Traitor's Knot Part 7

'This is not resignation.' Lysaer smiled then, clean sunlight on snow. If his eyes shone too bright, the embarra.s.sment escaped notice.

Sulfin Evend sat, busy with hose, boots, and spurs. 'Help me find grace! I ought to be drunk, to be acting so f.e.c.kless. I have an errand I have to run first. The bone-knife that enslaved you must be destroyed.'

Lysaer need say nothing. His point had been won. Wrung limp, he regarded his depleted hands and the letter caged lightly between them.

Sulfin Evend stood up. As he s.n.a.t.c.hed in nettled haste for his baldric, his sideward glance settled and sharpened. He moved with dispatch after that, hung his scabbard, and wrapped up his discourse forthwith. 'Liege, I'll be calling your seryants to set you in bed. Then I'm making rounds of my war camp. After two days, I expect to find shambles. Once my officers have orders, I'm taking the best horse in your father-in-law's stables. Don't ask where I'm bound. Your vaunted principles a.s.suredly won't stand it. If I come back unscathed, and if you're not waiting in state at Hanshire with every fit company we have at your back, then yes. By all means. Give my written discharge into the hands of my family.'

Dressed and fully armed, the Alliance Commander bowed before his liege's chair. 'Guard yourself well,' he murmured in parting.

Silence answered. Lysaer had pa.s.sed beyond conscious awareness. The discovery yielded a poisoned advantage: a sane intervention was possible, now. Act upon spurious opportunity, and Sulfin Evend might strip the false tissue of the divine cause. He might break the course of his sovereign's willed future, through informed mercy and the brute force of his vested command.

Lysaer slouched in the huge brocade chair. His senseless hands lay loose in his lap, tucked over the desperate words of a wife he had played as a painted game-piece. Yet the hardness that drove every inhumane choice was not written into the man. Care-worn to exhaustion, exposed in the artless sleep of an all-too-human fallibility, the magisterial presence that had stood off Erdane's mayor should have seemed reduced to its thread of mortality. Instead, the brazen commitment just spoken lost its overtone of brash arrogance.

The raw courage behind Lysaer's resolve caught Sulfin Evend like a fist at the throat. 'Mercy on you,' he whispered, and spun on his heel. Too proud, too heart-torn to break trust with such naked vulnerability, the Alliance Lord Commander retrieved the wrapped strong-box and fled headlong from the room.

Too late: two sworn oaths and the contrary grain of his honesty pursued him beyond that closed door. Peace had been destroyed by the conflict of loyalties now branded into his skin.

Late Spring-Summer 5670 By Land and by Sea While dark cultists regroup from their surprise set-back, and a secretive liegeman rides out of Erdane, Sethvir of the Fellowship faces dilemma: with no available help from the field, and no remedy for his invalid weakness, the necromancers who bid to suborn Lysaer's rule might yet rip the compact apart at one stroke . . .

Beating to weather against the stiff winds that presage the turn of the season, Feylind, who captains the merchant brig Evenstar, drives her vessel around the cliffs at Sanpashir, then wears ship, checks her yards, and ploughs a white streamer of wake toward her home port of Innish . . .

Trail-weary and silted with summer's thick dust, a lone clansman crosses the hills of Caith-al-Caen; just past summer's eve, he crosses the ancient Paravian way, and slips into Halwythwood, bearing the first confirmed news from the north concerning the Prince of Rathain . . .

Summer 5670 III. Citadel While storm followed tempest, and incessant rain lashed the western kingdoms to deluge and mud, the lands east of the Storlain Mountains enjoyed a golden, mild summer. The light breezes pranked and whispered through the forested wilds of Atwood. Gusts skimmed through the fringe of the East Halla farm-steads, and riffled like billowing silk through the grain-fields that bordered the coastal lowlands. The trade-roads were dry, and forage was plentiful, which caused the Mad Prophet a cracking irritation.

