The Ships of Merior (69 page)

Men grew to hate the scrape of crickets in the scrub as they quartered the stripped hillsides to meet the insatiable need for wood to fuel their cookfires. Outside the high walls, the heat at day’s end hung over the stubble of grasses, sucked brown by the rainless season
or else milled to chaff by the hooves of foraging livestock. The breezes settled at nightfall, to leave a rank, unhealthy morass: the reek of urine-soaked muck from the picket lines; of unburied garbage and open latrines; and the meadow scent of hayfields flattened under the burden of field pavilions and provision tents. Each day brought more arrivals, with yoked teams of thin-flanked oxen hauling their groaning supply wagons past the knots of beasts and the stalled carts of the trade caravans displaced by right of war.

Last to arrive, Avenor’s companies marched in to the snap of blazoned flags and the horn calls of officers. Wilted as any other troop in their sweat-dampened surcoats, the discipline on them sparkled. In deadly, polished order, they raised their camp in a landscape powdered ghostly monochrome by the endless haze of gritted dust.

The Prince of the West made his entry through the city gates at twilight to a thunderous welcome from the populace. Under the cut-brass light of a dozen torches, his jewels sparked like fallen stars amid his attendant guard of riders. At his side, Lord Commander Diegan cut a proud figure, resplendent in his silk and white diamonds and his hair ruffled sable under the bullion fringe of the royal standard. Poor folk and craftsmen thronged the wayside to throw rose petals and call appreciation. The wealthy, the guild merchants and their families, cheered and waved scarves from the balconies, which made the horses curvette and shy. The brick-trapped heat arose off the cobbles. Even the scent of the flowers crushed under the hooves of the destriers became clogged with the alkaline tang of parched earth.

Diegan regarded his sovereign lord with critical care. Fear had blunted support from the cities in Tysan after the sorcerous portent that crossed the sky during the barbarian chieftain’s execution. Lysaer had exhausted himself in diplomacy to ease the guilds’ entrenched suspicion
of wizardry. Only Pesquil’s iron-clad handling had kept the troops in discipline through the confines of a near windless crossing to reach port at Narms.

Now, strain and weariness masked in gay decorum, Prince Lysaer caught a posy thrown by a blushing young girl in a window. He inclined his head to a row of clapping merchants, and through teeth clamped in a fixed smile, said to Diegan, ‘These were your people, once. You could show them a bit of gracious interest.’

Straight in his saddle despite the suffocating heat, Diegan stayed stiff-lipped and obstinate. The laughing, light-hearted gallants who called his name were as strangers to him, changed as he was from the man who had ridden from these same streets two years ago. Now, chiselled lean by rough training, in fact more than title the hard commander of troops, no change in physical prowess could blunt the instinct for politics bred into his bones since childhood.

‘You’re stepping into a snakepit!’ he snapped to his prince. ‘Sithaer’s devils and furies! You’ve left the garrison captains of sixteen cities alone for hours to fret and wait upon your pleasure. Don’t be astonished when their arguments rip your plans to useless shreds. They’ll never let your officers have charge of their commands. They’d cut their own throats or see you dead, first.’

‘To the everlasting victory of our enemy,’ Lysaer replied in that honeyed tone which dealt reprimand like a slap. Eyes the heavy blue of his sapphire studs stayed trained on the throngs in the street. Still smiling, he tossed the posy in his hand to a grinning, toothless grandmother, then curbed his mount hard to forestall a shy as a sprig of dried lavender winnowed down from the dormer of a perfumer’s shop. ‘If the prospect of bearding a few snakes leaves you squeamish, I don’t need you at my side.’

‘I wouldn’t miss this.’ Reckless in challenge, Diegan countered, ‘Etarra’s guilds have a nasty, short memory
for favours, and for years your sweet war camp at Avenor’s been a bottomless drain on their treasury. If you’re offering yourself for political sacrifice, be very sure I want to stay and watch.’

A double-edged pride backed Diegan’s stab of mockery, as much for the masses of craftsmen and brown-clad apprentices who made deferent way for their cavalcade, as for the wedge of officers, turned out in glittering and lethal perfection at their backs. This city had been his turf. The pedigree birthright he had forsaken to serve Avenor and Lysaer s’Ilessid brought a swell of tightness to his chest. As they rounded the last corner of the thoroughfare, by perverse urge, he wished the whiplash instability of Etarran intrigue to unstring this prince’s self-assurance: to have just one unanticipated setback carve his insufferable royal confidence to proportions more malleably human.

