hideous sequence arrested, only to slip his grasp again as sensitized perceptions careened off on a tangent.
He saw a hillside strewn with corpses; banners fallen and snarled by the trampling passage of horses; and beyond these a clearing that held townsmen who were also Rathain’s subjects, hideously disembowelled and hung by their ankles from game hooks.
‘No!’ Arithon ground the heels of his hands in his eyesockets, then ripped in a shuddering, clean breath of air. Whirled by a firestorm of prescience, he grappled to recover mental balance, to reach past the reeling crush of nightmare for the single thread dictated by Caolle’s prudently laid strategy.
Control escaped him.
Harrowed by atrocities that deluged his mind in shockwaves, Arithon bent double in dry heaves. Gagged by the taste of bile, he sucked in another fast breath. Sweat poured off him in runnels. His sensitized flesh recorded the slide and fall of each salty drop. Another breath, this one deeper; his mind cleared fractionally. He managed to pry his consciousness away from the herb-induced barrage of far sight. He had been right to fear! One wrong choice, one misplaced scout or mistimed attack, and all he had envisioned might result.
Arithon tightened his hold on concentration, then locked onto the sequence he desired. His hand trembled as he shallowly drew on the pipe. Prepared this time for raw carnage, he traced through the spinning nexus of possibilities that deluged his innermind, to follow the single one that mattered.
Caolle planned to lure Etarra’s thousands up the Tal Quorin’s creekbed. Upstream, where the river shoaled and fanned out into reedbeds and swamp, the tight phalanxes of townsmen would be compelled to split their ranks. The terrain as they progressed would divide them further, until two rising, parallel ridges parted the garrison three ways. As battle became joined with the clan scouts, Arithon reviewed the unfolding engagement with deliberate slowness, while tienelle-inflamed awareness touched off in outbranching visions the thousands of alternate outcomes each action in due course might take. Natural and man-made barriers would successfully disadvantage two of Etarra’s split divisions. Archers placed in earth-bank embrasures Caolle hoped would disable the third.
Arithon paused to resteady himself. The bowmen would not be enough, he saw, as prescience swooped and spun to frame a grim chain of disasters. Etarra’s guardsmen slaughtered clan scouts like meat behind over-run embankments until the screams of dying men gave way to the croak of sated crows, all because the left flank of Etarra’s army would be commanded by a man whose lifetime obsession had been the study of barbarian tactics.
The butcher had grizzled grey hair and hands that were narrow and expressive. The face with its pocking of scars and out-thrust jaw was that of Pesquil, Mayor of Etarra’s League of Headhunters. His were the orders that sent city officers upslope like terriers to secure the ridge-tops. Etarra’s west division of pikemen would split two ways, then weaken the cohesion of barbarian resistance by storming both ends of the ridge. Then the light horse cohort dispatched single file through a ravine to the east would circle back and eventually bottle the valley from the north. They would crush the barbarian right flank and rejoin Gnudsog’s troops in time to effect rescue of the main columns bogged in the Tal Quorin marshes.
Faint and sick, Arithon watched the Deshans left alive at that juncture become herded into slaughter to a man.
Attempts to forestall their fate by assassinating Pesquil saw three scouts dead under torture. Whether fated by luck or by Daelion, the man would remain in command on the morning that battle commenced.
Sad recognition followed, that even the gravest misuse of shadow mastery and sorcery could not clinch a fourth effort. Pesquil’s Etarran paranoia made him carry a talisman, an artifact passed down since the rebellion that would ward against mischance by magic.
Arithon wept then, for sure knowledge: that his hope and his preferred future were forfeit. Left to their own resource, the clans were destined for ruin. Whether he left them outright, or played through his charade of weak prince and carried his sword at Steiven’s shoulder made no difference. Did he fight as a man, and not a sorcerer, his own corpse would be part of the carnage.
He yanked himself clear to escape a second reliving of the aftermath and the children’s executions in Etarra.
Shivering, wrung by a storm of guilt and grief, Arithon rallied wits enough to realize his pipe-bowl held only ashes. Though his body ached for reprieve, he could not let go yet.
The sweat on his lips mingled with a dampness salty enough to be tears, as he forced unsteady hands to move and function. He pried the lid back off the canister, repacked the pipe, then sucked in a redoubled dose of the herb to use trance to sound an alternative.
Back to the initial deployment, he reran the sequence of Caolle’s battle plan. Only this time, before Pesquil’s cat-cunning strategies could unravel clan defences, Arithon added pertinent contributions of his own. Inspired to terrible invention by the breadth of tienelle awareness, he gave his whole mind, bent the talents his grandfather had nurtured to full-scale killing. Wrought of magecraft, and shadow mastery, and devious cunning, he tested strategies that brooked no conscience. He toyed with the visions, slanted and skewed them to tens and thousands of variations. He weighed and recombined results; counted the dead and the wounded with a will locked hard against any acknowledgement of suffering. To feel, to think at all, was to lose the mind to sorrow. Dogged, driven half mad by his oathtaken weight of responsibility, he inhaled more tienelle and threshed through each chain of happenstance in exhaustive review for blind errors.
By the end, spent to a weariness that soaked in dull pain to his bones, he had garnered a handful of tactics that might yield the lowest toll of lives. His work would hold only if no unforeseen circumstance arose to upset his tested effect patterns; if against odds he had managed to circumvent all possible avenues of probability.
He was not Sethvir, to be tracking a scope of event as wide as the chance interaction that could happen between eleven hundred human lives. He could only try his best and leave his frailties to hope.
The tienelle was finished off in any case.
Arithon blew his lungs clear of the last, spent smoke. He sank on his heels and let the empty canister drop between his feet. At the edge of mauled senses, he sensed the quick, running tremors of withdrawal that must be damped and subdued before they built and racked through his body. He held motionless. Unlike the drug that had nearly ruined him in Amroth, tienelle’s toxins were not addictive. Once he had regained inner stillness, he could use mastery to annul the poisons. The torment would pass without craving. Arithon bent the lingering influence of the drug’s sensual enhancement toward steadying himself until his awareness could stabilize and let time reassume natural proportions.
The liquid call of a lark trilled through the glen. Eyes closed, Arithon savoured the sorrowful melody. He had done well, he knew. Amid odds so bleakly tipped toward defeat, he had ploughed an alternate path. Bitterness squeezed his heart for what felt like a tragic failure. To the farthest-flung limit of his abilities, a scant third of
