The Ships of Merior. Janny Wurts

him.

      The healer dispatched to examine him emerged from the depths of Jaelot’s dungeon, his tongue clicking in amazement behind the scented kerchief he carried to mask the stench. ‘The man’s crazed,’ he said in a nasal twang. He removed the linen and spat into it. After eyeing the sputum with the reflexive habit of his profession, he treated the head warden’s sallow complexion to the same disconcerting regard. ‘Thinks he’s immortal, your prisoner. Insisted he could survive a straight draught of deadly nightshade, and then offered to show me, the mad fool. Keep him chained on a diet of herb broth. Then if you take my advice, send him on to the crazy house run by the Brothers of Ath’s Initiates.’

      Cocooned in fur vests to ease a chest cold, the head warder shrugged his exasperation. ‘That would be a frank relief, to be rid of him. But the judiciary’s adamant. It’s the work team for Dakar till the advent of summer, and naught short of death will shift the sentence.’

      ‘Well, let him lie,’ the healer said, repacking his satchel in sour humour. ‘He might get pox, or perish of rat bite. At least, by Daelion’s justice, he should catch your cough and lose his voice. Does your wife brew cailcallow tea?’

      The glum warden shook his head. ‘No wife.’

      ‘Ah, too bad.’ The healer departed, whistling; and whatever sort of ills beset Dakar’s jailers, the prisoner proved maddeningly immune. He carolled himself hoarse in the darkness, then rasped on in a blithe and froggy baritone, while his guardsmen wore mufflers tied about their ears in an effort to dampen the dissonance.

      At mid-spring, with the hemp cloth smock worn by the condemned sagged like empty sacking over his depleted belly, and skin turned mushroom pale, the Mad Prophet informed the man sent down to fetch him that he had never stayed sober for more than a fortnight, even as a babe at his mother’s knee. Three months was a lifetime record, Dakar insisted, as if astounded to still be alive.

      Nobody succoured him with beer. He was prodded from his lair in the pits of Jaelot’s dungeon. The blocks shaped at the mason’s throughout the winter were now being loaded onto flat ox-wains and rolled in slow rounds to the headland. There, a team of men at arms in leather brigandines raised their bull voices to harry on a wretched line of workers. Scoured by salt-spray and the white-laced surge of high tide, bleeding from barnacle grazes and stone cuts, Jaelot’s convict labour team bent their backs to restore the torn bulkheads and jetty.

      Their work was cruel and dangerous; where currents had undercut the sea wall, the granite might shift and slide. A man could break his hands or his legs, caught in an unlucky place. Incoming waves could crest and slam down without warning, and a seething froth of brine would tumble the huge blocks like knucklebones stewed in a cauldron. Men died pinched like insects, or dragged under to drown in the weight of their fetters and chain.

      Dakar had no wish to end ground in shreds to be picked by the bay’s hordes of scavenger crabs.

      While the wains were pulled up for unloading, he stole a moment while the watch was diverted, and behind the move of blowing on chapped hands, cast a sharp eye across the waves. His month in the dungeon had left him more time than he liked for uninterrupted concentration; his eyesight was clear as a sailor’s.

      A gruff voice shouted behind him, ‘You!’ A pikestaff hit Dakar across the shoulders. ‘Back to work! And hurry on about it.’

      The Mad Prophet stumbled forward, caught short of a trip as he ploughed shoulder down into the stone block in process of being jockeyed from the wagon bed onto log rollers for transport. Men swayed. The wagon creaked. The dressed mass of granite shifted, grating, then spun off-balance and dived. Those poles not instantly milled to slivers lumbered out of alignment, while men jumped clear and swore, the slowest ones nursing whacked shins.

      ‘It’s the fat idiot, again!’ screeched the pikeman appointed to attend the wain’s unloading.

      Wide-eyed in affront, Dakar regarded flat folds where once he had sported a paunch. ‘Fat?’

