Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

‘Run,’ he snapped, and then did so, fighting off acid futility. They were too far from the grotto where Deshir’s girls and women were hidden, too hopelessly distant to bring reprieve. But knowing Pesquil’s headhunters were hot in pursuit of Fethgurn’s daughter, he had to make the attempt; for when Deshir’s clansmen discovered the extent of their losses, the grief of husbands, kin and fathers would for a surety touch off another bloodbath.

Last Quarry

The girl-child flushed by Pesquil’s headhunters led them on an arduous chase upstream. Above the initial site of the ambush, the valley narrowed. Tal Quorin’s bed sliced Strakewood in a steep-walled ravine, while springs that fed whitewater currents splashed in plumed falls from high gullies. Here the late afternoon shadows slanted through serried banks of broken, sunlit rock.

Pesquil disliked any country where the least chance noise would reverberate to a dance of wild echoes. Crannies between buttressed cliffs devolved into narrow, crooked grottos, any of which might contain a hidden camp. To search each one with a strike party would be fool’s play.

‘Noise and numbers would wreck all our chance of surprise,’ he complained in dry annoyance to Lysaer. ‘Clansfolk holed up in this place won’t be waiting about cowering like mice.’

While Pesquil debated over a dozen nooks where clan sentries could be posted, Lysaer fought drifting concentration. He felt faint. His bruises had settled into stiffness that cased the steady ache of cracked bones. The strapping on his wrist showed a damp patch of red, and he wondered how much blood he may have lost. The ferocity had not blunted from his anger, quite the contrary; but his reserves were worn away and temper by itself was no longer enough to sustain him.

Resolved on his course of precautions, Pesquil prepared for the moment when the fleeing girl crossed back into open ground and brought his best man with a crossbow to the fore.

‘Shoot clean,’ he whispered softly. ‘I want it to seem as if she tripped.’

The marksman set his quarrel with a steadiness Lysaer could only envy, aimed his weapon and lovingly squeezed the trigger.

The click and hiss of the bow’s release blended with the susurration of tumbling water.

Up slope, the running child missed stride.

‘Perfect shot!’ Pesquil said.

The bolt had struck her lower back in the soft flesh between ribs and hip. Her outcry rang and rebounded, multiplied from rock to rock as she folded to her knees. A dragged escort of small stones marked her fall in flat arcs and dust, swept off in the leaping rush of rapids. But the girl snagged on an outcrop at the water’s edge and hung there, one limp arm swinging.

From the vantage in the thickets, her dark hair could be discerned, fanned back from her face with the trailed ends sleeked by the spray.

‘Damn!’ Pesquil wiped sweat from his cheeks then rubbed his palms on his leathers. ‘Bad luck. If she’d hit the river, they might not suspect an assassin.’

Lysaer s’Ilessid stifled any flicker of revulsion. As strategy, Pesquil’s move was unassailable; nor had his effort been wasted. High in the rocks, a leather-clad woman left cover to rescue what looked from above to be the wounded victim of a misstep.

Poised in tensioned stillness, the more explosive for the fact he dared not fidget, Pesquil spent a moment in furious thought. He waited until the clan scout negotiated the most precarious segment of her descent, then touched his marksman on the wrist. ‘Again,’ he whispered. ‘Messier, this time. Have this one die yelling.’

The bowman muffled the ratchet of his weapon under a borrowed surcoat and wound it cocked. Smooth-faced and taciturn in concentration, he selected and slicked the feathers of another bolt. Weapon raised, he nervelessly fired again.

The clan woman windmilled into space, gut-struck and screaming in agony.

‘Move!’ Pesquil signalled his men. ‘Hurry, fan out, and keep close watch on the rocks.’ Beside him, the young marksman readied another quarrel, his instruction to dispatch the woman fast if her howls showed any sign of coherency.

Sweated and chafed under the quilted gambeson rucked in wet wads beneath his mail, Lysaer gritted his teeth and refrained from comment. Revulsion did not excuse responsibility. Toward his sworn purpose of destroying Arithon s’Ffalenn, he had sanctioned Pesquil’s foray against the clansfolk. No matter how unpleasant, duty demanded that he see the action through.

Again the crossbowman loosed his trigger. Quiet restored, the hiss and splash of the river once more swirled over sink holes and rocks. Pesquil picked a green stick while reports from his scouts were relayed in.

Movement had been sighted three different places along the rocks. Crouched beneath an undercut bank whose tree-trunks angled drunken reflections on broken waters, and chewing a scraping of sour bark, Pesquil sent stalkers to reconnoitre. Based on their findings, he used his stripped twig to sketch a crude map between his knees. ‘Here’s how we’ll deploy.’ The instructions he gave his lieutenants erased the last doubt he may have earned his command through any nicety of Etarran politics.

At a speed Lysaer found inconceivable, headhunter parties were called up from downriver and dispatched in wide, covert patterns that lined the canyon rims with crossbowmen. Pesquil’s design unfolded like well-oiled clockworks: the frontal attack designed to distract; the word at first engagement, that the grottos held only female defenders and small children; then Pesquil’s smirking comment to Lysaer before they crossed the river on strung ropes. ‘Man, don’t expect an easy victory. Clan bitches fight like she-devils.’

On the far bank, the men split into teams to scale the rocks. In deference to Lysaer’s strapped arm, Pesquil dispatched scouts to find him an easier route. Pain and exhaustion by now had outstripped the first numb shock of injury. Lysaer moved with gritted jaw, his skin grey. He would not let the men ease the pace. Slipping, sliding, grunting, he laboured upslope, past stunted cherry trees with their wild fruits green on the stem; over weather-split granite and twisted brush, and washed out gulches where the gravel turned under his boots and the jar of every wrong step made his breath jerk and spasm in gasps. The headhunters who accompanied him as escort might have disdained their assignment at first; but when at last they reached the ridgetop and rejoined their commander, Lysaer’s determination had earned their guarded respect.

By then action in the steep-sided glen was nearly wrapped up, the initial attack supported from behind by the stationed crossbowmen, who now cast about for the last living targets trapped against the walls of the canyon. Down through the fronds of ferns and cross-laced trailers of hanging ivy, Lysaer saw the sprawled bodies, bloody and hacked beyond anything recognizably female, or else near-unmarked except for feathered bolts that left flowering stains on the backs of deerskin jerkins. Half-sick from his hurts, too spent for strong emotion, the prince felt wretched and maudlin. For the first time in life he understood his royal father, who also had been provoked to require annihilating attacks on villages allied to the s’Ffalenn. That such forays had mostly come to nothing drove his sire to lifelong frustration. Lysaer, who in distant lands and exile had not failed, looked upon his dead with flat eyes and tried not to fret whether any of the corpses had been pregnant.

A headhunter lieutenant touched his shoulder. ‘Come. The able-bodied fighters are beaten down and our scouts say the tents are surrounded.’

They would fire the hides, Lysaer gathered. He braced his sore side and stiffly moved on. Of the hike up the canyon rim, he remembered little. The lowering sun hurt his eyes and patchy bouts of dizziness made progress difficult.