Master of Whitestorm (38 page)

Her man was nothing if not thorough; even should the fishing boat sail with intent to run aground on the beachhead, little could be accomplished in a westerly without steerage except a downwind run back to Whitestorm.

“I’ll break your ugly clever head myself,” Ithariel threatened to the empty air. She choked back a cry of frustration.

The diligent boys and their grandfather disclosed the rest of Korendir’s sabotage inside a quarter of an hour. The list was impressive, from sprung planks in the jolly boat, to a weakened splice in a halyard concealed near the top of the mast. This not being enough, the mercenary had purloined the jollyboat’s rowlocks, and cut all the hanks from the headsails. None of the damage was permanent. But the ship and her single tender were dependably crippled through a day or more of repairs.

Ithariel loosed an oath of aggravation. “Is there anything my curse for a husband failed to think of?”

There was not; the youngest of the grandsons wormed out from beneath the tender and announced two missing pairs of oars.

No one bothered to check on the spares stored in the aft locker. Korendir would have seen those the past morning when he fetched out the buckets to swab the decks.

Ithariel glared landward at the forests where her man had ventured without leave. “I can still swim,” she whispered in defiance. Oblivious to the stares of captain and crew, or the heated blush of the youngest, she began to strip off her tunic.

Beneath her bustle of action, her heart knew a crushing end of hope. She could not possibly make landfall before noon. By then, her arrival would be too late. Her man had gone ahead of her, into dangers he lacked training to comprehend. The only protection he carried was his marriage ring, a band with a cut tallix setting. The wardspell laid into the crystal was nothing more than a token, a charm to heal cuts and abrasions, and a luck-bane against broken bones.

Ithariel wound her arms around her shoulders as if racked by a terrible chill. In trying to spare her from risk, Korendir accomplished nothing more than certain doom for them both. No comfort could be wrung from his courage. Even had she broken her vow and revealed the perils of his parentage, Korendir’s thrice-cursed honor would remain. His absolute disregard for danger would have dictated his behavior to the end.

XXI

MATHCEK DEMONS

“LADY, NO.”
The oldest of the brothers reached out and tried to catch her wrist; too late. The enchantress shucked her shirt without pause to acknowledge, and his fingers collided with bare flesh. She wore no other undergarment. Her skin in the morning light shone pale and translucent as abalone, and the form it described was breathtaking.

The brother snatched back as if burned. Scarlet as his sibling, he doggedly resorted to speech. “We can have that jollyboat patched within an hour.”

Ithariel never glanced at him, but reached down to unlace her hose. “What’ll you row it with, spoons?”

Her tone was shrewish, but concern drove her too hard to care. The higher the sun rose, the greater her peril; if she was going to die because Korendir went before her, she would rather the end overtook her alone in open water. The fishermen would never understand.

The older boy watched her tear at her points, and his throat tightened uselessly. Only the elderly captain regarded her beauty with impunity, and that because he had seen naked women by the dozens in whorehouses through the years he had sailed out of Fairhaven. With less fuss than he employed to unhook a flipping mackerel, he caught the enchantress’s wrist and spun her around to face him.

“Daft as your man, you’re being!” The anger in his eyes, or maybe the overpowering smell of fish on him forced her to take notice and listen. “That launch can be rigged to sail in less time than you might think. You’ll reach the beach safely that way, and be rested enough to continue. If you go now, I promise, you’ll throw your last chance to the winds. Tide’s turned, can’t you see? Current’s in flood and pulling north at five knots faster than you can swim.”

The old man paused in his tirade. He glanced aside at his boys and sent them to work with a barked command.

Then he released the enchantress with a fatherly pat on the shoulder and left her to retrieve her shirt, which fluttered across the deck on the verge of being snatched by the breeze.

“May not be such a fool, your man,” the captain concluded. He fixed faded, squint-wrinkled eyes on the ripples which scoured past the counter. “Sure picked his moment, and rudder pins? What a right bitch of an embarrassment! I packed spares. Neth, in these waters, all us south coasters do. But damned if your bronze-headed gallant didn’t ask which locker, one watch a ways back ‘midst the straits. Claimed a pin was fixing to crack, when I knew myself they’d been replaced the last time this bucket got careened.”

Ithariel’s reply came muffled through linen as she dragged her shirt over her face. “Cleverness won’t save him from demons, more’s the pity.”

Her tousled auburn head emerged from the collar, expectant; but if the captain agreed, he kept silence.

