by Janny Wurts
The carriages parked. Mounted dandies milled in obstructive fascination, while the High Chancellor and the armed company’s field sergeants seized charge and barked irritable commands to set cordons. The heaving press sorted itself like stirred glue. While rescuers stormed the collapsing tents, a bucket brigade formed, and the first naked priests sprinted out of their torched pavilion.
They were not alone. Each had a boy-child clamped to his neck. Coughing and shrieking with tearful hysteria, the mites wore naught but grease-paint and perfume, and the sparkling gleam of paste jewelry.
Surprised fingers pointed. A shocked matron shrieked. Upright citizens recoiled. Hard-bitten campaign officers jeered. While veteran troops whooped in mocking laughter, the recruit infantrymen under their orders hurled down their filled buckets in poleaxed disgust. The frightened boys released their bellowing clients, then bolted, streaking like hares through the crowd. Catching them paled beside watching the Light’s high priest, nakedly protesting his innocence. Raiett Raven reined in his plunging horse. While the onlookers jostled to snatch the best view, his lashing contempt carried through wind and smoke and the racket of outraged catcalls.
‘I am sickened!’ Poised at the forefront of political disaster, he had to distance himself to avoid getting mobbed. ‘Shame on us all, that honest funds were allotted to raise a temple for scum! Spare us! The vice masquerading behind the seal of our Prince Exalted is worse than a shaming fraud! In the name of the blessed avatar himself, I will see each wretched malingerer stripped. Justice will be served for abusing the public trust to support lewd acts and depraved habits!’
While the soldiers rounded up the buff miscreants, and the bucket brigade surged to toss mud clods, the breathless children pelted into the brush, met by the arms of their kinsmen.
‘Time to go,’ said the bard. He asked one of the boys to guide his sightless step through the rapid retreat to the craft quarter. Dakar himself was too crazed with relief to question the need for that ruse. Breathlessly rushed towards shelter and safety, then panting to catch his lost wind, he crouched in a noisome cranny between sheds. There, he measured the public outcry, and the course of the fire, fast reducing the Light’s wrecked encampment to ashes. He cleared a throat stinging from laughter and smoke and realized he owed an apology for the ignominy suffered at Simshane’s. Turned in redress, he encountered a shock: the blind bard no longer accompanied them.
‘Where’s the singer?’ he blurted.
Fast as thought, a scout clamped a hand to his lips. Armed men from the war camp now fanned out on patrol, enforcing the need for strict silence.
Dakar had to wait till their threatened straits eased before he dared press for an answer. Too late, he learned that Arithon had returned to the cooper’s shop to face down the official inquiry.
‘He’s a free singer, and blind,’ allowed the brusque clansman. He shrugged off lathered worry, wary fingers poised on his knives and his eyes like chipped flint as the children were bedded down under sacking in a sympathizer’s fusty warehouse. ‘The man can’t be held responsible for what he couldn’t see. Since the cooper’s kinfolk know nothing at all, he had to stay. No way else could he prove out their innocence.’
Dakar caught his breath, wrung by visceral dread. Fast as he dodged through the warren of shanties and burst into the ramshackle craft shack, he came too late. The cooper’s distraught wife let him know that the bard’s steady answers had satisfied no one.
Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn had been taken up-town in the custody of Raiett Raven’s personal guard.
Left behind without means to slip through the security set over the governor’s mansion, Dakar blotted fresh sweat and questioned the desolate craftsfolk. ‘Did the singer resist?’
‘In fact, he went smiling.’ The burly cooper shook his bald head, unsettled a bit by the question. ‘We all understood the arrest was a farce. The fellow had nothing dishonest to hide. Even the soldiers showed him due respect. They led him off on the back of a horse and allowed the lyranthe to go with him.’
‘He’ll be back by morning,’ Dakar was assured by the tow-head who sharpened the adze blades.
Except for one suspect, insidious fact, recollected too late for avoidance. The Mad Prophet remembered the insouciant stakes lately placed on a public wager. The free singer’s boast would be delivered tonight with a twist of excoriating arrogance: that the brilliant allure of his music could enact a palliative cure for insomnia.
