Fugitive Prince (42 page)

The vision spun away like a scene in dropped crystal.

In its place, Dakar viewed the high frame of the scaffold. As if he were drifting unseen as a spirit, he saw Riverton’s executioner flick the gore from his wide, fullered blade. Bloody handed, the man shed his hood. His stubbled, lantern jaw pebbled the light like red sand-stone as he ran his gloved fingers over his sword to test for nicks in the edge. Behind his set profile, the three condemned clansmen sagged naked and broken in death. The posts which held them spread-eagled stood as pillars against the stars, flicked into coppery, shifting relief by the streaming billow of the torches. Slack fingers still wore the glazed sweat of suffering. Unclotted blood seeped, glistening, from the corpses’ hacked chests. Dakar failed to banish the horrific vista before his seer’s gift veered sighted dream into nightmare:

The gaped-open maw of dead jaws clicked shut. Glazed eyes swiveled in slackened, dead faces and fixed in reproach upon him. Then dead tongues stirred in dead mouths. ‘We failed in our task. Our life’s charge becomes yours. Warn the Teir’s’Ffalenn! Forsake plans in Riverton and see him away before sunrise. Lysaer s’Ilessid marches from Hanshire to close a Koriani trap…’

The whispered chorus of the slain leached into a future scourged through by light like a cleaver:
a storm-torn night ripped apart, and the air recoiled to a fell slam of thunder. Ripped out of darkness, a mercury ocean frothed and boiled into steam. Like dropped spills touched to flame, a thousand riven fragments of cordage and wood rained down upon the flecked foam. The wrecked shreds of ships and the frayed wisps of charred sails hissed through the roiling vapors…

Dakar screamed for the agony of a world gone mad, and then knew nothing more.

The stink of rat urine and musty, rotted straw told Dakar where he was before he opened his eyes. His scapegrace past had dumped him, manacled or caged, in city dungeons times beyond counting. The
drip of condensation down nitrous walls seemed common to stone cells everywhere. Nor was he stranger to the twinge of stiffened bruises, or the dull, throbbing aches brought on from an unconscious night lying supine on dank floors.

A headache of exceptional virulence made him feel as if demons with steel hammers played carillons on the bones of his temples. Through excruciating pain and the soured taste of vomit, Dakar clutched his crown to keep his skull from flying to pulverized bits between his fingers. His brain felt like jelly mashed through a sieve. The evils of strong drink were never so punishing. By contrast, vile sickness and palsy never failed to afflict him after an episode of prescience.

Against the grandiloquent maceration of his hangover, a racket of echoes spiraled down a stairwell: “…disorderly conduct, attacking royal guardsmen, not to mention disrupting the peace at a public function.” The speaker added in nasal superiority, “There’s certain to be a stiff fine.”

Dakar plugged pudgy fingers in his ears, too late to evade the dismal conclusion. “Those who can’t pay get hard labor on the hulks towed out for dredging the harbor.”

The talker scraped to a stop outside the barred cell gated shut with riveted-steel strapping. “He’s in here. You did say the man you want’s the fat loony?”

Dakar cracked an eyelid and winced through a spearing dazzle of torchlight. “Is it night, or next morning?” he rasped. He could not recall why he felt nagged by a shadowy sense of urgency.

No one gave him answer. Outside the cell, hatched in squares by forged bars, Caolle flourished the slate he carried to overcome the glamour which slurred his clanborn accent. His tough, swordsman’s hands scrawled sincere imitation of a yokel’s straggling script, then thrust the message under the turnkey’s beaky nose.

“You say he was drunk?” the jailer huffed. “That’s no excuse. You’ll find the offense with the minor charges listed after disorderly conduct. The fat wretch is your friend? Then toss a penny in the tide to give dame fortune her due. If the raving idiot hadn’t been sotted witless, our guards would’ve seen him spitted beside that pack of condemned barbarians. Best take him in hand. He won’t have a long life, showing pity for that breed of felons.”

Caolle scratched out a new sentence, then flipped his slate like a tray and cast a chiming spill of coins over the letters which spelled,
‘fine, paid in full.’
Then he tipped his laden tablet toward the turnkey.

Gravity obliged; the gold pieces slid. The jailer watched what
amounted to a generous year’s salary tumble toward the stinking, runneled floor. Decision became reflex. His spidery fingers swooped to capture the bribe. “This is irregular,” he grumbled, in no haste to unhook the keys from his belt. “The city’s grand magistrate ought to be called to preside over due process.”