Since Luhaine's deliverance from Shipsport's magistrate, his temper was not resigned. Denied the sharpened, fit edge of his talent by his forced regime of loose living, Dakar suffered a tipsy journey on foot, plagued by pounding hangovers and hay fever. This morning, with the heat a feverish blanket around him, his tight skull was played like hammer and tongs by tortuous fits of sneezing.

The easy living left Fionn Areth too much time for his badgering questions. 'I thought you said East Halla raised mercenaries, not crops,' the young man ran on. 'I've seen no army. Only cud-chewing cattle, defended by nothing but gra.s.shoppers.'

'So you're meant to think.' Dakar pressed a handkerchief to his livid nose. 'Look again. That's not a byre, and those aren't windmills, and for the sweet t.i.ts Ath puts on a virgin, keep your hat on your head, and your foolish hand off your sword-hilt!'

Fionn Areth grinned, his brown cheek flecked with the light that scattered through his straw hat's brim. 'We'll be spitted like geese at a field shoot?' He had noticed the arrow-slits; the looped apertures for cross-bows; then the sinister fact that, beneath timber sheathing, the croft buildings were stone, built two spans thick and recessed with galleries for arbalists.

'The s'Brydion have a dagger set into their fists when the midwife cuts the cord at their birthing. They get dandled by fathers who wear mail shirts to bed, and are blood-suckled on the arts of warfare.' Dakar rolled red eyes sidewards. 'You'll see soon enough. There's the citadel.'

'Where?' Fionn Areth craned over the shoulder-high corn, ta.s.selled and droning with insects.

'There.' Dakar pointed. 'Don't act c.o.c.ky. The look-out's seen you. He'll have counted that blade at your belt, first of all. At the gate, they'll already know the coin worth of your buckles and b.u.t.tons.'

A winkle of light flared through the sea haze, banked above the horizon.

Fionn Areth stared, enchanted. A moment's search, and he made out the outline, grey overlaid on a palette of slate: the high teeth of stone battlements, seemingly cast adrift above the shimmering scarf of the barley-fields. 'The watch surveys the road, do you say? Just how, in that steam-bath of mist?'

'Are you simple?' Dakar honked noisily, veiled in the dust thrown up by couriers and drays returning unladen from market. 'We've been under their eye from those windmills, since dawn. The signals are pa.s.sed on with mirrors.'

Foot-sore from the iron-hard ruts, Fionn Areth pressed on toward the stronghold of the Duke of Alestron, whose clan family, Arithon s'Ffalenn had once said, were "warmongering lions who judge a man first by his armament."

They reached the walled citadel in the slatted shadows of late afternoon. Perched on its promontory above the sea, the ma.s.sive, tiered bastion of Alestron reared up like a cliff-face, its flint stone notched with arrow-slits, and its mortar glittering with embedded gla.s.s. From the soot shade under the outer gate, beneath the teeth of its ma.s.sive twin portcullis, a man would be flattened by the inbound traffic before he could count even half of the murder holes.

'I feel like a seamstress's pincushion, already,' Fionn Areth murmured in awe. Shown what the duke's men considered a guard's standard issue of weaponry, he added, chilled, 'Or I should have said, collops and mince. Do these folk have any enemies left alive with the warm b.o.l.l.o.c.ks to breed offspring?'

'If they didn't, they'd thrash up some more in a heart-beat,' Dakar said. 'They're wont to pick fights like starved wolves dumped fighting mad into a cur pack.'

For him, the steep, switched-back road past the gate carried too many d.a.m.nable memories. The last time he had called on the lord of Alestron, he had come on an errand for Sethvir, with Arithon of Rathain made the b.u.t.t of a personal plot laid as a double cross. Even after twenty-six years, Dakar winced at the outcome. S'Ffalenn cunning had defanged his set trap. Without intervention from a Fellowship Sorcerer, Dakar would have seen himself spitted on the venom of s'Brydion vindictiveness. Today, escorting Arithon's shapechanged double, he sweated by turns, clammy dread superseded by his eagerness to see Fionn Areth receive his long-overdue comeuppance.