* * *

The jollyboat was prepared in less than the promised interval, but her design was not so easily compromised. Never intended to carry sail, she lacked keel, and her improvised rig made her clumsy. Worse, the prevailing westerlies had picked up. Harried by current, and forced to tack, the craft made marginal headway. Caught between views of a landmass that promised doom, or the wake which curved behind and displayed their disastrous set to leeward, Ithariel crouched with her forehead braced on frustrated, white-knuckled fists as the sun climbed inexorably higher.

The grandfather seemed sublimely unconcerned. He and his relations worked their boat with their accustomed sarcastic banter all the way to the shore.

The jarring impact of landing threw Ithariel bodily from her seat. One brother caught her as the craft rolled in the waves, while the others freed sheets and leaped the thwarts to steady against the pull of the surf.

Helped ashore by the old man, Ithariel murmured thanks and stepped out onto blinding white sand. The blot of shade beneath her feet was alarmingly small. Caught by immeasurable dread, she squinted toward the captain. “I’ll need you, and one of your crew that’s unmarried.”

“Oleg.” The grandfather hailed the brother whose hair was bound with a twist of red wool.

He was not the oldest, nor even the one of middle years. Ithariel regarded the boy’s cheerful features with no end of trepidation. “I’m sorry,” she said, touched by misgivings that echoed the captain’s. “Trust me, I’ll skin my husband the mercenary, if we ever recover him alive.”

The wind carried a smoky taint over the fragrant resin of pines. Worn with nerves, and guilty for the dangers she must impose upon a kindly old man and young boy, the enchantress made her way inland at a pace that promised blisters. The grandson followed at her heels, while his elder delayed briefly to shout orders for the brothers who remained.

“Ye brought the axe? Good. Then find some decent driftwood and hew us two brace of oars. Bind them in net twine for rowlocks, then dismantle that limping excuse for a mast.”

As the brothers’ oaths of irritation fell behind, Ithariel felt gratitude for the grandfather’s undying good sense; if they survived to recover Korendir, a hasty departure could save them. When the boy at her side asked a question, the enchantress found grace from somewhere to explain that over soil and rock she could follow Korendir’s path without any need for spells. There were advantages to tracking a spell-bonded mate; but as she passed the dunes and plunged into brush and thick forest she sorely cursed the necessity. Twigs clawed her hair and fallen leaves mired her step. A persistent ache started at the base of her skull, warning that at last, Korendir of Whitestorm had encountered the trouble inevitable from the start.

The enchantress’s discomfort intensified as she and her companions made headway into Illantyr’s wooded hills. The smell of smoke and burning grew stronger. Then the forest thinned, and they crossed a village byway, where corpses rotted in a ditch by the roadside. One was a woman, with the beetle-crawling remains of an infant wrapped in her shawl. Scavengers had gnawed away her abdomen.

The boy doubled over and got sick, and with pity in his eyes, the grandfather steadied him to his feet. “Bear up, lad. You’ll see much worse if we’re delayed.”

The boy peeled his bandanna from his brow and dabbed at his fouled mouth. His fingers shook. “Do you think Mama—”

The grandfather answered with stony lack of sympathy. “Her, and us, and yer brothers, too, if we don’t find that mercenary quickly.” He nodded after Ithariel, who waited with anxious impatience. “Get on and follow her, and belay the whining complaints.”

The boy raised his chin. He stumbled ahead while his eyes spilled a flood of soundless tears. Behind him, the grandfather’s weathered face showed sadness.

Beyond the roadway, the trees stood bare; clouds massed the sky ahead, but the going became easier, the terrain cut by woodsmen’s footpaths. They crossed the clearing of a charcoal burner’s hut, but his kilns were cold, and his family departed. Squirrels had nested in the tree overhanging the chimney, sure sign that desertion was not recent. Sun spilled through stripped branches and scattered bars of shadow across the ground. Through a headache that steadily worsened, Ithariel realized the light lanced straight down; noon had come, and with it, the peak of the demons’ powers.

Any minute would reveal Korendir to enemies as the get of Morien Archmaster. Once that fact was uncovered, the tallix ring with its token spell of blessing was not going to spare him from dismemberment.

The trees ended soon after; ahead the ground stretched gray, an expanse of wind-sifted ash winnowed into patterns like desert sand. Shivering from pains that now laced like fire along her nerves, Ithariel paused to lay spells. Her skin wept clammy sweat and her hands shook worse than the boy’s as she fought to trace symbols in the earth.

For the vista of wasteland established without doubt that they had reached the leading edge of demon territory.

At Alathir, Morien had raised magic to challenge and defy this same advance; his defense had been wrought of earth forces, and these the demons had unbound like a snag in a fisherman’s knit. Yet where Korendir’s father had sought to destroy, his wife wished only to conceal. She tapped the forces of Alhaerie itself to weave a glamour around her companions. Just as a man from Aerith would take no notice of pebbles, or sticks, or roots, so the demons might overlook the moiling, chaotic trace energies transmuted from their native environment.