None but a fool would refuse to fight beside Lysaer s’Ilessid against the Shadow Master. But on the advent of new war, against the ugly, blood-soaked memories still carried from the past campaign in Strakewood, Lord Commander Diegan desperately wished back his lost equilibrium. He needed the cat-cool independence of the dandy he had been that gave no man leave to lead his heart.

Heat rode the air like a blanket, thick with the reek of packed humanity. Oily fumes drifted from the great bronze pans of the braziers, lit to commemorate the arrival of s’Ilessid royalty. Above the swept marble stair, the copper-leafed doors of the council hall stood closed and latched behind guards in red and gold livery who held back the crowding, raucous throng which loitered to stare and speculate.

Inured to the flare and temper of Etarran street mobs, secure amid the ring of Lysaer’s captains, Lord Commander Diegan dismounted. He left his horse with the prince’s equerry. Humidity bogged the night like liquid
glass, freighted with the calm of pending storm. Lysaer should have looked hot in his mantling layers of state finery. For this meeting, no symbol of dress had been spared: the fingers of both hands flashed jewels; his full-sleeved, damascened shirt was hemmed with bullion braid; and bracelets cuffed the bones of his wrists. Over a tabard of indigo silk, he wore Avenor’s linked chain of office. Dusky red against the purer gleam of his hair lay the gemmed circlet of his royal rank.

Every move he made embroidered by the flash of costly tailoring, he mounted the shallow stair. The duty guardsmen made way to admit him with servile humility.

The royal escort entered the foyer, with Lord Diegan tense enough to suffocate. The knit weight of his mail bore him down beneath his surcoat, and the hair at his temples clung with sweat. To affirm his unease, the clash of the officers’ weapons and the grate of their tread across the tiles became overwhelmed at once by the clamorous argument that raged inside the great hall.

Amid a shouted uproar and the crash of someone’s banging, vain efforts to restore order, Etarra’s minister of city finances mounted to a pitch of hysterical fury. ‘Would you beggar the treasury? To move thirty-five thousand to sea before winter cannot be done without ruinous use of borrowed funds.’

‘Cost be damned!’ cut in Lord Commander Harradene in his grinding, martial bellow. ‘You want this Shadow Master dead? Then use the two eyes Ath gave you and take a long look at the map!’

‘Listen to Harradene,’ a garrison captain interrupted in the clipped style of Rathain’s northern coast. ‘It’s a dead simple case of wise tactics! Merior’s the Fatemaster’s very nightmare of a place to mount a large scale attack. The coast road through Shand is no option. Did your counting clerks think of supply costs over a thousand league march? Never mind we’d have no morale
left to fight with. Yon sorcerer would’ve flown his little coop before we could hack our way down the peninsula.’

‘Ath!’ In the hallway, Lord Diegan spun in alarm to his prince.
‘Who told them Arithon’s location!
I’ll have the head of the fool who spilled the secret!’

‘That could be awkward,’ Lysaer said with a maddening, mild glance. ‘Since the fool, as you call him, was myself.’

Diegan’s attempted rejoinder was lost as Commander Harradene’s declaiming bellow rattled the glass in the sconces.

‘To Sithaer with your whining trade ministers! The
only
chance we have is to surround and attack in force by sea. Harry the sorcerer against a lee shore. Once he’s dead, you can natter over debts and owed interest ‘til you kill yourselves with sheer worry. At least our people will be safe!’

While captains representing a dozen city garrisons raised a storm of yelping objections, and the thumping for order on the tabletops gave way to a clangorous bell of steel, the steward on duty by the entry took notice of the movement behind him: the quiet guard of officers, advancing, then the bejewelled presence they escorted. Obsequious in relief, he hurried to offer obeisance. ‘Your Grace, my Lord, they are frantic. Let me announce your arrival.’

Lysaer advanced a sharp step and touched the man’s wrist in restraint. ‘If you please, just open the door without fanfare.’ To Avenor’s Lord Commander, straight-lipped and furious at his side, he flipped an insouciant shrug. ‘What became of your Etarran taste for bloodsport and nasty politics?’

Diegan returned a tiger’s smile. ‘Allow our sworn allies to argue themselves to paralysis? Well if you fail to master the pack this time, and Pesquil doesn’t murder you for indecent lack of priorities, I’ll personally remedy the lapse.’

