The Ships of Merior (79 page)

Gritty-eyed and aching, the captain jerked awake from an unquiet catnap. The swells beyond the stern counter heaved dull pewter under the advent of dawn. The wind still freshened. Stiff southeast gusts had the sailhands aloft to tie in a reef. In snatched bits of invective they maligned numb fingers and canvas turned unwieldy in the cold.

If the lamp had been left to bum out, the aft cabin was not empty.

Before the stem window, poised at the sill on propped forearms, the Master of Shadow waited against the foam raked off the brig’s rudder. He said gently, ‘It’s nearly time.’

An oath lilted back from the gloom. Jieret Red-beard shouldered into view, a pair of fleece bracers in his hands. At Arithon’s swift query, he said, They’re mine. And yes, before you ask, they’ll fit you. I trimmed them down with my knife.’ Hardened against any protest, he
added, ‘If you stay bull-stubborn and go through with this, I won’t have you tear yourself raw.’

Arithon managed a smile, slicked with the grimness a condemned man might carry through his last march to the scaffold. Then he drew a sword of spectacular artistry from his scabbard and laid its black blade on the chart table. Disarmed, his expression of humility at odds with his killer’s reputation, he freed his laced cuffs and bared slender wrists to his liegeman.

The barbarian showed no surprise at the marring white tracery of scars he tucked underneath the leather cuffs. He drew the ties firm then went on to lash his sovereign’s wrists with braided leather.

‘Jieret,’ Arithon said. ‘Thongs can break. I saw wire in the starboard locker. Forget about pity and use it.’

The clansman drew a fast breath to argue; stopped. The corners of his mouth flexed down until his moustache bristled into his beard. He accepted the bidding in dumb misery, drawing the wire tight in forceful jerks that had everything to do with a duty he found abhorrent.

His prince endured in distanced stillness, his averted gaze turned to the brightening sky outside. On deck, orders passed to counterbrace the yards. The imprisoned captain shifted against the bulkhead, puzzled why his vessel should heave to in the middle of the channel.

The barbarian finished trussing his prince, then positioned himself on the chart locker. ‘I’m ready,’ he announced in distaste.

Arithon squared his shoulders. He made a last survey of the coves, cluttered with mismatched hulls, masts and spars and crosstrees packed in layered ranks like a forest denuded of foliage. Angles of tarred ratlines jagged scribbled ink above waters tinged silver and rose under daybreak. His stance stayed in balance despite the pull of tied wrists, while the brig bucked the crests and lost way under him, shuddered by the whitecaps that slapped
her broadside from the south. ‘Make sure this ship keeps her station,’ he insisted, then added in cutting entreaty, ‘Jieret, by your oath as my liegeman, I charge you. Don’t let me give way, no matter how horribly I scream.’

The clansman looked as hag-ridden as though he stared down the throat of a waking nightmare. ‘Ath’s mercy on us both! My liege, you don’t have to do this. Can sparing one seaside village be worth the price of such a risk?’

A slim form limned against salted glass, the Master of Shadow gave stinging correction. ‘Merior’s folk aren’t my birthright. But a woman there holds my signet ring as pledge that her children shall stay safe.’

‘Forgive me,’ Jieret whispered, for eight years in the past, on Tal Quorin’s greening banks, the decision had been no whit different. ‘Don’t hold me to blame in my fear for you.’

‘Wasted effort.’ Above the laboured creak of ship’s timbers, Arithon’s voice sounded easy. ‘Save your pity instead for the captains lured here in the misled belief they were threatened.’

One moment the city of Werpoint rested in stilled peace, the anchorage thatched with masts and hazed soft gold by daybreak. Menace seemed absent; unreal. No inhabitant expected the Shadow Master’s presence. Unremarked, he gave no bodily sign in warning, no showman’s flourish designed to awe or terrify his audience. Arithon s’Ffalenn simply poised with a dancer’s concentration and spun the shadow he had ruled since his birth.

The snare he designed was for Werpoint.

A giant black leopard bounded over the rim of the southern horizon. The apparition swelled to monstrous proportion, then snarled in a silent, silhouetted show of fangs and swallowed the risen disc of the sun. For an instant, two diminished slits of sky glared through its eyes; then it blinked.

Darkness clapped down, soundless, complete, unnatural as if the air compressed to felt.

No star burned, no light. Werpoint’s broad headland seemed snuffed from existence, its harbour and ships swallowed up as completely as if Daelion Fatemaster had gone berserk and unravelled the thread of creation. Banished into fell darkness, a city in its entirety lay erased.