'They don't like besiegers, I see that much,' the young man allowed. Just as anxious to give the spellbinder his brisk quittance, he turned his admiring regard to the gate barracks, and the brick bailey just visible through the portal, where the guard checked arms for the watch change at sundown. 'Where should I go to sign with the field troops who fight for the Alliance of Light?'

'A trained swordsman like you? March with the foot ranks?' Dakar's sidelong glance showed contempt.

Fionn Areth drew himself up, his pleased surprise at the compliment stifled behind a thick scowl. 'The day sergeant could have told me,' he insisted, dodging a wine tun rolled by a boy in a stained-leather brigandine, 'where I should go to sign on the rolls as an officer.'

Dakar tucked a strategic cough behind his fist. 'They would not,' he said, eyes watering from stifled laughter. 'This is Alestron. Charter law rules here, and promotions to rank go by merit. However,' he said, s.n.a.t.c.hing his companion's sleeve, before he ducked back toward the barracks, 'if you wish to be seen as more than a green recruit, you could come along to the upper citadel. I might present you in person to the reigning s'Brydion duke.'

Fionn Areth stopped short, almost run down by a wagon filled with crates of squabbling chickens. Oblivious to the carter's oaths and the blizzard of down dusting over his hat, he said, 'No! You're d.a.m.ned to the dark as a minion of Shadow! In such company as yours, I'd likely be lopped into mincemeat the moment you opened your mouth!'

'You think so?' Dakar's grin widened. 'More likely, my friend, I'd be cut dead for standing next to your face. You're so blissed at the prospect of killing for glory, you've forgotten whose features you're wearing?'

Fionn Areth flushed. 'Well, maybe I'm thinking I'd be better off if somebody else introduced me. Your name's too well known, for a certainty.'

'By all means,' the Mad Prophet mocked. 'You can try. But without my credentials, I'll tell you now, you won't pa.s.s the gate to the inner citadel.'

'And you can?' Fionn Areth marched onwards. 'Show me a marvel I can believe, like a chick from an egg-hatching donkey!'

'I'm the apprentice spellbinder to a Sorcerer. Charter law answers to crown justice, and, gra.s.s-lands idiot, no offence to your ignorance, crown justice upholds the compact as granted by the grace of the Fellowship of Seven.' Smug as a swindler, Dakar sidled into an alley with a steep, twisting stair, without pause to see if his mark followed. 'The s'Brydion will not only receive me, they'll provide board and bed, and a bath with a willing maidservant.'

Fionn Areth raised his eyebrows, prepared to retort. But Dakar's wheezing seemed cruelty enough, as the ascent robbed him of breath for dignified speech.

At the top, disgorged on a road like a cliff-rim, they pa.s.sed through another wall, and another gate, this one more heavily guarded. Here, a plank-bridge spanned a vertical ditch, with keep towers on either side. The streets beyond snaked up the promontory, overhung by slotted-wood hidings. These had murder holes also. The unwary traffic moved underneath, drowned in a blue gulf of shade. Footmen and carriages, hors.e.m.e.n and drays breasted the seething press. Squeezed into the slot of another close, Fionn Areth realized the craft shops and houses were built chock-a-block, their fortified facings pierced with notches for bowmen.

'S'Brydion don't like besiegers,' Dakar agreed, puffing to recoup his wind where a matron's herb pots soaked up a thin slice of sun.

Upwards again, they pa.s.sed the rock-springs and the cisterns; then the chopped turf of the tilt-yards; another barracks and armoury, attached to a smithy. The heat wafted through the crossbuck door smelled of charcoal, and the clangour of hammers was deafening. Fionn Areth stepped, crackling, over curled shavings, whisked on the breeze from the cooper's shacks; dodged a boy rolling rims to the wheelwright's. Higher, three muddy children tugged a squealing pig on a string, past a fat woman who scolded. Pigeons flew in flurries of slate wings,, and gulls perched, white, on the cornices. They pa.s.sed the brickmaker's kilns, and the steaming vats where the Tenderers stirred fat to make yellow soap, and a sweating girl boiling fish-glue. Dakar puffed a complaint that his chest would split, and asked for a stop at a wine-shop.