Caolle proved impervious to argument. He snatched the loose key ring, tongued the iron in the lock, and clashed open the hasp and grilled portal. Dakar cringed from the clangor of iron. His evasion saved nothing. His rescuer caught his wrist and hauled him headlong from his noisome nest in the straw.

“Damn you, for bingeing,” Caolle muttered as he towed his redeemed miscreant toward the narrow turnpike stair.

Dakar moaned. “Let me stay. The risers are too steep.”

When he tried to collapse, Caolle shook him. “Sober up, fool! You’re needed.” Steel shackles in putty, his hold never loosened as the Mad Prophet stumbled and tripped. “Arithon’s taken with some sort of fever.”

“If you have to shout,” Dakar groused, “at least wait until we’re outside.”

“I’m not shouting.” Caolle slammed shoulder first through the upper-landing portal, and chivvied his charge through the magistrate’s chamber, a cavernous space of scarred wooden benches and the fetor of old sweat and dried ink. The Mad Prophet shivered as they passed the justiciar’s dais, then the prisoner’s dock with its rows of forged rings for manacles.

Torches still burned by the entry. Gagged by a billow of oily smoke, Dakar missed his stride. His fragmented vision resurged and gave birth to a hollow spasm of alarm. He bludgeoned dulled senses to gauge the turn of the stars. Only two hours left before dawn.

Caolle was still energetically speaking, his words unintelligible gibberish to the sentries standing bored watch by the portal. “We have trouble afoot. Those clansmen who died were Lord Maenol’s own cousins. They would scarcely have wasted their lives in a town without the most dire reason.”

Dakar lagged again as full memory returned like a battering onslaught of cavalry.

“Don’t mind the guards,” Caolle snapped in abrasive impatience. “I bribed them on my way in.”

The Mad Prophet gave up his effort to shield his tender eyes from the sconces. Tugged stumbling into the sea-damp night, and a mist like dew-sodden velvet, he grumbled in plaintive injury, “You needn’t tear off my arm. I know the message those couriers carried.”

“What?” Caolle plowed to a tumultuous halt. “Ath, man, you spoke to them?”

“No.” Necessity and pain made Dakar succinct. “Their execution wakened my prescience. And Arithon’s not ill.” He broke off, wrung by a pestilent shiver.

Caolle suffered the delay in steaming, clamped patience. Around them, the clogged air clung like silt. Lights from the wharves shot ruddy spears through the tenements, and seepage off the overhanging eaves splashed echoes through the darkened alley. Dakar ground on between dry heaves. “We’re in deadly trouble. If I’m right, your liege has been touched by the madness of Desh-thiere’s curse.”

Never slow to grasp threat, Caolle began running. “Then someone’s told the s’Ilessid prince we’ve compromised the shipyard?”

“Worse,” Dakar panted. Even crimped like a bolster, he made every effort to match the increase in pace. “Lysaer’s marching on Riverton with a fighting company at his heels. They would’ve arrived yesterday, but clansmen from Korias slowed them down. Lord Maenol’s messengers died to bring warning. We have maybe two hours left to force Arithon away before a royal cordon seals the gates.”

“Much easier said than accomplished.” Caolle added a string of pungent epithets. Too real, that Earl Jieret’s dreamed vision might happen on Riverton’s fresh-bloodied scaffold.

The Laughing Captain’s upper story lay dark, the candles set burning to guide patrons to their rooms long since drowned in sooty wax. The door to Arithon’s chamber was closed. No light leaked under the
sill.

Dakar stalked down the corridor, his flesh napped with chills as he touched Caolle’s sleeve. They had agreed he should disrupt the bard’s privacy first.

A board squeaked underfoot. The hallway with its ingrained tang of lye soap and floor wax, and the stale fust of overused bedding raised too clear a memory of another tavern hallway, and the Shadow Master hurled outside reason.

No lingering pinch of guilt plagued his royal Grace this time, but the proximity of Lysaer himself. Dakar rolled back his sleeve cuffs. Perspiration snaked down his neck. If he misjudged and the fatal balance tripped, disaster would follow beyond any power to contain.

The unlocked door latch gave at a touch, the plink of the bar like a cry against silence. Unnerved by apprehension, Dakar eased open the panel.

Darkness met him, thick as warmed felt and stamped with indistinct shapes. The mullioned casement latticed diamonds across a rectangle of indigo sky. The feeble, ruddy gleam of coals in the grate brushed the textured bedhangings, and scattered sequin reflections over the yarns of gold tassels. Steeped in the mingled fragrance of citrus oil and beeswax which toned the wood of the Masterbard’s lyranthe, Dakar searched the gloom.

