Warhost of Vastmark. Janny Wurts

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       III. VASTMARK

      On the morning that Lysaer’s cordon across the Scimlade peninsula was tightened in brisk effort to block Tharrick and Jinesse in their flight out of Merior, Arithon s’Ffalenn put his sloop Talliarthe in at the trade port of Innish. There, he spent a busy brace of days playing for small coin in the taverns. He renewed select friendships and secured help from a merchant to arrange for a ship’s crew to liberate the Khetienn from the rigger’s yard at Southshire. Then he collected the messages left waiting for him in posthouses and taverns throughout the city.

      In the bone-lazy mood brought on by a night spent in a first-rate brothel, Dakar watched the Shadow Master answer his correspondence in hagridden hurry. Since the threat posed by Lysaer’s armies lay far removed from Innish, the Mad Prophet railed that the rush was a criminal waste. After more than a year lost to sea passages and the backwater boredom of Merior, only an idiot or a man possessed would not linger amid civilized comforts.

      Arithon gave such complaint less weight than he ever had. On the following tide, he raised anchor again and set Talliarthe’s heading farther west. A rainy two-week passage brought her to landfall in the Cascain Islands.

      Like everywhere else on the Vastmark coast, the shoreline was all hostile rock. Galleys made no ports of call there. Captains who plied the trade routes gave the chained islets with their reef-ridden narrows and foamnecklaced channels a nervous, respectful wide berth. Forbidding slate cliffs stabbed up through the froth of winter breakers, black, jagged-edged and desolate. Their knife-bladed faces, clean polished by storms, slapped back every sound in meshed echoes.

      Assaulted from the moment the anchor splashed by the screeling cries of flocking gulls, Dakar puffed his cheeks in a sigh of relief. Today, he suffered no hangover. In a beady-eyed vigilance launched out of malice, he kept himself sober to see what Arithon would do next.

      The loss of the shipyard in its way became as shattering a counterblow as the wreckage of the fleet inflicted upon Lysaer at Minderl Bay.

      Never more patient, Dakar passed his days in coldblooded discontent. Arithon caught out in ignominious retreat was novel enough to be fascinating. The options left to choice were all mean ones. Lysaer’s warhost, so brilliantly reduced, now moved southward, pared down to its most dedicated divisions. Once the weather eased and more companies arrived to bolster the strike force at Merior, the Shadow Master dared not be caught cornered. No quarter would be shown by the specialized troops trained at Avenor for this war; Duke Bransian’s seasoned mercenaries and the hotly partisan garrison divisions lent by Etarra and Jaelot would vie to be first to claim his head.

      ‘Your tactics have only burned away the dross,’ Dakar pressured as Arithon turned the sloop’s second anchor line on a cleat and flipped in a sailor’s half hitch. ‘You now face the eastlands’ most gifted commanders. They won’t make misjudgments for the season and the supply lines. They’ll know to the second how long they can expect prime performance from an army in foreign territory.’

      Dakar fiddled with his cuff laces, a half-moon smile of anticipation masked behind his moustache. Against established officers and hard-bitten veterans, the livestock raids made by Selkwood’s barbarians would gad this war host no worse than stings by a handful of hornets.

      ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Erlien’s clansmen dance to their own mad tune.’ Arithon straightened and wiped salty hands on his breeches. ‘Am I meant to be grateful for your wisdom as a war counsellor? Lysaer and the duke won’t find much satisfaction using crack mercenaries to beat the empty brush at Scimlade Tip.’

      Too wily now to rise to goading, Dakar listened and caught the fleeting catch of pain that even a masterbard’s skill could not quite pass off as insouciance. Merior’s abandonment to the whim of hostile forces stung, and surprisingly deeply. Just what the village had meant to Arithon, Dakar avowed to find out.

      Asandir’s geas bound his person to the Shadow Master’s footsteps. Unless he wished to be crushed like furniture in the thrust of Lysaer’s campaign, he must sound Arithon’s plans, then use whatever vulnerable opening he could find to leverage influence over their paired fate.