'Only one gla.s.s,' he promised. 'It's our chance to take in the gossip.'

Fionn Areth sat in a dimmed corner, his hat-brim pulled low, while a man who made rivets flirted with the barmaid, and others with sword scars shot dice. In the streets, he had noticed that most men bore the marks of campaigns; or else the s'Brydion sergeants taught their recruits with sharpened weapons.

'This whole town's a war camp,' he murmured to Dakar, as they paid up to leave.

The comment earned him a moon-calf glance. 'It's a wasp's nest,' Dakar amended, then belched into his hand. 'I thought you would feel quite at home here?'

They climbed again, past dormered houses, then another deep ditch, and a wall notched with razor-toothed barbicans. The gatehouse held embrasures for ballistas, and a sand arena contained the full-scale array of a field camp. Hors.e.m.e.n were at practice, and other men, stripped, were perfecting the aim on a trebuchet.

'You will notice, there's been no standing timber for five leagues,' said Dakar. 'If an attacking host wishes to a.s.sault with siege weapons, it must import the timber, then cross that naked valley by ox carriage. Plenty of time for that monster, there, to hammer such toys into match-sticks.' He finished with wine-scented gravity. 'You don't want the s'Brydion clan for your enemies.'

Higher, they climbed, past stables and commons, while the swooping rooks wheeled in the salty gusts whisked off the channel inlet. They sheltered in a doorway as an armed troop clattered by, drilled to a cutting-edge of obedience. The captain who led them had eyes like his steel, sharpened and ruthlessly wary.

'There, just ahead.' The Mad Prophet panted. His wave encompa.s.sed two high towers, and a slit in between, which glowered down over a cleft like a quarry. The gulf was spanned by a thin, swaying bridge suspended on cables and forged chain. 'That's the Wyntock Gate to the inner citadel. Here's where the war host that sacked the royal seat at Tirans was broken, then crushed, in the uprising over five hundred years ago. They say the ditch, there, ran knee deep in blood at low tide, with the heaped fallen seething with ravens and vultures.' Overhead, there were such birds, now, circling high on the air-currents. Dakar mopped back his screwed hair and shoved off toward the bridge. 'They bring up dray teams and supply wagons by winch from the sea-gate, and now, the defences get serious.'

The approach took them through another set of twinned keeps, pierced by a narrow, cobble-stone ramp, pitched too steep for a cart. Planks had been laid, ribbed with nailed strips. The wood had been gouged into slivers by horses shod with screwed caulks.

'In war, they will unshackle the span of the bridge, then take up the planks and sluice down this causeway with grease,' Dakar said. 'Foot-troops can't pa.s.s then. See those embrasures? That's where the archers lie back and slaughter each wave of attackers at leisure.'

'They don't advance under frameworks and hides?' Fionn Areth asked, breathless.

'They try, and they burn like a torch.' Dakar added grimly, 'Look up.'

Overhead lay a spider-work track of forged metal, where an iron cart bearing boiling oil, or pitch-soaked batts could be dumped to scorch any force pressed against the meshed gate.

At the top, stopped by hard men with bared steel, Dakar gave his name. 'He's with me.' A jerk of his chin set the sentries' cold glance sweeping over Fionn Areth. 'My surety,' the Mad Prophet informed them, then said, 'We're expected. If you don't wish to trouble the duke or his brothers, Vhandon or Talvish can speak for us.'

The man in charge grinned, his helm polished over the scratches of veteran service. 'Brave man, you say my lord's family knows you? Better pray, if they don't. The two captains you mentioned will vouchsafe your ident.i.ty, or else you'll soon be greeting the rooks who clip the dead eyes from your carca.s.s.' He surveyed them again, lingering over Fionn Areth's plain sword and blunt hands. 'Go across. Since I don't know your faces, expect that you're going to be challenged.'

The watch-officer stepped back. High overhead, someone yelled, 'It's a maybe?'

The sentry nodded. Another man must have dispatched a signal, for torchlight winked in smart reply from a mirror in the far keep.

