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But now the shortening days turned the weather against them.
Soaked peat made poor fares. The brick ovens for baking bread stayed
dismantled, the wrapped iron pots corroded in moldering canvas.
Flour stores spoiled and cheeses grew rinds of sticky mold. The days dawned
the same, dim under spun webs of mist that wisped and coiled through the
corries; only now the fogs lingered, shedding silver drizzle and a miserable,
pervasive clinging damp.
Chain mail and weapons lost their shine despite polishing, and the tents grew
streaks of black mildew. Men slept on wet ground and donned bymies splotched
with rust to ride out and scour the uplands for the fugitive enemy.
Arithon's motley force of shepherds melted before their patrols, elusive as
wind. Or they lurked concealed in ambush, to rain down their killing flights
of arrows. No day passed without casualties. If Lysaer still commanded a
force eleven thousand strong, they were not enough to cordon off Vastmark's
wild territory, with its seamed peaks and dim ravines and steep-sided,
rock-scarred ranks of ridges. The best a scourging army could effect was a
headhunter's aim, to pocket small groups of skirmishers, or scour the vales
for flocks or unwary settlements, then close in and leave nothing alive.
Against their armed numbers, the nomad tribes were pitifully few.
Each death brought the Master of Shadow a loss he could ill afford, a life
that left the shepherds one foothold less on the land to preserve family ties
and survival.
Lysaer labored, tireless, to reforge the knit of troop morale.
No matter what the hour, he arose to meet the sentries at every change of the
watch. He heard each report from inbound scouts, unfailingly at hand to
number their dead or credit their diligence, or acknowledge their smallest
success. Thin and tired and regaled in soaked finery, he stood in chill
darkness and engaged his gift of light to warm the garrison troops dispirited
by the cheerless, dreary nights.
Each dawn, while camp followers called coarse encouragement from damp wagons,
the patrols rode out to sweep the mist-cloaked crags and comb the ravines for
the sign of the Shadow Master.
"He's out there," Lysaer insisted, his confidence a balm to fuel faith.
Nights he awakened to the tug of antipathy that bloomed into sweating, harsh
nightmare: the sense of a step an the earth, or a current in the air, raised
to a distinctive stab of awareness that warned of his half brother's
proximity.
The hours when the feeling burned strongest, he dispatched Skannt's
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headhunters, backed by squads of Alestron's leaderless mercenaries.
No few of these rode re tte to arms at his personal expense. Since the gear
cast off in the rout behind Dier Kenton had vanished to tribal looters,
Keldmar's divisions gave their loyalty in redoubled diligence to atone.
No one berated them for giving way before a barrage wrought of sorcery.
Prince Lysaer's direct word silenced any loudmouths who jeered.
Still
Alestron's men stung for shame that the enemy's escape had been accomplished
through the break in their lines.
They raked the hostile hills and splashed through the grabbing reeds of the
bogs that spread like virid stains along the bottomlands.
At nightfall, most foray teams returned emptyhanded, unblooded, chilled to the
bone, and disheartened.
Others suffered a lightning-swift attack, played through and finished before
they could fight back. Their fallen died unavenged as they seethed in grim
circles that netted them no target to strike back.
For each paltry triumph garnered by the headhunters' tactics, shadows and
sorceries claimed their ongoing toll. No matter how well disciplined, the
outlying skirmish lines became swallowed at random by unnatural dark. Arrows
killed them. As often, the inbound supply trains straggled off their known
route, bewildered and misled by illusion. Patrols later found them, bogged
down in mud, or wandering lost, parted from their livestock and wagons.
The sorry truth persisted as the cook tents thinned their gruel and shortened
rations. Through a fortnight of blood and sweat and selfless effort, the
manhunt launched after the Master of Shadow gained Lysaer no measurable
results. By small nips and bites, his ranks were whittled by losses.
Lord Commander Harradene of Etarra became a familiar sight, splashing from the
puddled muck of the picket lines in his oversize boots and a cerecloth cloak
which flapped off his broad shoulders like the hunchbacked plumage of a
vulture.
He was at hand to quell the upset when a pike rack beset by Lyats brought a
tent down in tatters, then sent the contents of the armorer's too] chest
kiting through the high bracken, mallets and nails tumbling and tangling ahead
of the men who raced to snatch them.
"Your Grace, such misfortunes won't let up," Lord Harradene importuned once
the last errant tool had been netted in chain mail, and four shelterless men
crouched on their hams in the rain, stitching up rents in soaked canvas.
"Anytime troops suffer sour spirits, their angst will lure in the stray
fiends. In this benighted country, Ath's adepts keep no hostels to drive the
accursed creatures off. We could send to the Koriani hospice at Forthmark for
talismans. But if our couriers drive their remounts any harder, they're going
to break legs in the bogs. Another fortnight will pass before word of our
need gets through."
Lysaer was seated on a camp stool sharpening a dagger.
His hair beaded silver with wet, and his blue-and-gold surcoat a cry of
unnatural color against the unremitting gloom of wet hillsides, he looked up
at the towering officer given rank as Lord Diegan's successor.
"You know such vexations are precisely how our enemy hopes to weaken us." His
mildness a mask over iron determination, he added, "A whole lot worse than
Lyats will plague the five kingdoms if the Master of
Shadow escapes alive."
Lord Commander Harradene gave back no comment.
The Prince of the West laid aside whetstone and knife. He arose, snapped his
fingers to his page, and received the cloak with Tysan's star over his
shoulders. Then he waited, silent also, until the burly man of war who balked
with folded arms could no longer sustain his level gaze.
"Are you suggesting Etarra should withdraw?" asked Prince Lysaer.
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Flushed red by the implication that the allies from Jaelot and
Alestron were more staunch, Lord Harradene gave way.
"Persistence is a credit, but it cannot stay the weather, nor lift the gloom
of defeat off the troops. The hunger they suffer isn't helping.
If this campaign's to win us aught but despair, our quarry had best be drawn
and cornered quickly."
"See to your men and he shall be," Lysaer pledged.
An approaching jingle of steel, a man's bitten laugh, then the squelch of a
fast stride through mud heralded the courier with the report from
Skannt's last patrol. "Mount a foray team," the headhunter called, wringing
out his cloak. "We've seen more circles of flattened grass left by tents, and
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