‘By the rank breath of Dharkaron’s Black Horses!’ Dakar swore, pressed to frightened exasperation. No belated rescue might follow; no impromptu act of fast salvage. Rathain’s crown prince had gone to the adder’s den, with six hours of darkness left before dawn and no man at his shoulder to back him. ‘My blind idiot, you are setting the hare on the fox! What in Daelion’s name were you thinking?’
Etarra’s High Chancellor himself stayed on edge since his return from the priesthood’s debacle. The recurrent nightmares that ravaged his sleep meant his sixty-five years no longer rode his frame kindly. Ascetically thin before he had deserted his family interests at Hanshire to assume the mantle of s’Ilessid service, Raiett, still called Raven, now wore the semblance of a nerve-wracked hawk, gaunt-cheeked, and beak-nosed, and craggy. His magnetic presence and keen intelligence wielded ruling authority with unimpaired prowess. The peridot eyes still burned like chill flame in the cavernous frame of deep sockets. Scorched by his impatience, the servants saw him divested of leathers and arms, freshly shaven, and reclad in the comfort of house clothes.
He was up and pacing the unadorned closet he kept for debriefing spies before his burdened outriders could dismount and escort the suspect free singer upstairs.
‘My Lord, your instructions?’ the liveried butler inquired.
The trailing hem of Raiett’s belted robe whispered on tile as he spun between strides. ‘Have my armed men bring the prisoner in. Drag up the oak chair.’
At the butler’s raised eyebrows, Etarra’s High Chancellor snapped outright, ‘You think I’m uncivil? Too bad. Keep him bound. I’ll want cord, as well, for his ankles.’
Raiett was poised still when the guardsmen arrived. Behind him, the tall candelabra were lit. A log on the hearth threw off cloying heat. The combined glare rendered his motionless form as a mirrored reflection. His preferred black velvet was flecked with shell clasps, and his silver hair combed, shoulder-length. Lean hands clasped, he watched the prisoner dragged in with a viper’s drilling intensity.
If the singer had faked blindness, his act was unflawed. The guard leading him guided each diffident step. When his heel hooked on the threshold, the white eyes stayed fixed, and never once flickered downwards. The aged face displayed no tell-tale creases of crow’s-feet, and the mismatched, cast-off clothing was ineptly patched at elbow and knee. The instrument borne by the trailing guard was nondescript, a likely find in a jumble-shop.
The bard seemed as harmlessly ancient and worn. Pressed into a seat in the unpadded chair, then bound hand and foot for rough questioning, the odd creature seemed submissive enough. Except those sensitive, showman’s hands showed not a quiver of nervous distress.
Raiett was not wont to miss a detail. Further, as the rumpled white head tipped his way, cued by the sound of his breathing, the expressive mouth curved with the insolent suggestion of cynical forbearance.
All effrontery, in fact, the bard chose to speak first. ‘The lyranthe of herself cannot frame words. Is this an interrogation?’
Caught setting the instrument on a tasselled couch, the trailing man-at-arms blushed.
Raiett replied in time to forestall the soft idiot’s contrite apology. ‘The lyranthe of herself does not cut down pitched tents. Or set them aflame to unveil a staged scandal. Confess why you came to discredit our priests, and we can begin with a round of polite conversation.’ He waved the guard back to assume position in the hallway outside the closed door. By established custom, a taciturn pair of veterans remained on station behind the strapped c
aptive.
‘I didn’t come for polite conversation.’ The bard shifted his shoulders, to no avail. His aged wrists were affixed to the chair-back, tight enough to cause him discomfort.
Raiett edged a step closer. ‘Did you not?’
Blind eyes never wavered, but the weather-lined face lit up with engaging amusement. ‘I came to sing. You’re not care-free?’
The High Chancellor was no sorcerer. His measure of born talent could not pierce through the audacious layers of wrought subterfuge. Yet the keen prompt of instinct made him sure of his hunch: this man was the Master of Shadow. Lifetime connoisseur of intrigue, Raiett Raven savoured his moment to challenge the peril placed at his private disposal.
‘Nor am I your enemy,’ said the man in the chair, ‘the shame to your upstart priests notwithstanding.’
Which declaration was a slap without parallel, a taunting dare to unmask the bold sleight of hand, or expose the arcane trick and prove the Light’s defamed delegates had been victimized. No, Raiett acknowledged: the damage was done. Tonight’s display of vice could not be eclipsed. This frail singer’s arraignment could never appease the contempt of a thousand outraged, sober witnesses.