Past the narrows of the Wyntock Gate, goatherd and prophet stepped onto the bridge, whose gouged planks heaved under their load like sea-rollers. The steel links of the chain pinched a swatch of snagged tail hair.

'They can't cross a horse here!' Fionn Areth protested, clenched sick by the irregular, bucking sway and the creak of taut cordage beneath him.

'They do,' Dakar reb.u.t.ted. 'Hand-picked light cavalry and stronghold couriers, the animals are ridden or led over one at a time.' He paused, queasy, as a raven soared down the ribbon of shade cast by the span underneath them. 'The animals are trained as sucklings beside their dams. Legend holds the original mares were hand-picked, starved for water, then lured over to drink under a blindfold. You don't,' he finished, 'presume the impossible with s'Brydion. Foes who have tend to rue the experience.'

Several dizzy steps later, clued by the lack of disparaging comment, the Mad Prophet appended, 'If you're going to be sick, don't try running back. They'll have a spanned cross-bow sighting you from behind, and an archer apiece, stationed in the towers ahead of us. Long-bow men ready to skewer your heart, and mine, if the first marksman happens to miss.'

Fionn Areth swallowed. He disliked windy heights. 'They're that good?'

'Better.' Dakar mopped his brow in relief as they neared the pair of squat keeps, each housing the ma.s.sive drums for the windla.s.ses, which required twenty stout men to turn. They set foot at last upon secure stone, buffeted by the freshening wind, and surrounded by darting cliff swallows. The upper fortress reared up beyond, with the eyrie vantage of more drum-towers and look-out points, each with streaming banners painted in sun against the clear, lapis zenith.

'The Mathiell Gate,' Dakar stated. Before the forged grille, six sentries in scarlet-blazoned surcoats stood ground with mailed fists and poised halberds. 'It's a corruption of the Paravian, mon-thiellen, for "sky spires."'

More guardsmen in plain armour lurked in the sallyport, armed to the teeth, and with no trace of slackness about them. Two others, clad in stud brigandines, advanced to issue the challenge.

Dakar stated his name, then used Luhaine's, concerning an issue of sanctuary. He added much more in Paravian, several times stating Prince Arithon's formal t.i.tle of Teir's'Ffalenn.

'You don't match the description,' the gate captain snapped, while his men-at-arms responded to doubt with instantaneously lowered weapons. 'The Mad Prophet is said to have ruddy colouring. Your pelt looks dyed, and a poor job at that.'

Dakar sighed over the silver roots of the hair grown in since his ordeal at Rockfell. 'That's the price of my service to a Fellowship Sorcerer. Would an imposter try such stupidity?' The sentry's sharp glance flickered to his companion. 'Hat off, you!' he rapped with impatience.

Fionn Areth obliged without turning his head, still mollified by the view. The ma.s.sive, lower fortress lay spread out below, clutched like a bezel around the ducal council-hall, with its craft shops and gabled houses a jumble of lead roofs and slate, descending in steps to the valley. Beneath the chain-bridge, the first combers swirled in scallops of green, flooding in from the tidal rip in the estuary. At the periphery, the double-take of chagrined alarm pa.s.sed unseen, as the gate sentry noted black hair and green eyes, then the sharp-angled set of his features.

'Dharkaron's glory!' the watch captain gasped, low-voiced. 'Here I thought you'd brought me a yokel.' He wheeled, cracked an order to the halberdiers, then slipped through the grille and bolted up-town at a jangling sprint.

Dakar, smiling, murmured a laconic phrase to the man who remained.

The gate sentry now stood rigidly smart, and answered with punctilious deference. 'Someone's already fetched Vhandon and Talvish. Naturally, now, they'll serve as your escort. The wait's just a courtesy. Our watch-officer will have gone on ahead to inform the duke of your arrival.'

The herd-boy from Araethura overheard this, impressed. Faced forward, he jammed on his straw hat, while Dakar touched an arm to forestall an untoward exclamation. 'Patience. We'll be warmly welcomed.'

