held more worry than reassurance. A sailor’s move and a slither saw him up and then prone on a treebranch.
Below him, Madreigh fought half-blind from a gash that trickled blood off his brow and right eye. Arithon drew his belt knife, threw and took down an opportunist who bent for a low stab at Jieret.
Madreigh finished the action by stomping the fallen man’s face. He said, blade-harried, ‘If you know something that’ll save us, just do it!’
Already two more clansmen lay dying, with another one wounded about to follow. Torn that such bravery should go wasted, Arithon stilled his nerves and focused his mind to cold purpose. The crossbowman perforce must come first.
He cast about the wood, but could not pinpoint the man’s cover. That was the bitterest setback, since his purpose must be accomplished without broadscale use of shadows, or any wide sweep of illusion that might terrify an army into rout. Unless he maintained his anonymity among the clans, everything that mattered would go for naught.
Amid a battle that assaulted concentration, Arithon distanced his senses, walled off awareness of everything outside a discrete sphere of air that immediately surrounded his person. The ward snare he shaped was risky and difficult, an amalgamation of illicit magelore and inspiration he would on no account have attempted to save himself; nor had he, to spare his own father.
But to Deshir’s clansmen, he was oathbound. Steiven’s people would never have faced annihilation if not for his tie to Rathain.
The forces he tapped were forbidden by any right-thinking mage. The tiniest miscalculation, just one slipped step and the vortex he fashioned could rend himself, the tree and the last of Jieret’s defenders. Arithon pitched the far fringes of his knowledge against dependency that, with his person offered as target, the town bowman would shoot to kill. The attention must be poised like strung wire: he must not feel his cut shoulder, must not rouse at the choke of dying men, nor even spare thought to question whether his clansmen might already lie slain. Ringed in perilous energies, Arithon touched the air,
Air did not feel death: it registered screams only as rhythms, intricately concentric as ring-ripples spread through a pool. There was peace and the terrible beauty of Ath’s order, until a rip of turbulence bored through, swift and barbed for death as only man-made ingenuity could contrive.
Arithon closed the net of a ward just finished, but not yet tested for weaknesses. Too fast for care, too late for regrets, too utterly final to abort, the headhunter’s quarrel whistled in.
A small thing, the dart, comprised of a handspan of wood and steel, wound string, glue and dyed feathers; but a shaft notched and barbed, that sped with a force to pierce mail. Each particle of its substance had Name; each grain of its mass, an energy signature for which Arithon had subverted Ath’s order and patterned a banespell.
By nature, any snare of unbinding held a lawless compulsion to annihilate. Counter to the Major Balance and in parallel with chaos, frail strictures bent to harness the ungovernable were wont to spin dangerously awry.
In raw fact, Arithon’s effort was only plausible through a tangle of tricks and paradox, a loophole in the world’s knit that hinged on a theoretical blend of fine points: that the object to be over mastered was itself made for death, and that its uninterrupted natural action must set forfeit the conjurer’s life.
Everything,
And if the man was such a marksman and his aim did not drift, and the baneward successfully intercepted his bolt before the instant it broached living flesh, the result offered perilous instability. The safeguards contrived to limit the unbinding’s ill effects were by no means infallibly sure.
Doubts were all Arithon had, and stark fear, when the quarrel hissed into his defences.
To unmake any particle of Ath’s Creation came at hideous cost. Arithon shuddered, then blocked a scream with his knuckles as the mote he had captured exploded in a battering burst. Tied to his conjury, his body convulsed in a spasm that seemed to crush out his marrow as law and matter unravelled in a whistling rush of wild energies. Arithon felt the nexus of his uncreation graze his protections, burning for entry to twist, tear and unravel his whole flesh as well as any other thing that lay within range of its reach. Inflamed as though he noosed magma, he flung out the shielding second stage of his counterspell.
He deflected his ugly package of wrecked order through air, back along the disturbed eddies traced by the quarrel’s first flight path, then trailed with a stop-ward set to the resonance of wrought steel.
A hiss arced through space above the skirmishers that partnered no physical projectile. Arithon opened his eyes, running sweat and winded as if he had been whipstruck. With every nerve screaming he waited.
Until, behind a thin screen of alder, the crossbow exploded in the hands of its wielder.
Splinters and wound wire and metal burst like shrapnel and flayed the headhunter’s face. He dropped, choking, holes torn through his chest and his abdomen, and blood spattered like thrown ink across the bleached trees. The only bit of his weapon not fragmented was the trigger latch, the first steel to contact the spell and engage its limited safeward.
That stricture at least had worked and cancelled the unholy destruction. Arithon shivered in relief. Let there be no more archers among the enemy, he hoped, gasping as he clung to the treebranch. If there were, then Deshir’s clans were finished. He lacked stomach to repeat those defences. Torn by nerve-sick reaction, he regretted the victim, whose death was not needed, but who could not in the pinch of the moment be distanced from the means that destroyed his weapon.
Below the beech tree fighting still raged. Casualties mounted ferociously. Only five clansmen remained standing. Madreigh battled on one knee, his right arm useless and his blade in his left hand, parrying. Jieret had taken up Alithiel in braced readiness for the moment when his last adult defenders should be cut down.
Again, Arithon stamped back the temptation to grasp at the easiest expedient. Whoever he might spare by using shadow he could later kill without compunction in the grip of Desh-thiere’s curse. No risk was worth the chance he might draw Lysaer. Hedged by untenable choices, Arithon recouped a concentration that felt as if sloshed through a sieve. Need drove him again to abjure safe limits and to further violations of integrity that were going to cost bitterly later.
He must not think of that. Now, all that mattered was the preservation of Jieret’s life and after him, any other clansman who could be saved.