Terror undid the brig’s captain. He screamed in muffled panic behind his gag. Across the water, unseen through that featureless dark, the fog bells of Werpoint pealed the alarm. Trumpets shrilled on the anchored galleys, their clarion distress borne downwind.

Low and urgent, Jieret spoke through the clamour. ‘My liege, at least leave the flame in the lantern. I can’t guard your reason if I’m unable to see.’

Arithon perhaps failed to hear him; or else words themselves became meaningless noise as he braced in the dark for a retaliation now beyond any power to revoke.

The bang of a thunderclap ripped the sky into light. From Werpoint, in strong defence, Lysaer s’Ilessid hurled his gift full-force into counter thrust against his sworn enemy. Bolts split the darkness like craze lines dashed through obsidian.

In a wilful, cold-blooded dance with disaster, Arithon of Rathain had wakened the curse of the Mistwraith. The need bloomed and burned, to hammer force against force, until one or both of them lay dead.

People, causes, Werpoint’s naked vulnerability the next instant came to mean nothing. His body limned in actinic bursts of glare, Arithon surged toward the stem window. His lips peeled back from bared teeth in a mask that abjured his claim to humanity. Empowered but weaponless, he sought to raise his hands. The bonds on his wrists caught him short. The jerk he tried to free them doubled his frame and an animal snarl rasped his throat.

Worried, perhaps, that the force of his fury might come to dislocate his joints, Jieret clenched his sovereign’s elbow and dealt him a violent shake. ‘Arithon! For your very life, don’t give in to this now.’

The Master of Shadow gave a scraped cry that violated mercy to witness. The fury that knotted his limbs let go. He staggered and all but fell.

Jieret caught him, while the veil of shadows that prisoned the daylight flared and flickered, weakened under Lysaer’s strike from Werpoint.

Steady as tide, Jieret murmured while the man in his hands hissed in a shuddering breath. ‘Easy, my liege. Easy. The effect of the curse can be tempered. If I didn’t believe it, I’d never have let you attempt this.’

The sounds of wind and waves acting on hull and canvas marked time amid flickering hell. Then Arithon s’Ffalenn seemed to master himself. ‘I can bide,’ he said. In the edged blue flare of Lysaer’s lightnings he looked bloodless and drawn, flesh racked to bone by sourceless agony.

A heartbeat’s hesitation, and Jieret s’Valerient released him.

Arithon turned back toward the stern window. Now, the work of the brig in the channel swell jostled his stance as he recovered his footing and gazed outward. His screen of darkness showed moth-eaten gaps, where knives of fierce light had torn through. Softly as rainfall, determined as flint, he took patent charge of his handiwork.

Timed on the next flare of sheet light that rocketed from Werpoint’s battlements, he played with the tattered edges of his veil and let its stressed fabric dissolve. To an onlooker’s eye, the shadow cloak over Minderl Bay seemed to falter, then fray, then sear off like a flame-scalded web. Sunlight and Lysaer’s blaze in riposte sheared a swathe of glare across the waves.

The respite proved false: for across the cleared waters
to the south loomed the tanbark sails of an inbound fleet of black ships. They were brigantine rigged. Over hulls lean-lined as greyhounds, the bellied swell of headsail and spanker cupped the gusts and trampled up spray. The yards were squared to the wind. Running a relentless, downwind course, the fleet sheared in formation toward Werpoint. As a scythe set to raze through a stand of ripe grain, they spelled doom for the vessels packed at anchorage.

The bugle calk from the galleys shrilled in treble urgency. Captains screamed desperate orders and frightened crews rousted from their berths. Lines were cast off, or cut, and moorings splashed free. The chattering plink of a capstan’s pawls carried in strings on the gusts.

In Werpoint the alarm bells pealed out their call to arms; the war camps seethed black, distressed as kicked. ant-hills with the distanced forms of running men. From his unseen vantage on the wall walks, Lysaer s’Ilessid would recognize the oncoming fleet. He would see in their lines and the trim of red sails a memory resurfaced from childhood: brigantines fashioned by the hand of s’Ffalenn, built in the shipyards at Merior at sorcerous speed, and now, attacking for pillage and piracy.

Provoked as a cold point of strategy, his rage would burst all bounds.

The light bolt he launched in defence of his own slashed the dawn like a scimitar. Air shrieked. The sky flashed blinding white, then rebounded into fumes and smoke, lit to churned orange by a firestorm of raw, ignited power. The holocaust scalded across wave crests rent to steam, until the bay seemed a cauldron brewed by demons.