His mage-trained acuity found nothing amiss. The silk shirt and pearl velvet breeches Arithon had worn the day before were draped over a chairback, creased by an ornate clasped belt. The bard’s full-length cloak hung in order from its peg. His wrapped instrument rested on the clothes chest. The accustomed coils of refined wire lay on the marquetry table by the casement, nicked to scarlet glints where the light caught; nearby, the spare winding pegs and pearl-handled knife the Masterbard used to trim lyranthe strings. Everything kept its accustomed place, except for the item that counted.

The Paravian-made sword was not on its hook by the armoire.

Dakar shrank to a stab of alarm. Innocuous stillness became sinister as he moved on and surveyed the bed. The hangings were tied back: recessed in the shadow of the dagged velvet curtains, the blanketed outline of a sleeper. Dakar shut burning eyes in relief, then advanced in quick stealth to take down his quarry unaware.

Movement sighed from the shadow behind, a friction of leather against cloth. Dakar caught his misjudgment a split second before a chill pinpoint pricked at his nape.

He swore in venomous consternation. The uncanny attunement of his mage-sense informed that the irreplaceable blade he required now threatened to skewer his neck. Lost, his one chance to deflect Desh-thiere’s geas;
the sword’s enspelled virtue would only deploy if the defender held to a just cause.
In Arithon’s hands, the malignment of the curse would keep its defense spells dormant.

“If you plan to wreck the peace, make your stroke count,” Dakar accosted. “You were awake.”

“In fact, I never slept,” said Arithon s’Ffalenn in his most abrasive ill temper. “Whatever else did you expect?”

“Not words of brotherhood and courtesy.” Dakar chattered on in the spurious hope he could mask Caolle’s presence in the hallway. “Your promise to Lord Maenol has become a bad risk. If you know Lysaer’s coming, we’ll agree, you can’t stay here, no matter how ugly the fate of chained clansmen.”

“But I can,” Arithon contradicted. “I’ve a launching in two days, and plans I’ve no wish to abandon.”

If the voice held its usual pared sting of mockery, speech offered an untrustworthy gauge of a masterbard’s state of mind. Dakar cursed the sword, which forestalled his need to turn around. Even in darkness, his trained senses must discern more than Arithon wished to reveal. The inimical bite of the blade turned informant as a finegrained tremor ran through its steel.

“Arithon, hear me. You’re not yourself.” Through the pound of his heart, hammer to anvil against the wound pain of his headache, Dakar forced himself to keep talking. “If you stay, you’ll be letting Desh-thiere’s curse overset your mind and integrity.”

The sword moved, as if Arithon noticed the price of its bearing pressure. “And what if I planned this to be the last bloodbath?”

Dakar gathered up the rags of his courage and spun face about in the darkness. “If you had,” he said, tremulous in terror and entreaty, “then as I was born, I’d not stand here.” He pitched all his resource to unmask the man facing him, and desperately wished he had not.

The sword blade divided the air in between, an obsidian line against a less palpable darkness. Arithon no longer wore his delicate pale-haired disguise. Alert and reverted to his natural coloring, he had also cast off fancy clothes. “Since I didn’t cut you down as you came through my door, you may accept my invitation to leave.”

“You know I can’t do that.” Dakar licked dry lips. His headache redoubled, the throb of forced blood at his temples a trip-hammer misery of pain.

Arithon said nothing. Reclad in fitted riding leathers, his form seemed sheared out of black watered silk. He did not look deranged or demonic. Excised by the curse from the encumbrance of loyalties, he looked ready to scythe down any obstacle in his path.

“I won’t move aside,” Dakar said in ultimatum. “To get past, you’ll just have to kill me.”

A tensioned thread of suspension snapped. Mage-tuned intuition sensed the event as a frisson of vibration shot through the weave of Ath’s creation. Only then, too late, the Mad Prophet realized what his tactless handling had cost.
Until this instant, Arithon had been aware, and still fighting the pull of curse-driven directive.

“Stand me down at your peril,” came his silken invitation from the dark.

The infinitesimal shift in tone speared chills down Dakar’s spine. Opened to mage-sight, he witnessed the change as the last sane controls burned away.

Now wholly ruled by the Mistwraith’s design, the Shadow Master showed the fixated viciousness of a cat as it tracked a lamed kill. “I’m
sure the whole Fellowship would applaud your good sense for dying to stop the inevitable.”