Enchantments of this nature were a perilous undertaking in any place; elaborate safeguards must be taken to avoid an imbalance, and caution warred with the pressing need for urgency. Ithariel worked against certainty that time was now ruinously short. Halfway through setting the wards, she shuddered and cried out. Her face went gray and she flung back her head while above her, outlined against sky, the faces of frightened companions watched helplessly.

“He’s not dead,” she said hoarsely. “Not yet.” And she forced her spells to completion, ringing her fishermen in crackling eddies that snapped and then faded to invisibility .

Ithariel arose, hunched in pain like an old woman. “If we can keep our advance quiet, we have hope. At the moment the demons are diverted with Korendir. They would make sport with him before he dies. As long as he stays alive, our presence stands a chance of being overlooked.”

She did not add that they tortured him; or that like an echo, his suffering harrowed her. Instead she said he was close by, and as she staggered forward, she felt the arms of the old man and the boy reach out to steady her steps.

They progressed over ground blasted to the desolation of a volcanic plain. Burned rock and blackened cinders heated unpleasantly through layers of boot leather and hose. The air smelled scorched, and though elsewhere the land was sunlit, the sky here hung gloomy with overcast. Loose hair stuck to Ithariel’s temples. Her breath ripped in gasps from her chest and her eyes watered. She blinked away tears, stared upslope to the ridge. Smoke billowed in drifts against the summit. Her stinging eyes could just make out the limbs of what might have been thorn trees at Whitestorm.

“Up there,” she grated, and began the ascent over coarse rocks that gouged at her shins and palms.

The climb was relentlessly steep, and the grandfather began to wheeze. A simple man, content with his life of toil with bait and nets, he had no experience with enchanters or demons; but danger was a thing he knew well, and he understood the management of men. He held his position with a determination learned from weathering gales and acted as if he had moved through circles of spellcraft since youth.

“Look you, Oleg, see these stones?” he said to divert the boy who moved in stiff fear on Ithariel’s other side. “They’re sharp, full of holes like the lava rocks from the Mathcek Isles to the north. Bad shores for ships, those. They say the demons escaped to Aerith from there.”

Ithariel had no breath left to correct that misapprehension, which nonetheless had given rise to the demons’ name. The point became moot five paces later when a scream drowned out the old man’s chatter. The cry was human agony distilled, then magnified and shattered to a thousand echoes by the riven, lifeless landscape. Ithariel shuddered again. The boy beside her balked on the mindless edge of panic. Though the grandfather had no more bravery left in him, he went through the motions and tried to speak words of encouragement.

Ithariel fought for grip on the confusion which divided her mind. Aware through the pull of Korendir’s torment that around her companions were faltering, she snagged the grandfather’s attention with a look and said, “My Lord of Whitestorm is alive.” She qualified in a racked and scraping croak, “He’s fighting for survival, and that of your loved ones, never doubt. What we hear is certain proof.”

Another scream sheared the air. Ithariel felt the hair rise along her spine. She worked her fingers free of her shirt cuffs, the right one now shredded to match the other in the unthinking clench of her hands. “You must not run,” she finished finally. “No matter what you see, I’ll need you both to help carry him.” She did not add that if she succeeded in reaching her man, the odds lay against getting him out.

They labored to climb the rugged slope. Smoke swirled around them, wind-eddied into shapes like departed spirits. The rocks rose raw-edged and dark against a sky forbidding with storm. Though elsewhere the hill was scoured clean of vegetation, they came at length upon a hollow that sheltered a stand of living trees. Their branches were cruelly barbed. The crowns which tossed in the wind were green-black, each leaf the mirrored replica of the forest which clothed the cliffs above White Rock Head. The sultry inland air carried an incongruous tang of ocean.

Stung by the manifestation of Korendir’s vulnerability, Ithariel understood how the trap had been sprung. She guessed in advance what must wait beyond the last crest. As if to intensify her dread an ominous silence fell. She and her companions hurried the last steps and breasted the lip of the rise.

The outcrop fell away beneath, but not as randomly jumbled stone. Here rose battlements of blue granite, dressed, shaped, and corniced into a structure immediately familiar. The valley amidst the wasteland held a perfect recreation of Whitestorm’s inner holdfast. Every detail was accurate, from Haldeth’s craftmark on the gate winches, to the patterns of the cobbles in the bailey; and so they would be, since their shape had been torn intact from Korendir’s mind. Yet in this place wrought by demons, the aura of the tallix in the watchtower washed a scene of living hell.