The Ships of Merior (80 page)

Through the dross of patched dark, through rank bad judgement and confusion as hull ground into hull, the imprisoned captain on the
Savrid
deciphered a shattering truth: the straggle of fired hulls had lost their clean lines. The raked masts and spars glazed in outline by fire no longer wore the shapes of the brigantines Lysaer had spent his powers to destroy.

No fleet of deadly warcraft out of Merior, this ragtag chain of hulls: the hostile vessels which closed upon Werpoint were unarmed old hulks, a derelict gaggle of fishing boats and rafts, packed with dried fir boughs and floss, which exploded in fanned sparks and flurried in the breeze, to touch alight whatever lay before them. The illusion of shadows that once masked their shapes had winnowed away to reveal the cunning trap beneath.

Anguished witness to the fate of the east-shore trade fleet, the brig’s captain wept in beaten grief. A hand’s reach away, or one thrust of a knife, the enemy responsible had his back turned. Still locked hand to hand with
his clansman ally, the sorcerer showed no care for the ruin his ploy swept through Werpoint’s harbour. His deranged fit raged on unabating. While the stem cabin’s furnishings were trampled over, upset, or smashed wholesale, the brig’s captain hoped with a vindictive turn of spite that the combatants would pummel themselves to mortal injury.

Even bound, Arithon used his head, his knees, and his feet to bruise and strike. Jieret Red-beard vented pain in choked oaths. The only grip his prince could not break was the hand he held latched in black hair, and that insufficient to stay him. The clansman came aware in clear dread that Arithon manoeuvred toward the uncanny blade still left unsheathed on the chart table.

‘Ah no, my prince. Never that.’ Jieret at last resorted to blows in return. His merciless fist bashed his liege lord in the jaw. While his adversary reeled, half-stunned, he snatched up the black sword himself.

The evil in Desh-thiere’s curse roused the Paravian guardspells ingrained since its forging to defend in the cause of just conflict. Steel clove through air with a terrible, belltone keen of overlaid harmonics. Silvered runes set into its smoky length lit and blazed, sheened like mercury transformed to white light.

‘Arithon, hear me!’ Jieret screamed.

His anguished appeal went unheeded. Tortured by pity, all but unmanned, he grasped the quickened blade and in a tight, controlled cut, slashed his sovereign’s exposed shoulder.

Contact wrung a cry from the man and the elements. A flare of white sheeted through the cabin. Nothing like any weaving of Lysaer’s, the clean blast of brilliance came twined with a peal of struck sound. The resonance climbed in unbearable sweetness. Its harmony unstrung the mind. The passions of hatred and sorrow alike were dashed out in a celebration of life that made of all strife a desecration.

Smote by a longing that ached through his bones, the brig captain groaned for the sorrows of the world. Fired to unalloyed grief, stripped in a heartbeat to the dross and clay that cased the naked sum of his mortality, he heard Arithon s’Ffalenn cry aloud as if his heart had been torn from his body.

Still screaming, the Shadow Master folded to his knees. Blood streaked from the gash traced in flesh by Jieret’s cut. The enchanted scald of light nicked over the white bone, laid bare beneath his slashed shirt. A marring edge of scarlet flowed down the black blade, then sublimated away in the heatless burn of magics laced through immutable metal.

Jieret stood frozen. Unaware of his sticky hand on the grip, or the grazed pain of his knuckles, he shook with running tremors and wept unabashed, tear for tear in shared anguish with his prince.

‘Ath,’ Arithon moaned, crumpled finally to lean in sobbing weakness against his liegeman. He hid his face. ‘Spare me. I beg you. Desh-thiere’s works are too strong, too much for any born man to fight sanely.’

Earl Jieret showed him no quarter. ‘You have no choice. Stand up!’ He raised the sword, the singing flare of spellcraft now diminished to a fast-fading whisper.

Even the memory of its sustained chord made Arithon’s voice grate like gravel. ‘Had my hands been free, you know very well I’d have killed you.’

‘But they weren’t,’ Jieret said, unequivocal. ‘You made most sure that wouldn’t happen.’ As his sovereign still shrank in avoidance, he added, ‘Shame on you, for cowardice! Did you think you suffer anything I don’t feel also?’

Already pale, Arithon went colourless to the lips. He tipped up his head. ‘The bloodpact. Ath’s mercy, you
feel this?’