‘Now,’ urged Jieret Red-beard. ‘Now!’

Against the stem window, a silhouette etched into what seemed the infernos of Sithaer, Arithon quivered like a string cranked taut and then plucked, a quarter note shy of its breaking point. Perspiration gilded
ribbons down his temples and jaw, and his soaked collar clung to sinews like taut cable. He seemed a man racked, or a victim tormented by a course of untenable stress.

On the berth, forgotten, the brig captain heard him snatch in a short, sobbed breath. A snarling tic twitched his cheek. He controlled it. The hands behind his back dripped clammy sweat, each finger clenched until his short-cut nails stabbed a rash of red crescents in his palms. In a brutal, contained courage, despite nerves peeled raw by the scourge of Desh-thiere’s curse, Arithon kept grip on his reason. He danced his shadows like cats-paws across the water, by turns masking his oncoming ships. In and out of the light, through glare that waxed and fled before countering darkness, his brigantines came and went like smoke. They sailed substanceless, ghostly, all the more threatening for the fact they seemed an apparition.

A clap and a boom volleyed over Werpoint. Against the massed fleet and his sworn mortal enemy, Lysaer retorted in pure light. The sky above the battlements split with the blast. Arithon’s teasing play of shadows became snuffed in one towering burst of raw force.

The bolt jagged on and struck the bay, a hammer on at anvil of waves. The inrunning fleet of brigantines exploded into crackling fire. The throaty report slammed a shock through the wind as timbers, canvas, sails and spars ignited, touched off like a torch to inferno.

Struck by the backlash of that virulent, unbridled violence, Arithon lost his last, harried hold on self-awareness. Before Jieret could react, he screamed primal rage and rammed the mullioned casement with his shoulder. The panes shrilled and burst to flying fragments. Then the hands in restraint drove him mad. Arithon twisted like an eel, eyes wide open and wild. Glass slivers stabbed through his shirt linen and reddened his clansman’s clenched fingers.

Jieret swore, shifted grip, and gasped in retching pain
from a hit to the belly. ‘No you won’t,’ he ground past a stopped bitch of breath.

Arithon thrashed free in a reeling charge that carried him toward the companionway.

Jieret rammed after in pursuit. ‘Show your face outside and you know what will happen. By your very orders, that criminal of a mate will slit your throat and claim this brig as his prize.’

The Master of Shadow flung back a mocking laugh not a man of his friends would have recognized. ‘Not if I freeze the living flesh off his bones with bindings wrought out of shadow.’

‘Dharkaron’s vengeance on your twisted bargains,’ Jieret swore. He crashed past the table and tackled his prince from behind.

From the vantage of the berth where the captain lay bound, the progression of the fight seemed unnatural. A man so much slighter should never be able to wrestle with success, hampered as he was by bound hands. The disparity in weight by itself should have forced a surrender. Paired in an insane violence, clansman and prince rolled and battered across the deck, then struggled, still locked, to their feet.

‘Arithon! My liege!’ Jieret’s cry wrung off as a kick staggered him into the gimballed lantern. Shadows flared and jumped to the swing of tipped flame. Arithon thrashed in possessed fury. Backward and forward he raged, Jieret’s efforts to contain him marked in flittering lamplight, each curse cut to grunts by the quick, starved breaths of exertion.

Jieret clamped both arms around his prince but failed again to pin him down; as well stay magma with silk thread.

A booted heel spiked his instep and rocked him backward. Fast reflex spared him a bitten wrist. In a blistering show of heart, he kept both fists clamped in rucked shirt. Bloodied from the glass, he resisted with the tenacity of
a fiend through the punishment, while the pandemonium set loose against the city of Werpoint raged on unheeded outside.

Across a bay serried in restless waves, the snarled, dark tints of spent shadows stained the air, sliced through by light and fanned flame. For the fleet of fired brigantines bore downwind still, chivvied onward by the gusts into a spark-torn, twisted chain of wreckage. Every hapless, trapped captain in Werpoint’s harbour saw them come as they screamed frantic orders to crewmen half-stupid with terror. The brigantines now were unmanned, a mindless, deadly, threat against the galleys and merchant brigs striving to pull up anchor and make way. Shouts and horn blasts entangled on the gusts, overwhelmed at ragged intervals by booming blasts of light as Lysaer sought to rout his enemy’s unnatural cloak of darkness. Sails cracked out, loosed from their gaskets by sailors whipped aloft to act by main fear and urgency.