Warhost of Vastmark by Janny Wurts

Author:Janny Wurts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780006482079
Publisher: Voyager
Published: 1995-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

By eventide, the horses grazed in three divisions, and the cattle in two, the herds held separate by hills and minded by those few unfortunates Arithon had caught slacking. The other clansmen gathered around Dakar's campfire, laughing, bone weary, and noisy with exuberant pride. They had all laboured like animals. The prince who had driven them sat in their midst, his elegant linen silted with dust and his voice burred hoarse from shouting. If he had broken their rebellion through merciless work, he had spared himself least of all.

Exhausted as they were, the clansmen were reluctant to retire. They sat picking shreds of hare stew from their teeth, and swapped stories of four-legged mishaps. More than one jaundiced glance was rolled toward the cooking pot, filled now with a bubbling concoction of urine, bark, and dried berries. Squat as a hedgehog in his frayed layers of tunics, the Mad Prophet stirred the ill-smelling brew intended for use as a dye.

'We'll need to mark the culls,' Arithon was saying. 'My archers need field rations to carry them through the winter, and your high earl's share of the spoils won't improve if the breeding stock's butchered for jerky.'

Across the fire, someone called a derisive comment. A log fell. The coals fanned up flame in a flying leap of sparks that lit the s'Ffalenn profile bloody red.

The sight caused Dakar to stiffen. A horrible prickle doused through his flesh, chased by a chill like needled ice. Stark sober, no kindly veil of alcohol to blur his awareness, he had no means at hand to evade the onset of his spurious talent for prescience.

A shudder rolled through him. Before he could make outcry, the next wave bent him double in a gasping fit of racked air.

The stick he used to stir up the dyepot toppled from his slack fingers. He felt his knees buckle. The vague impression grazed him, of someone's grasp on his forearm and a yank that spun him clear of the embers.

Then his senses overturned into vision.

He saw no fire, no clan scouts, no stewpot. His flesh stung and his ears roared. He beheld the sweep of a wintry hillside razed brown by bitter frost; and felled in dead bracken, that same royal profile, racked by the agony of a death wound. The place was Vastmark. The season wept a dismal cold rain on the scene, and the water splashed lichened ground, stained from the blood that welled between Arithon's fingers. Around his prostrate, shuddering form, a fast-fading tracery of phosphor.

Dakar's captive senses strained after the phantom glimmer of what might have been a dissolving chain of spell seals.

Then the place where Arithon lay dying folded and spun into itself. Darkness followed, ripped through by another strand of augury: he received a whirled glimpse of Morriel Prime, matriarch of the Koriani Order, hunched like a web-making spider above the amethyst gleam of the Great Waystone.

Then fey sight burst asunder, torn into sparks and white-hot, glass-edged pain. Dakar returned to himself with a choked-off cry.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.