events at Minderl Bay had effectively shown that Lysaer held no vestige of control over Desh-thiere’s aberrant geas.
Which left Arithon once again at the critical crux of responsibility.
Sethvir sighed, his crown tipped back against the tower’s chisel-cut window. In tones hammered blank by a burden just extended through trials enough to stop the heart, he said, ‘Asandir will reach the focus at Caith-al-Caen by the advent of tonight’s sundown. He can transfer to Athir’s ruin on the east shore and flag down the sloop Talliarthe. He will treat with the Shadow Master there and charge him, for the world’s sake, to stay alive. At any cost, by whatever means, the Prince of Rathain must survive until this threat beyond South Gate can be resolved.’
Beside the table, thinned to wan imprint against the varnished tiers of the bookshelves, Kharadmon blinked like a cat. ‘Not enough,’ he said in his old, stinging curtness. ‘Have Asandir bind our crown prince to his promise by blood oath.’
Luhaine stiffened to indignance and Sethvir looked aghast. ‘He is s’Ffalenn and compelled by his birth line to compassion,’ they protested in clashing chorus.
The Warden of Althain finished. ‘Since Torbrand, no scion of Rathain has ever required more than his royal promise!’
Kharadmon’s image vanished into a wisp of gloom that fanned a chill through the chamber. ‘You didn’t experience what lies behind South Gate. Heed my warning. Who can say what lengths may be necessary to save us all before this disaster is played out.’
Tharrick
Dakar the Mad Prophet snapped awake from the tail of a nightmare that involved the loss of his best spirits into the gawping jaws of a fish. The lap of wavelets against wood reminded him that he inhabited a musty berth aboard Talliarthe. He cracked open one eye and immediately groaned as light speared into his pupil from a scald of reflection which danced on the deck beams overhead.
‘Is it sunset or daybreak?’ he bellowed, then stuffed his face like a turtle back into the dark refuge of his blankets.
From his place by the stays in the stern, Arithon merely kept whistling a threnody with an odd, glancing dissonance that went ill with the aches of a hangover.
‘Ath,’ Dakar grumped. He shrugged off the suffocating layers of salt-damp wool, his pudgy hands stretched to cover his eyes and his ears, and successfully managing neither. ‘Your tune sounds like a damned fiend bane.’
Arithon nodded. His screeling measures stayed unbroken. He had seen iyats in the waves at the turn of the tide and preferred to keep his rigging unmolested. He had yet to change the ripped shirt he had worn through the affray at Minderl Bay. Bathed in the ruddy gold light that washed the misted shoreline at Athir, where his little sloop lay at anchor, he twisted the cork from the neck of another flask, then upended it over the stern rail.
Dakar screamed and shot upright as a stream of neat whisky splashed with a gurgle into the brine. The nightmare that had wakened him had been no prank of imagination, after all. ‘Dharkaron rip off your cursed bollocks!’ he howled, and added a damning string of epithets that curdled the quiet of new morning. ‘You’re dumping my last stock of spirits into the Ath-forsaken sea!’
Arithon never paused in his pursuit. ‘I wondered how long you’d take to notice.’ That icy note of warning in his tone was unmistakable to anyone who knew him.
Dakar paused in the companionway to catch his breath, take stock, and indulge in a long, thoughtful scratch at his crotch. ‘What’s changed?’
In the days since the discharge of his hired seamen, then Earl Jieret’s landing ashore for return to Caolle and his clans, the Shadow Master’s brittle temper had seemed to ease. With Lysaer’s warhost disbanded, the intolerable mood he had affected since the massive strike at Werpoint had settled out. Left to his preferred state of solitude, the Shadow Master plied the helm and set Talliarthe’s course gently south.
By the drilling intensity his green eyes held now, something had happened since last night’s sunset to upset his plans yet again.
Too sore for subtlety before balking silence, Dakar repeated his question a plaintive half pitch higher.
Arithon stabbed the cork back into the emptied crock, teeth bared in a wince as the movement troubled some hurt beneath a bandage on his forearm. The injury had not existed the day before. ‘We’re going on to Perdith to visit the forges, and here forward you’ll need to stay sober.’
The reference took a muddled moment to resolve through a headache into sense.
‘Fiends!’ Dakar cried, scaring up the gulls who had just folded wings and settled back into the waves. ‘Don’t say. It’s those Sithaer-begotten brigantines again. You promised you weren’t going to arm them!’
‘Complain, if you like, to Asandir,’ said the Master of Shadow, succinct. ‘If I thought it would help, I’d back you.’
The Mad Prophet opened his mouth to speak, then poised, still agape. He swelled in a gargantuan breath of disbelief, and stopped again, jabbed back to furious thought by the stained strip of linen tied over his adversary’s left wrist. ‘Ath Creator!’ His eyes bulged as he exhaled a near-soundless whistle. ‘Asandir was here. Whatever have you done to require a blood oath before the almighty Fellowship of Seven? No such strong binding has ever been asked, and you a sanctioned crown prince!’
Arithon shot back a glare like a rapier, hooked the last crock by his feet, and ripped the cork from the neck.
Dakar turned desperate. ‘Have a care for your health! At least save one flask. It might be helpful, for need, in case that knife wound turns septic.’
Awarded the Shadow Master’s cool indifference at its worst, the Mad Prophet knew when to desist. If he gave in to fury, his head would explode and, from nasty past experience, he knew better than to provoke the s’Ffalenn temper while emerging from the throes of a hangover. He would seek a patch of shade and sleep off the worst before he shouldered the risk of having his own whisky crocks thrown at him.
He awakened much later to the bone-jarring crash of Talliarthe beating to windward. Her topsails carved in dizzy circles against a clouded sky, while winter-cold spray sheeted over him at each rearing plunge through the swell. Green in the face and long since soaked to his underclothes, Dakar groaned. He rolled, clawed upright, and staggered to the rail to be sick. The horizon showed an unbroken bar of grey and the wind in his nose was scoured salt.
The Mad Prophet closed his eyes and retched, too miserable to curse his companion’s entrenched preference for the rigours of deep-water sailing.
At the helm, far from cheerful, Arithon s’Ffalenn whistled a ballad about a wicked stepson who murdered to steal an inheritance. The tune held a dissonance to unravel thought. By the arrowed force behind each bar and note, Dakar resigned himself: he had no case left to argue. The renowned royal temper already burned fierce enough to singe any man in close quarters. To cross a s’Ffalenn prince in that sort of mood was to invite a retaliation in bloodshed.
The wind scudded through a change and blew from the north, and the rains came and made passage miserable. Dakar lay below decks, too wrung to move, while the sloop ran south, her brick-coloured sails bent taut. At Perdith, Arithon concluded his business with the weapon smiths