‘My liege,’ Jieret begged, appalled too late for the inadvertent cost of his admission. ‘Don’t spurn my part. You
charged me to safeguard your integrity. Whatever you say now, as
caithdein
, I am bound. I shall hold you to the letter of that promise.’

‘You feel this?’ Arithon repeated, his tone skinned into shrill horror.

Merciless, Jieret cut him off. ‘That can’t be permitted to matter! No one alive can shoulder the burden you carry. You have a job to finish, or blameless people here and in Shand will start dying.’ Brutal by necessity, he seized his prince’s forearm, hurled him upright and around to face the stem window. When Arithon recoiled and tried to flinch aside, Jieret wrestled him immobile in a shackling grip that spared nothing.

Pinned still and gasping, Arithon had no choice but to behold the unalloyed impact of his handiwork.

The conflagration touched off by Lysaer’s defence still raged in coruscating flares of torched sails. Sparks and flying debris flew windborne. Passed from vessel to vessel in Werpoint’s jammed harbour, the fire was having its fell feast.

‘So end what you’ve started,’ snarled Jieret, ‘and bedamned to your whining.’ Then he touched the dire sword like Dharkaron’s black Spear against his sovereign’s quivering nape.

Wrung, wretched, dragged back from the precipice by Jieret’s edged scorn and the lacerating beauty of the wardspell instilled within his weapon, Arithon s’Ffalenn bent his head. He drew a breath. His bound hands flexed and tightened. Shamed to reclaim the scattered threads of his design, he raised his chin at last, and measured what remained to press advantage from the destruction his ruse had created.

Turmoil reigned in Werpoint harbour. In the crush of frenzied flight and confusion, vessel collided with vessel. Bowsprits rammed broadside into galleys mired in anchor chains; luggers swept downwind and battered into ships struggling with sails caught aback as crews
hauled to check their yards and claw free of the eye of the wind.

To rack and utter ruin, Arithon added shadow spun to a fiendish edge of subtlety. He dimmed the shores of Crescent Isle to make the shoals appear more distant. He cast masking flares of darkness in the eyes of harried helmsmen through critical moments of judgement. Those few vessels brought safely underway were lured astray from the channel. Some lurched aground, to be struck in a scream of broken timbers by following ships unable to veer off. Other captains tacked in misled timing and found themselves against a lee shore, or else turned about, once again in the path of the ruinous maelstrom that stewed in Werpoint’s harbour.

The fire, wind-driven, showed mercy to none.

Where Lysaer’s opposing talents were hampered by the need to spare allies, Arithon stiffened shadow at will. Even without access to the wellspring of his mage talent, training lent advantage and finesse. He could play his gift to gossamer illusion, or snap wave crests to ice in a swift, freezing absence of light. Where the fleet fled the fire, he used cold as a weapon, to jam sails, and ice rudders in their pintles. Many a stricken quartermaster fought to clear his fouled steering, while the smaller slower luggers in their path were overtaken and mulched to wreckage beneath the trampling bows of crippled ships.

Thin as the cries of flocking gulls, the screams of the injured carried on the breeze to Arithon’s vantage at the stern window. For all his clever strategy and wilful bleak purpose, he was not unscathed by the suffering. Taxed to visible, shivering pain, he sought to spin aside again; to abjure his killing touch on those fell tides of shadow and give way at last to despair.

Like rock behind him, Jieret forced him back with a prod of spelled steel, and never one slued of human mercy.

Denied leave to turn away, Arithon could not know
that Jieret was weeping. Locked against the force of a grief stifled ruthlessly silent, the clansman’s knuckles on the sword’s grip were rigid, marble-white, and his eyes showed the anguish of a spirit torn up piecemeal. He held unbending to his given service, the black blade ever steadfast, even as the inevitable few vessels tore free of the harbour’s morass of fire and billowed ash to run the straits toward the open sea.

By then, Arithon had recovered self-command. Every raw nerve clamped back under control, he called his own crisp order to the mate and crew above decks. Men jumped to lay the
Savrid’s
yards until her canvas came alive to the wind. Greyed to an outline against a pall of blown smoke, she sheared off on port tack, her course laid east across the channel. She no longer sailed unaccompanied. Off her bow, arisen like phantoms, rode more ships spun out of shadow. From his pirate father on Dascen Elur, Arithon held brutal knowledge of the nautical tactics needed to execute raids in close quarters. The shadow fleet he designed to blockade the channel was formidably arrayed, bristling with weapons and archers, and flying full sail braced sharp up.

