Traitor's Knot (3 page)

Truth and impasse; the magistrate smothered a yawn. The victimized landlord glowered, arms folded, while the clerk licked his thumb and flattened a clean sheet of parchment. ‘Hard labour, then? Incarceration? Public whipping? The brawling was started without provocation.' He tapped the scroll bearing the transcribed statement. ‘Disrupting the peace calls for a harsh sentence.'

Shipsport's magistrate laced his prim knuckles and delivered the final verdict. ‘The accused have no money. Therefore, the bard will perform until the debts to the town and the tavern are discharged.' He silenced objection with the superior glare he reserved for the low-class condemned. ‘No reprieve!'

‘I won't sing for any man!' yelled Fionn Areth, a mistake: his broad grasslands vowels displayed no congestion. ‘Not for a penny, not for struck gold, and not ever for settling damages over a riot that I didn't start!'

The Kittiwake's landlord stared down his beak nose. ‘Upright men don't keep the company of smugglers.'

Since such shiftless character was the s'Ffalenn bastard's legacy, the slung mud was going to stick. By luck alone, none of Shipsport's officials connected today's face with the infamous Master of Shadow. Draw undue attention, and some sharp-eyed busybody might come forward to point out the oversight.

Fionn Areth slumped in the prisoner's dock, cowed by his fear as the steps of due process saddled him with the arraignment.

Experience taught him the futility of argument. His just plea would only fall on deaf ears and earn him a savage beating.

‘You dare the impertinence of claiming to refuse?' The magistrate flicked a glance toward his clerk, then granted the case his sharp quittance. ‘Call back the guards to remove the offenders. Lock them in the dungeon on bread crusts and water till the singer sees fit to change heart.'

The dungeon in Shipsport outmatched even Dakar's revolting description. Flood-tide clogged the drains with green slime, coating the floor with decomposing shell-fish, strained through the wracked straw and stranded kelp. Fionn Areth gagged on the nauseous stench. Too miserable to curse the rough handling of the wardens who hauled him into confinement, he sagged as they bolted his manacles to a chain spiked in the sweating stonewall.

Head tipped forward, shoulders hunched to avoid the damp masonry chilling his back, the Araethurian squeezed his eyes shut. The pound of his pulse split
his skull to white agony. To make matters worse, the Mad Prophet had burst into a fit of inebriated singing. The cell had an arched ceiling. Within closed confines, his racket raised echoes fit to drive the dead to screaming torment.

Oblivious, Dakar belted on through a ballad expounding the exploits of two whores, a blind cobbler, and a goat. Cuffs from the guards failed to silence his noise. Dakar grunted, undaunted, through his tone-deaf rendition of the repetitive chorus.

‘He's sloshed to the gills on the Kittiwake's rotgut,' the long-faced turnkey observed. Anxious to leave, he jangled his keys. ‘If you bash him unconscious, he'll just wake back up. I say, let him bide. Locked in without recourse, his wretched companion is going to be driven insane. He'll either pay up the charged fine for relief, or he'll kick the brute's bollocks clear through his throat. If such doesn't kill him, the mutton-head jape won't be left in a fit state to breed.'

Dakar widened his brown eyes, unfazed. Limp as a roped walrus in the hands of the guards, he forced them to tow him up to the ring to fasten his prisoner's shackles. As they wrestled the bolts, puffing vile curses, his chained posture proved no deterrent. Dakar followed the ballad with warbled, scurrilious doggerel extolling the virtues of gin.

‘That's it!' snapped the turnkey, ears plugged with his thumbs. ‘The tide floods apace. Tarry much longer, and we'll have wet boots.' He fidgeted until the last guardsman filed out, then clashed the grille shut on the miscreants. His malicious grin flashed by the glare of held torch-light as he secured the rusty lock. ‘Enjoy the Lord Magistrate's sweet hospitality!'

The squelching tread of officialdom retreated, plunging the cell into darkness.

Fionn Areth stifled his impulse to shout. The icy air settled like a batt of inky wool once the upstairs portal banged closed. The reek of sea rot and urine overpowered, as the flow of fresh air was cut off.

A large insect scuttled over the Araethurian's scraped wrist. His jerk of revulsion clanged the fixed chain, and his curse snatched the break between choruses. ‘May the furies of Sithaer's eighth hell plague the day that your dam spread her knees and gave birth!'