      A mailed fist fetched him a ringing thump on the jaw. ‘No talk. Just work. Or ye’ll see yourself pressed to parchment under yon mother of a rock.’

      Dakar staggered on rubbery knees and fell spectacularly flat on his fundament. Prods from the pike failed to raise him.

      ‘Fiends plague us!’ The watch captain arrived, the higher-pitched clink of his accoutrements clear over the deeper tones of shackle chains. ‘Drag the lout into the spray! Cold water should rouse him soon enough.’

      Two convicts were waved over to manhandle Dakar clear of the work crew. He lay sprawled at the edge of the sea wall, a crumpled heap in stained rags, bruised and apparently dazed; except that his face stayed raptly turned toward the surf that pounded below. At length, he stirred, not due to the needling spray that sheeted over him, but because he finally sighted the sign he sought amid the moiling whitecaps.

      There were fiends in truth, out amid the breakers, riding the incoming tide to replenish themselves. Energy sprites native to Athera that drew fuel from the tumble of the waters, invisible to the eye except as crests that rose and broke, then subsided, unnaturally splashless, into the current of the bay. What the Paravian tongue named iyats, or tricksters, for their tireless penchant to make mischief.

      Dakar’s lip curled in an evil smile through split and bleeding contusions. He moaned for effect, rolled over and propped himself on his forearms. Then, eyes clenched shut in a feigned fit of queasiness, he mustered his skills as a spellbinder and inwardly massed a tight, spinning core of focused energy. Sloppily, as a novice might, he let the force bleed into his aura. The miscast conjury was imperceptible, even harmless, little worse than the flash of static discharge that might jump and ground to metal in a dry freeze. But as Dakar well knew from experience, the slightest mismanagement of mage-force was irresistible fare to the appetite of an unsated fiend.

      Often enough in the past he had suffered, when negligent handling of his lessons had attracted the sprites to plague him. As much as Asandir tried to castigate him, Dakar’s ways stayed incorrigible. Ever and always he remained an insatiable magnet for fiends.

      He felt a shiver thrill the air as they sensed his beckoning presence. The splashless fall of the wavecrests unravelled, spouting into joyous, wild spray as the creatures arrowed from their sport and fastened upon his signature of strayed power. Never before had he revelled in the itches and small tingles that played over his skin as they spun, drinking the energy-spill off his aura. Where one came, more followed. Iyats liked travelling in packs. Prickled and lightly burned through the tuned perception of his mage-sense, Dakar judged to the second when the fiends blithely gathered to feed from his handout became charged and engorged beyond their simple needs. He groaned and groped and stood upright with just enough show to draw the eye of the watching overseer.

      For once in league with shouted oaths and harsh orders, the Mad Prophet let the guardsmen prod him. Chivvied, cursed, and shoved on by impatient pike butts, he let himself be hazed into the thick of the work crew, no longer unloading carts, but labouring and groaning to lever the heavy blocks into place on the broken sea wall. The smells of salt-damp wool and sweat combined with the squeak of ropes through blocks and tackle; the grind of stone over stone. Pressed amid the heat of straining bodies, made to shoulder his share of the weight, Dakar licked crusted blood from his teeth and cut off his trickle of leaked energy.

      The invisible fiends knit about him in spirals of distorted breezes. They buffeted and pinched and tweaked at his hair in signal fits of irritation. When he refused to give in and fuel their wants further, they lent themselves in their madcap way to tease, to frustrate, to annoy, that they might sip what stray spurts of emotion they could wring from whatever victims were available.

      In an eyeblink, the work on the jetty erupted into chaos.

      Stone chips and rocks sprang up and whirled airborne, clanging off the helms of the officers and unmercifully pelting the conscripts. Bruised and screaming in wild surprise, men heaved off the encumbrance of their loads. The massive dressed blocks misaligned and jarred awry, then dropped with a thud to quake the sea wall. Granite rasped against granite, grinding off