Janny Wurts - The Ships of Merior

The invisible fiends knit about him in spirals of distorted breezes. They buffeted and pinched and tweaked at his hair in signal fits of irritation. When he refused to give in and fuel their wants further, they lent themselves in their madcap way to tease, to frustrate, to annoy, that they might sip what stray spurts of emotion they could wring from whatever victims were available.

In an eyeblink, the work on the jetty erupted into chaos.

Stone chips and rocks sprang up and whirled airborne, clanging off the helms of the officers and unmercifully pelting the conscripts. Bruised and screaming in wild surprise, men heaved off the encumbrance of their loads. The massive dressed blocks misaligned and jarred awry, then dropped with a thud to quake the sea wall. Granite rasped against granite, grinding off falls of small pebbles that ripped aloft to sting flesh. Men coughed out curses and spat grit while the older blocks already mauled by storms and ice loosened, cracked, and gave way, to fall with thunderous, geysering spray into white petticoats of surf.

A waterspout kicked up where no breath of wind was in evidence. It shrieked and snarled and snaked itself a passage like a whip through mild air. The lead ox teams scrabbled back, whuffing. Pounds of solid muscle strained against the constraints of leather and shafts, while the stout cart behind struck a wall of rock and compressed. The wagon bed groaned and burst in a wreckage of timber. The next dray in line jounced and jammed two wheels in cracked paving, its hubs wrenched off to a squeal of sheared linchpins.

Yards away, three stolid drovers appeared to entangle themselves in their ox goads and fall flat.

‘Ath spare us!’ yelled the captain in charge. He ducked too late to miss the sliced foam off a wave top that poured itself down his back. Red-faced, dripping, ready to murder for sheer fury, he hopped from one leg to the other. ‘We’re caught in a damned plague of fiends!’ The pikestaff in his hands came alive with the urge to bang down and hammer at his insteps.

Bleeding now from a dozen minor gashes, men at arms threw aside polearms to slap at the hail of small pebbles. While the oxen bucketed against their yokes, and bedevilled carters strove to quiet them, iyats possessed the very reins in their hands and exuberantly undid the buckles. The dropped leather twined snake-fashion and laced around ankles and fetlocks. While the animals bawled and the convicts thrashed in their shackles, the beleaguered guardsmen unsheathed their daggers. They bent to hack themselves free, then stamped and slapped at cut bits of leather that groped up their calves like maggots.

‘Men, get the prisoners to form ranks!’ shouted the harried captain.

While his troop pushed, punched, staggered, and shoved the distraught work team into ragged columns, a sizeable stretch of the sea wall began in bounding starts to unravel. Rocks flew and cracked, whistling the air like slingshot.

‘Back!’ screamed the officer of the watch. ‘Inside the gatehouse! The talismans there will fend off the fiends.’

Braced on planted feet just shy of the crumbling jetty, the Mad Prophet laughed through his reddish frizzle of beard. If the little tin fetishes that dangled from the gatehouse had once held power to ward, time and attrition had drained the spells. The residue that lingered might deflect one fiend; never a full pack bent on a spree of wild mischief. Against common belief, the jangle and chime raised by wind-tossed strips of tin caused no warding vibrations. Their sound was good for nothing but warning and the iyats would pass them unscathed. Dakar knew from bleak experience: having tasted the heady discharge of spell-force on his person, the sprites were apt to dog his tracks for days.

As unrepentant instigator, he set his jaw against the throttling tug of his prison smock, that a smaller iyat seemed bent on unravelling into a garrotte. He marched in his shackles through splintered carts and the steaming heaps of dung littered by the terrified ox teams, and felt inordinately cheerful. Singing bawdy ditties in confinement was vastly preferable to hard labour that might see a man’s bones ground for fish food; worth even the torment of a plague-storm of fiends to regain a safe state of idleness.

Four days later, engrossed in a target shoot against Jaelot’s second captain of archers, the Masterbard’s apprentice Medlir poised at the butts in the practice yard to tally the score of his arrows.

An off-duty guardsman hailed him from the gate across the field. ‘Hey, minstrel! Did you hear? That fat man your master must play to redeem was let off his term of forced labour!’

Wrapped in a faded dun cloak, lashed about the ankles by the wind-crumpled stands of spring grass that had finally pushed through the mud, Medlir flicked back his hood. Eyes as changeably flecked as the lichen tinged wall behind his shoulder widened under up-turned brows. ‘You speak of Dakar? What’s to hear?’

His shooting companions clustered around, sand pig-gins empty, their shafts still jammed in straw targets. The silver they stood to lose if the count was completed left them amiably open to diversion.

Now able to laugh at the afternoon’s pestering annoyance, the guard just off watch in the dungeons strode over, his conical helm tucked beneath his arm. ‘Fool bailiff had to release him. No choice. Besides being crazy, the fat man’s a breathing, walking lure for stray fiends. Brings them on like a lodestone draws iron, and not a blighted talisman in the city seems to hold power for protection.’ Arrived at the butts, and soldier enough to count and weigh odds at a glance, he slapped Medlir on the shoulder. ‘You’re winning? With that? Against longbows?’

‘I was.’ The minstrel gave a crooked smile. Long, supple fingers unstrung the horn recurve, then surrendered the weapon to a page boy for return to common stores in the armoury. ‘You didn’t tell Dakar the name of the inn where we’re quartering?’

The guardsman’s brisk humour turned wicked. ‘The city dungeon won’t keep him. Who’s left? I hope you’ve got patience for waking up with your bootlaces snarled into knots.’

‘Well, I don’t.’ Energetically merry, Medlir laughed.

He kept to himself the piquant truth that a masterbard’s art included chords arranged in particular harmonic resonance to repel fiends. Halliron had forbidden his apprentice to perform any music in public; for himself, the old man avowed to make no appearance until the moment he was compelled by the terms of the judiciary’s bargain. If Jaelot was pestilent with iyats due to Dakar’s incarceration, the Masterbard and his singer in training would retreat to their attic and share rich appreciation of the havoc.

Touched across distance by a prompt from the Warden in Althain Tower, a raven flaps and rouses a Fellowship mage, who ignores the stiffness of old wounds to arise, don his threadbare black cloak, and journey eastward across Radmoore Downs toward the spell-guarded stronghold on the edge of the dread mires of Mirthlvain …

In western lands, the same call is heard and declined by another spirit mage who stands watch over an enclave of enchantresses; in particular one initiate with dark auburn hair and a guarded heart, entrapped in the web of greater intrigue that surrounds the Master of Shadow …

Far removed from Athera’s spinning orb and the sphere of Sethvir’s provenance, the discorporate awareness of a sorcerer departs from a world bound in ice and shackled under brooding bands of fog; and as his conscious presence arrows on through the emptiness that freezes the space between stars, he fears the next place he seeks to unlock the Mistwraith’s secrets may prove as lifelessly desolate as the last …