Through the hitched pause to recover his breath, Dakar chuckled. ‘You might as well sing along with me, bumpkin. Stay cheerful, you won't have to think overmuch, or listen to the skittering wild life.'

‘Damn you for a sot!' Fionn Areth lashed back. ‘Without your loose habits, we wouldn't be dangled like carrion, nose to nose with the starveling rats.'

‘Ho!' Dakar whooped. ‘Starveling rats! That's poetic' Buoyed to euphoria by the Kittiwake's ale, he nudged his companion's ankle. ‘Know this one, do you?' He plunged into another obscene recitation, at a pitch fit to mangle the ear-drums.

‘Shut up!' Fionn Areth kicked back, cleanly missed, and clunked his head against the wall with a yelp of anguished frustration. ‘Just how are we to get
out of this fix? They think I'm Athera's Masterbard! In truth, I don't sing any better than you. If you're going to insist that we work off our fine that way, the Kittiwake's roughnecks might as well batter us straight to perdition right now. Better I give my consent to such madness, before we pickle in this cesspit, drowning in rat crap and sea-water.'

‘Well, practise a bit first.' Dakar hiccoughed in brosy hilarity. ‘Might as well test your talent before we're marched out to get diced by a mob of drunken sailhands.'

‘You should care, numbed as a dolt on cheap beer,' Fionn Areth cut back in ripe sarcasm.

‘Actually I'm not,' Dakar confessed, his blurred whisper nearly lost in the darkness. ‘For the record, at least, I'm uselessly pissed until after the tide-water rises.' Louder, he added, ‘Sing, damn your hide. Howl like a monkey, or warble in counterpoint. If you don't, the pesky warden might decide to withhold our ration of bread crusts. The last thing we need is some ham-handed grunt trying to drag us back upstairs beforetime.'

‘What!' Fionn Areth jerked his sore wrists in a bale-fire flash of amazement. ‘Refuse the chance to get out of this place? You're off your head! Gone moonstruck, and truly'

‘Skin-tight on beer, but not crazy,' Dakar insisted with owlish gravity. ‘I thought, since we're here, you should savour the experience. The odd, swimming varmint who might perch on your head will be offered the gift of survival. Far more than a rat might see benefits.'

Past hope of holding a sane conversation, Fionn Areth lapsed into stiff silence. Besotted whimsy could not reverse the gravity of his current quandary. He felt no pity for the doomed rats, though the shut door blocked their way to the stairwell. Not as long as he languished in chains, bearing a criminal sorcerer's features.

Dakar was no use. Unfazed by the threat, he filled his lungs and resumed bawling sing-song nonsense. The cold grew no less. The stink stayed oppressive. The herder from Araethura cursed the short length of the chain, which would not let him clasp his hands to his aching head. While he sat, chewing over his circling fears, the news from upcoast moved apace: word already spread, that the Master of Shadow had escaped from the Mayor of Jaelot's close custody. The men-at-arms dispatched in his pursuit had been lured over the Skyshiel Ranges and into the wilds of Daon Ramon Barrens.

In darkness, the graphic accounts spurred fresh terror: of town-born blood spilled by savage design; eye-witness tales of shadows and haunts bringing death on the Baiyen causeway; of men lulled to sleep by the singing of stones and frozen to glass under moonlight. Everywhere, Arithon's name inspired fear. If Dakar gave short shrift to the doctrine that claimed Rathain's prince was a demon, today's episode of manic debauchery destroyed the last foothold for trust.

Fionn Areth snarled a frustrated oath. Although Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had risked capture to spare him from the horror of Jaelot's scaffold, the Mad Prophet's assertion the deed sprang from sound character only made the surrounding facts seem the more ominous. Today's truth spoke too loudly: when the passes reopened, no more wearied men straggled in upon starving, lamed horses.

The first hardy caravan to descend from Eastwall had described the emergency muster at Darkling. Bloodshed had dogged Arithon's heels at each step. By command of Avenor's high priesthood, Alliance troops had unfurled the sunwheel banner and marched upon Daon Ramon. They had not embarked on the campaign alone. At Narms, no less than Lysaer himself had gathered a veteran company. His cry to arms also raised the standing troops trained by his steward at Etarra. Both forces had converged on the snow-clad barrens, to wage the Light's war against Shadow.

Until breaking ice reopened the northcoast, and the trade galleys hove in from the west, the eastshore towns held their uneasy breath, as yet unaware that a crushing defeat had shattered Lysaer's combined host.