Harried like minnows before shark’s teeth, the vessels in flight wore ship, their choice to run the gauntlet between a wedge of armed vessels, or to turn behind
Savrid
, sailing free, and flying friendly colours from her masthead. They closed in brash confidence, their crews beaten limp from perils but narrowly averted.

Too soon, their captains’ guards were lowered; the shadows swirled and thickened, and the fire arrows, shot by clan enemies in
Savrid’s
own cross trees, hissed from the darkness to claim them.

A pall of choking cinders interleaved with the gloom. The cries of sailors who leaped overboard to escape being burned alive shrilled over the crack of stressed timbers. In Werpoint the bronze bells still tolled in distress. Here and there, amid planks that flamed and hissed in
the barrage of cold waves, those galleys left whole manoeuvred to spare survivors who thrashed at the mercy of the sea.

Against maritime misfortune, Lysaer s’Ilessid had no recourse. His vast armies ashore were helpless to do aught but brandish their weapons and curse.

The disaster to the merchant fleet played itself out, while under cover of blown smoke and shadow, the pirate crew manning the
Savrid
launched a longboat and slipped away. They would seize a fatter prize, the reward plucked from chaos that the Shadow Master left them for their service. Under a helmsman carefully chosen for loyalty and two crewmen hired on for risk pay, the brig rounded the headland and turned southeast, to sail close-hauled down the coast. Werpoint slipped astern, eclipsed by the forested shores of Crescent Isle.

In time, the taint cleared from the air.

Sunlight poured untrammelled through the shattered stem window and sketched the man there in glancing light. Slowly he turned his head. In a voice grained hoarse from the aftermath of stress, he said, ‘Jieret. It’s safe, I think, to free my hands.’

The ebony sword flashed, moved; the gleaming tip dropped from fixed guard. The red-haired clansman whose age, in the daylight, was not a day more than twenty, sawed through the bonds tied with cord. Then he cast down the blade as though its mere touch burned his skin. The clanging reverberation of tempered steel against the deck caused him to shiver and shrink. His hands trembled. Minutes passed as he fumbled with torn fingers to untwist the crimps in the wire.

When the last bond gave way, he dropped to his knees, hands clasped to the ripped bracers that had scarcely spared the royal flesh beneath from the rigours of curse-bound directive. He could not bear to look up, nor confront what awaited in the face of the sovereign he had obeyed to the ruin of all pride.

‘My liege lord,’ he entreated. ‘I beg your forgiveness.’ In agonized remorse, he convulsed his fingers in torn fleeces. ‘Rathain’s justice and Dharkaron hear my case, I had no way else to keep your orders.’

Arithon s’Ffalenn pried loose his chafed wrists. He turned around, careful in movement as if his bones were spun glass and his being might shatter at the jar of a wrongly-drawn breath. A moment passed while he stood with closed eyes. The running blood from his shoulder seeped through his torn shirt and tapped the white spruce of the deck. Then he stirred. He laced narrow fingers over the damp, copper crown of the
caithdein
who had abused him; who had broken his royal will on the point of a sword to force a cruel round of strategy to its finish.

‘Jieret,’ he whispered. The tracks of his tears had dried on his face. Rucked hair flicked his cheek in the play of the breeze through the shattered panes of the stem window. ‘Arise, man, I beg you. We share a brother’s trust. What pride or integrity do I have left that this curse hasn’t thoroughly undone?’ His wounding note of compassion snapped all at once to bare a core of acid bitterness. ‘If ruin and despair are any cause for satisfaction, take back your heart and stand tall. By strict count of burned planks and wrecked ships, we have rather brilliantly succeeded.’

Indeed, no army would sail upon Merior to take down the Master of Shadow.

On the smoke-hazed battlements of Werpoint, Lysaer s’Ilessid stood in freezing wind and tainted sunlight and regarded a vista of wrecked hopes. The enormity of fate seemed unreal, years of careful planning reduced to ruin within hours by one strike of diabolical cunning. Longboats plied the bay to rescue what remained to be salvaged after the Shadow Master’s surprise attack on the harbour.

Lent the outlines of embossed paper under blown drifts of smoke and cinder, tired oarsmen jagged tortured courses through clots of half-submerged timbers and steaming wreckage. They dipped skinned knuckles into raw brine and hauled in survivors who were stunned, half-dead from immersion in cold waters, or worse. Too many were brought in screaming from the hideous agony of burns, the jostling passage back to safety and shore too much for seared flesh to endure.