‘Our summer campaign’s defanged, nonetheless,’ Raiett declared with stripped irritation. ‘Give me a reason why you should not bleed without trial for your malicious act of live sabotage.’
The mirth that dogged the bard’s lips disappeared. ‘Because no one’s died yet. I am here, as I promised, to offer a permanent cure for the nightmares that cause your insomnia.’ The old singer’s eyebrows, perhaps, showed the faintest tuck of impatience. ‘Release my hands. Send your guardsmen away. You cannot dismiss the harsh facts in this case. Dare you afford to misjudge my appeal? If you fail here, what fate for Etarra? Can your misguided faith save the people you govern? You have rats in your cellar. By all means, let them breed. Ignore their insidious pestilence, while you scour my empty carcass for fleas.’
Blind eyes bored straight ahead, but no flawless performance could defer the fraught crux: now the hands in their bindings were rigid.
Raiett Raven measured that first sign of stress. Then, stung incredulous, he also divined the blistering courage behind the urgent appeal. ‘You were Fellowship-sent?’
The guards stirred, behind. The burly one with the unquiet eyes closed his fist and unsheathed his belt-knife. The blind singer would know by the dissonant ring that the drawn steel bore a lethal temper. If he did not flinch for the blade at his back, he was not impervious, after all.
Springing sweat striped down his temples. ‘Does that matter, my friend?’
Raiett returned a clipped head-shake, cranked to a strained note of sorrow. ‘My choice holds no sway any more, my bold lark. Your offer comes far too late to spare any-one. Bid farewell to the sun. For you, the bad dreams won’t be ending at daybreak.’
‘No execution in public?’ said the bard to his captor with taut grief. ‘I won’t have my clean passage across Fate’s Wheel?’
Anguish infused the cat-gleam of Raiett’s eyes. ‘You won’t. I can’t free you. Why didn’t you see? You’re the new prize the cultists will seize to finish their plot to snare Lysaer.’
The bard closed his eyes. ‘Then for my sake, rest my appeal with Ath’s grace.’
The guard’s heavy hand closed upon his bound wrist. Brought to defeat, he did not engage sorcery. Nor did he call on his wild gift of shadow. Such restraint brooked no logic. Raiett frowned for the lapse. Yet his flare of unease died without analysis. Though the blade was plain steel, its cold edge bit deep as the guard’s lightning stroke sliced the prisoner’s forearm from elbow to wrist.
The singer’s frame shuddered. Shock parted his lips. The air left his lungs in a gasping rush, while his blood ran and splashed on the floor-tiles.
Raiett lost all colour, his sleeve pressed to his mouth to stem a sharp uprush of sickness. The knife was not bone. It bore no binding spell-craft. The bleak burn of dark sorcery would come later. But the High Chancellor of Etarra understood how the gushing wound felt, as the Kralovir bled a victim with talent to sap the mind and weaken the sinews. Each night, he dreamed of the hard, spinning rush, then the panting need to draw air to stave off the feeling of incipient suffocation. Too well, he recalled the nauseous faintness that came as the mind spun down into darkness.
The memory of what would occur after that framed the terror that wakened him, screaming.
‘Grace,’ the bard whispered as consciousness failed him. His head tipped, chin forward, while his torso slumped, and the cord on his arms strained his tendons.
The cultist behind him wiped off the fouled blade. He sheathed his cleared steel, and waited. His dour-faced henchman looked on, unmoved, while in the oak chair, the victim’s soaked fingers splashed a pattering red stream in the fire-light. If a glamour had wrought his disguise, the white hair failed to shift colouring. Raiett stared, disbelieving, but observed no change. Even under the swift encroachment of death, the aged skin kept its wrinkles. No signs of royal identity emerged. The singer’s slack flesh turned blanched as a corpse. His slumped frame convulsed, then loosened.
The heavy-set guard snatched a fistful of hair. He raised the bowed head, peeled a fluttering eyelid, then swore for the inconvenience. Cataracts still fogged the pupil beneath.
Raiett Raven edged backwards to spare his fine hem. ‘Look at the wretch, will you? He’s no one’s prized prince. My guess was mistaken. We’ve dealt with a lackey, and you have just butchered a free singer sent as a sanctioned Fellowship agent.’ Regret resurged, charged by vindictive hope, that the bard’s strained bequest might be answered.