As the gra.s.s-lands-bred hothead this once minded decency, the Mad Prophet stifled his pique. The problem with bear-baiting Arithon's double: the artless creature provided no sport.

The recent arrivals were closely observed from an overhead vantage in the right gate tower. Two heads bent close to peer from an embrasure, one close-cropped and grey, and the other flaxen. Granite strength set in counterweight contrast to a dancer's mercurial quickness, the ill-matched pair of retainers surveyed the two men held up at the bridge-head.

'Merciful death! Did you look at that hat!' Vhandon burst out in amazement. Normally the more restrained of the two, he lapsed back into thoughtful silence.

Yon's not himself,' Talvish agreed. His narrow features hinted at laughter, while his clever fingers danced a tattoo against the battered stone coping. 'The stance is all wrong. That sword's not Alithiel. What I see is a flat-footed b.u.mpkin who's maybe experienced at skipping through cow clods?'

'The rescued double,' Vhandon surmised. Stolid frame planted, arms crossed, he was frowning, soot eyebrows shading creased sockets. He resumed in the rural drawl of East Halla, 'If the bait from the Koriani trap's been brought here, then where under the Fatemaster's almighty eye is his royal Grace of Rathain?'

Talvish grinned like a weasel. 'Shall we go down and find out?' For answer, Vhandon poked his spike helm through the siege shutter. 'Pa.s.s them! They're known to us.'

The gate sentry detaining the arrivals waved back, and Dakar, glancing up, shouted a pleased phrase in Paravian.

'Tal, d.a.m.n you, wait! Stop and listen to this!' Vhandon's blunt grip trapped his fellow's wrist, halting the rush for the stairwell. 'The Mad Prophet's brought us a parcel of joy! The child's a goatherd who believes all the mummery, that Duke Bransian's allied with the Light.'

'You say?' The taller blond chuckled with rapacious delight, then cracked his knuckles to limber his sword-hand. 'My beer coin says the duke's brothers will spit him.'

Vhandon's frown vanished. 'And mine says, Bransian will get his lambasting blade in before them.'

'Ath!' Talvish plunged for the landing, snorting back laughter. 'The duke might, at that. It's a squeaking tight call.'

A fleeting glance was exchanged in the dark, as side by side, the retainers who were life-pledged to serve Arithon descended to wring the Mad Prophet for news.

Whisked at brisk speed through the shaded, tight streets of Alestron's inner citadel, with the two men-at-arms padding like predators after him, Fionn Areth was shown through an iron-strapped door, into the bowels of a drumkeep.

'Up there,' said the blond, whose leopard's glance absorbed everything, and whose narrow lips did not smile.

The st.u.r.dy partner with the reticent face held his stance.

Parted from Dakar, a.s.signed to these veterans, Fionn Areth stifled his questions. He shoved back his straw hat and set about climbing stairs.

The swordsmen trod after him, matched. The feat should not have been possible, the breathless goatherd thought sourly. Their differing frames should not have been able to stride in such seamless tandem. Distempered by the time he was granted a guest-chamber, Fionn Areth closed the door on his disconcerting armed escort. Faced about, he b.u.mped into a liveried page, sent to help with his bath and his dress.

'No.' Flushed scarlet, Fionn Areth jerked his thumb toward the doorway. His scowl would have credited the Prince of Rathain, as he dispatched the fellow outside.

The room had no rug, no tapestries, no ornaments. A bronze-bound clothes-chest sat beside a low table bearing a basin, and a close stool, shoved underneath. The bed-covers were linen and beautifully woven, with a weapon rack waiting at hand's reach. The bronze tub had ma.s.sive, lion ring handles, and was already filled and steaming. Fionn Areth stripped and washed, pausing a moment to admire the towels. Hair dripping, lips pursed in a tuneless whistle, he hooked up his grimed hose to wipe down his baldric and scabbard. Still naked, hands busy, he heard the door gently open. He wheeled, but found no one there: only a clean pair of boots and a pile of folded clothing.

Sword in hand, he advanced. His nonchalance frayed into a desperate silence as he surveyed the offering he was expected to wear.