He trailed his prince through the archway to accost Etarra’s grand war council.

Under the musty fringe of trade guild banners, mewed in by dagged drapes of red velvet pulled over the hall’s lancet windows, the war commanders in their blazoned surcoats, dyed leathers and mail, and the trade ministers in ribbons and creased sarcenets locked horns in belligerent contention. The hall rocked with echoes. Marble friezework and groined arches resounded to a hell-bent boil of high temper. Secretaries scribbled notes and ran messages. Every man a seasoned master of dissent, the trade ministers connived in stifled whispers, faces masked beneath the deep brims of their exotic feathered hats. Atop the high dais, crammed into a conspicuous gilt chair, the Lord Mayor Supreme of Etarra dabbed sweat off his quivering double chin. Flushed in his over-tight layers of brocades, he flailed like an agitated puppet, and failed at each turn to make himself heard through the clash of raised voices.

Cryptic good sense drove one visiting foreign dignitary to avoid the crush on the benches. Keldmar s’Brydion of Alestron leaned on a square gilt pillar, an arras at his back and one negligent shoulder turned toward the gathering. His other hand masked beneath his cloaked elbow, he kept gripped fast to his dagger. Appointed by his brother to represent Alestron’s case against the Shadow Master, he had to display the earl’s blazon everywhere he went, lest his accent get him skewered for a forest barbarian each time he opened his mouth.

After seven days of insults stopped just shy of bloodshed, and apologies from fools invariably attached to commiseration over the political misfortune of his speech, Keldmar’s countenance was slit-eyed, his mood jumpy, and his contempt for the doings of pompous officials explosive as live eels in a cask.

When the seneschal’s harebrained assistant had the temerity to leap into the face of the black-bearded veteran, Commander Harradene, then pulled his eating knife to batter the table to seize attention, Keldmar stifled a burst of laughter behind upturned, sardonic lips. Etarra’s vaunted alliance was about to erupt and run riot. The ranking officers of Rathain’s city garrisons were inflamed enough to draw steel and gut the trade ministers and their secretaries, to say nothing of the other nattering windbags in stuffed velvet who objected to the costs of campaign warfare.

Keldmar cheerfully prepared to field whatever mayhem swirled his way. He weighed the prospect of pinking a few lame-brains who had dared mistake him for the get of the fugitive clanborn, while the spat between war captains and the hatted ranks of ministers climaxed in screaming crescendo.

A crack of whipped air rocked the chamber, to an actinic burst of white light over the central dais. Shouted invective died as if slammed by a thunderclap into stunned and terrified silence.

‘Ath have mercy on you all!’ pealed an acrid, carrying voice. ‘For believe it, the Master of Shadow will show none when his ships are built and he takes up the piracy of his ancestors!’

Blinking through flash-blinded vision, Keldmar saw a vivid, fair-haired figure stride through the press from the doorway. Laced in a dazzle of gold and the ice-point sparkle of royal sapphire, the newcomer’s advance was attended by a dark man muscled lean from hard training, then a compact knot of officers in a smart polish of accoutrements.

‘What a perfect, meek target we offer, bent one against another, and over a matter as, transient,
as petty
as expense.’ Lysaer s’Ilessid, Prince of Tysan, mounted the dais with quick grace. Every eye in the chamber fastened on his person. Sizzling silence met the outraged fury
which charged him from head to heel. The royal presence of him towered. Before the chair of Etarra’s Lord Mayor Supreme, he spun and glared over at the gathering. ‘Arithon s’Ffalenn is indeed ensconced at Merior. His location has been chosen most carefully, and I warn, to trap him there won’t be simple. War against any scion of s’Ffalenn has never been bloodless. This campaign will cost more than gold, more than lives, more than heartbreak, if we bicker ourselves into failure. Give anything less than total effort, and I promise: no city in the land will stay scatheless. No innocent life will escape suffering.’

The alderman of Etarra’s south quarter swiped his bonnet off his bald head, inflated for passionate rebuttal.

Lysaer rounded fast and cut him off.
‘Seven thousand lives were lost against the Master of Shadow in Deshir.
Would you make that ten thousand more? Twenty? This encounter against a criminal sorcerer must be fought on his own chosen ground - a deadly proposition. We must overcome any odds set against us, else give this man time to complete the fleet of ships the barbarians of Camris have funded. Let that happen and you’ll see a scourge upon your sea trading galleys such as you have never imagined.’