks have no place for faint hearts.’

In brisk, snatched moments between assignment of shelter and arranging care for the injured, Lysaer dispersed patrols of headhunters with tracking dogs. These scoured the southern coastline for sign of the fugitive crews who must have manned the enemy fleet of fire ships.

To the wounded who cried aloud for vengeance, he bent his bright head. ‘Stay alive,’ he entreated. ‘Any man hale enough to fight shall claim his due right to justice.’ The maimed were promised a haven for themselves and their families at Avenor. For the dying, the prince gave solace: on his knees in the blood-rinsed bilges of open boats, and on the docks, beneath the shadows of soldiers set to work hefting litters.

Premature twilight dimmed the sullied, ash-silted air. Relaunched under torch light, the longboats rowed now to recover a freight of cold corpses. Officers laboured under lamplight to tally the full count of casualties and to list any ship that repairs could restore and make seaworthy.

Then the headhunter patrols returned on lathered horses from their southbound sweep of the countryside, exhausted and worn at their failure.

‘Sorcery,’ the heavyset rider appointed as spokesman insisted to Captain Mayor Skannt. He cast uneasy glances at the shadows to each side of him, while his tired horse blew and dripped sweat. ‘We found no track, no sign. Not so much as the cinders from a campfire. If those fire ships were crewed by living men and not demons, then some trick of fell sorcery built them a bridge to escape across the face of the sea. Had they
trodden the honest earth, we’d have scared up some sign of them.’

Inclined to treat such fear as hare-brained fancy, Skannt gave the prince and the town council his report in the dockside warehouse set up as headquarters, his rapid-fire speech at odds with his slouched posture against the door lintel. ‘Had to have bidden a few dories under shadow, and a fishing smack to pick up swimmers,’ he summed up, succinct. ‘Your fugitives escaped by sail. Had they once come ashore, there’s no living way they’d have slipped past the noses of my tracking dogs.’

Lysaer silenced Diegan’s intrusive comment with a placating touch of one hand. ‘I didn’t expect the patrols to take prisoners. Arithon’s by far too clever to provide us loose ends and mistakes. But our sea captains needed the belief that we tried. The ones left unsatisfied with the result of your search will become the more diligent to pursue the criminals back to Merior.’

Skannt took his leave with a disdainful smile, the spark of the fanatic masked under lazy, half-lidded lashes.

The interrupted council resumed the grinding long list of its agenda.

‘What use to give chase?’ cried Werpoint’s withered harbourmaster. ‘The winter’s upon us.’ Crumpled on his chair like a heap of mouldered rags, he held onto manners through biting contempt, and managed not to spit while in the royal presence. ‘We’ve nary a handful of vessels not holed, and hulls with charred masts won’t sail anywhere. What armies you move must now go on by land, and the bay road’s a rough march as the weather turns.’

The grim knot of men in charge of supply lines exchanged glances in freezing lack of comment. The decision was going to have to be given within hours to disband the proud war host from Etarra. Ath’s storms
would hold for no man’s just cause, and soldiers brought to starving could not fight. Stockpiles in Werpoint were already drained from the prior demands of the fleet. No righteous need could change fact. The city had no more resource to spare the muster against Arithon s’Ffalenn.

As the mayor’s council heated into chin-jutting argument, and officers shouted and banged tables, Lysaer jumped erect and burst apart declaiming factions in a bristling show of royal outrage. ‘Will you not stop? Our men at arms are living! That’s reason enough to give thanks to Ath, that we’ll have them to fight again at need. We are reduced to sad choices, but all is not lost. Let us act well and use reason, and salvage whatever we may. Unless we wish to cede the Master of Shadow an easy victory, we must review what resource we have left and seek the one alternative that might make the next campaign unnecessary!’

And so began the sober process of remapping the assault over the wreckage of old plans.

Aid might be garnered from Jaelot and Alestron; a fast courier was dispatched southward through the post relay to Minderl, where petition could be sped on by galley.

‘How much of an army must we have to strike at Merior?’ Lysaer said in forceful conclusion. His trimmed blond hair feathered shadows over his ringed and tired eyes, yet weariness stole nothing from his character. No trace of his gnawing anguish flawed his voice or his bearing as he added, ‘The village there has no resources, no garrison, nor any natural advantage of landscape beyond its troublesome access. My troops from Avenor are hardened. They’ll survive a winter march. The core of our veterans from Etarra have the heart to weather setbacks. Let’s look to patch together a reduced fleet, and find captains stung to rage enough to sail them.’