But the grey cult’s initiates knew their macabre trade in the barter of spirit and flesh. Undeterred, they fingered the vein in the neck until they detected a pulse. The raced heart-beat let them measure the bard’s ebbing vitality. Practised experience made no mistakes.
‘Enough. Strap his arm,’ the burly guard snapped. His spattered fist clamped down to stem flowing blood, while his taciturn henchman slipped off his belt and wound the strap into a tourniquet. ‘Blind victim or spy, he’s no use to us, dead.’
The surly guard also stripped off the rope manacles, while the knife-bearing brute freed the knots binding the unconscious prisoner’s ankles.
‘Lordship!’ he barked, as though Raiett was a servant. ‘Fetch out some linen for dressings, and blankets. The spirit must not slip from the husk beforetime. Can’t risk a chill that might start him shivering before we’ve got him down to the cellar.’
‘Should we bother to stir for this night’s paltry take?’ the man wrapping the savaged arm grumbled. ‘Could be he’s naught but a decrepit old bird who carols for coin, after all.’
‘Who knows? Who cares?’ The ringleader licked a slicked, scarlet knuckle, then smiled and mopped his smeared palms on the singer’s patched shirt. ‘At least the tang of fresh blood never lies. The essence of him reeks of talent.’
A last glance, shot off in piercing contempt, caught Raiett Raven’s masked strain and grey pallor. ‘Still shrinking squeamish? Don’t worry. We’ve bled your spy white. He won’t be able to gather his wits, far less find the strength to recover his grip should he ever regain lucid consciousness.’
While the litter bearing the blanket-wrapped bard was transferred to the crypt underneath the governor’s mansion, the clan children whisked into hiding remained at risk of forced search and exposure. Around them, Etarra continued to seethe with the intensity of a stirred ant-hill. Torches streamed down the bends in the road, as the night’s flagrant scandal sparked lights up and down the town battlements. The sunwheel tents smoldered to cinders and smoke, attended by grudging recruits who laboured to thread buckets between the obstructive press of a mob stung to violence by moral betrayal.
Horns wailed. Harried officers shouted. Hecklers hurled mud at their white surcoats as they struggled to bind the naked offenders into locked custody.
The overwhelming noise drowned the pries
ts’ protestations as the onlooking crowd catcalled and fed on the rage of betrayal. More mounted patrols were dispatched from the garrison. Fast as they broke up the fist-shaking knots, angered citizens poured into the fringes and gathered in subversive clusters between the craft sheds.
More soldiers bore in. Since the entrenched canker of Etarran oppression bred hysterical fear of revolt, the troops were rough men who preferred to break heads and sort out with questioning later. Dakar dared not rely on glamours to mask old blood fugitives seeking escape. Not tonight, when any cloaked figure bearing a child was hell-bound to spark vengeful inquiry.
Just prior to dawn, as the ground mists rolled in, the unrest burned down to a sullen distrust of the motives of sunwheel priests. Before the daybreak change in the guard could revitalize the patrols, Dakar pushed aside his concern and fatigue, and wove the subtle protections that allowed the threatened clansmen to slip past the sentries. Dawn-light saw the boy-children safely away.
Dakar at long last found himself free to act. Past view of the town, tucked in the parched brush where the barrens of Daon Ramon lapped against the bleached ruts of the trade-road, the misted air smelled of manure and dew and the packed clay soon to raise clouds of dust in the swelter of daylight. Dakar tipped a pebble out of his boot. Alone with bad thoughts, his apprehension intensified, raising the aching throb at his temples that often fore-ran the onset of prescience. Every ruffled instinct he owned made him chafe over Arithon’s detainment.
No spellbinder’s resource might obviate risk: not since the High Chancellor’s court rooted the seat of the grey cult’s machinations.
‘Damn your secretive nature to Sithaer’s deepest pit!’ Dakar groused. The next instant, he hopped as a needling pain stabbed into his exposed ankle. He glanced down, discovered his foot in an ant-hill, and spouted off with more venom. Since cursing did the absent prince little good, the Mad Prophet brushed off the insects and snarled an apology. Limping a respectful distance away, he sat down on a boulder and seized his first chance to conjure a shielded scrying.