Licked by the trickle of rising water, young Fionn Areth had no choice but to hang his trapped fate on a prayer. ‘Merciful maker, let the ice hold the north passage closed for a while longer.'

A trained seer, Dakar knew the Spinner of Darkness had survived the Alliance assault. He would not divulge his liege's location. That sore point piqued Fionn Areth's suspicion and tightened his queasy stomach. No platitude eased him. Not since the hour the Mad Prophet broke his last scrying, stunned into unyielding silence. He refused to speak of Prince Arithon's plight, even sunk in his cups at the Kittiwake. Desperately determined to carol himself hoarse, perhaps needing to smother the nag of his conscience, Dakar stayed deaf. He would not acknowledge the scope of his peril, allied to the Master of Shadow.

A goatherd who lacked arcane talent could do nothing but thrash out his worries alone.

An hour passed; two. The well of the tide crept across the stone floor. The kiss of cold water seeped through dry clothes, then like slow agony, deepened. Soon the pool lapped at Fionn Areth's tucked ankles. The flood stirred the vermin, who quested forth upon tentative, pattering feet. Every fraught effort to kick them away brought him vengeful nips from sharp teeth. The misery mounted. Dakar's filthy stanzas had devolved to gibberish, touched here and there by the oddly placed line, lilted in cadenced Paravian.

Distempered and ill, Fionn Areth lost patience. Curses did not stop the rodents that clambered over his shivering skin. The sea rose, inexorable. Soon immersed to the waist, he fought chattering teeth, while the scrabbling rats became frantic.

‘Fiends plague you, Dakar!' Fionn Areth jerked his chin left and right, but
failed to dislodge the wet creatures that nosed at his ears. ‘Can't you shut your mouth? Maybe fashion a bane-ward. Anything to send these fell pests to oblivion!'

Yet the rats' splashing struggles and shrill squeals could not dampen the madman's racketing choruses. He sang without let-up, each quavering line of botched metre an insult that mangled intelligence.

The emphasis set on the name at the end served Fionn Areth scant warning. The closed cell became charged. Hair rose at his nape, while his skin puckered into sharp gooseflesh. Not being chained, the rats squeaked and bolted. They splashed helter-skelter in panic. A knifing breeze that moaned down the stairwell, the discorporate Sorcerer drawn by Dakar's summons, arrived with the force of a silenced thunder-clap.

If darkness still reigned, its texture had changed, filled by that ineffable presence.

Fionn Areth recoiled. He wished to be
anyplace else in Athera.
The affray with the Mistwraith's prison at Rockfell had shown him the reach of Luhaine and the Fellowship's power.

‘Wards!' Dakar pealed in jagged hysteria. ‘Set them now! Koriani enchantresses are seeking the goatherd, and I can't stand them off any longer!'

‘Done,' Luhaine answered, mercifully brief.

Fionn Areth shut his eyes, braced for a blast of scouring light, or a purging release of wild energies.

Nothing happened.

The slosh of salt water did not abate. Apprehensive, the Araethurian cracked open one lid. Stillness remained, laced by a nexus of withering, cold air and a living awareness not to be gainsaid.

‘Rats,' Luhaine qualified. ‘They gave their consent and carried the spells to lay down my guarding circle.' Fixated on Fionn's repressed jerk of startlement, he bristled, ‘What did you expect, goatherd? A flare of crude conjury? Such a beacon would have been grossly misplaced where the utmost of finesse is needful.'

‘What enchantresses? Where?' Fionn Areth accused. ‘I saw no women but shameless harlots when Dakar's lunacy rousted the Kittiwake.'

‘Be quiet, Fionn! Koriani spell-craft was the reason I tipped the damned beer on my head in the first place.' To the Sorcerer, not drunken, the Mad Prophet said, ‘Then you knew the accursed witches were after him?' His slurred speech
in fact the sapped mark of exhaustion, he complained, ‘For my pains, then you might have come a bit sooner.'

‘Your goatherd is not a blood prince of the realm,' Luhaine pointed out, miffed. ‘To strike a clean balance, you did have to ask. Even then, my act stands on tenuous ground. I could not defend, but for Arithon's ill-advised pledge to spare a crown subject from injustice.' Met by Dakar's crest-fallen silence, the shade of the Sorcerer tempered his censure. ‘Though you need not have waited for use of salt water to mask your cry of intent.'