Impelled by royal influence, the dignitaries of Werpoint and the factions of disgruntled officers plunged into a night of rapt planning. By first light, to a marvel of
swift decisions, the process of reorganization had been detailed and begun. Lysaer scarcely ate or slept. Every moment he could spare from arbitration and the thankless, unending task of smoothing the ruffled tempers of the merchants, he spent at the bedsides of the wounded or scribing letters to the widows of the dead. No detail was too small for his attention, no diplomacy too petty to express.

Men came into his presence worn, or frustrated, or enraged to the point of violence. Without exception, they left inspired to fresh purpose.

Sundown of the following day saw the bedchambers requisitioned for the royal suite cluttered under layers of nautical charts, discarded stacks of dispatches marked urgent, and plates of gnawed fish bones couched upon crusts of stale bread. The carpets were gritted with sand and soil from the tramp of petitioning officers. Red-eyed, hoarse from talking, chapped from prolonged exposure to the whipping winds off the harbour, Prince Lysaer s’Ilessid cast himself with irked force into the depths of a cushioned chair.

He looked pale enough to be ill. The speech just delivered to the garrison captains of Rathain had been a masterwork of hard statecraft. Thwarted in purpose, cast down in defeat, the prince had shown not a flicker of despair. While in the public eye of his troop captains, he had been the unbent picture of royal pride.

Only Lord Diegan could imagine the cost and the heartache such care for his following had cost. Every promise Lysaer had made had been ruined; every hope built over the course of eight years crumbled down in one hour of fire and trickery.

The main force would begin the laborious process of disbanding on the morrow, lest they starve where they camped in the onset of winter. The order should have caused mayhem, when trail-worn, hardened captains were told to turn back, and retrace the steps of every
brutal league they had crossed since departure from Etarra. No one spoke of the fatalities they would suffer from weather and sickness throughout the arduous march home. Brought to fighting pitch, forged into a magnificent weapon, they were to turn tail with their steel unblooded. The tight-knit purpose, the hard work, the tremendous expenditure of effort and gold: all had gone for naught.

Captain Mayor Pesquil lay under a stone cairn in Valleygap, his death reduced now to a sacrifice without purpose, another name on a list awaiting vengeance.

For Lysaer s’Ilessid, who had dedicated himself to the cause of Arithon’s defeat, there could be no more bitter a debasement.

From his place by the emptied command table, Lord Diegan waited for the officers, petitioners, and city councilmen who clustered in knots in the corners to clear themselves from the room. As the glitter of the last jewelled pourpoint disappeared in the shadow beyond the doorway, he knuckled his eyes, crusted and stinging from the documents and tactical maps perused for hours by candlelight. ‘Your Grace, you must rest. To recoup from this setback will be daunting enough. You’ll never stay fit if you drive yourself harder to ease what cannot be changed.’

Insurmountable problems would grow no less. What steps had been taken in salvage had been completed at whirlwind expediency. The markets were emptied of food. Those ships still fit to restock them had sailed for Jaelot, crammed with Avenor’s best troops; the rest were a loss, sad snarls of burned spars on the beachheads.

The tap at the chamber door was unwelcome, another needless, petty worry the s’Ilessid prince could do without, since every visitor came bearing his burden of complaints. Lord Diegan straightened sore shoulders as the mayor’s chamberlain poked in his head, his sorry, hound’s face a pale blur against the wilted lace of his
collar. ‘Your Lordship? Your Grace?’ He hurried to stave off rebuttal. ‘A sea captain’s here. He demands to be granted admittance.’

Lord Diegan lost his temper. ‘By Ath! Send him on with the others.’

‘I tried. He wouldn’t go.’ The chancellor’s flurried excuses cut off as Lord Diegan shot straight, hands mired to the wrists in the Utter on the tabletop.

‘What ever it takes, throw him out!’ A quill pen tossed awry by the Lord Commander’s agitation sliced in arced flight to the floor. ‘He can present his requisitions until the roof falls in and get no more joy from the effort. No stores remain to be issued.’

‘Your pardon, my lord.’ The chancellor coughed in forbearance. ‘This man bears no supply writ. He’s from the brig
Savrid
, and he claims on some authority to bear a message from the Master of Shadow.’

‘He has a whole ship?’ Lord Diegan cut in, astonished enough to relent. His query entangled with Lysaer’s clipped gesture to hasten
Savrid’s
master in for audience.

The seaman wore a merchant’s broadcloth. Fair haired, his sturdy frame fleshed on the spare side of corpulent, he had honest blue eyes and a wary stance on the carpet. The cap in his hands showed crushed prints in the velvet from the fretted grip of thick fingers. Too independent to bow before royalty, he bestowed a curt nod of respect. ‘My Lord Prince.’