Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  The predictable happened: the muscular chick in his glittering armour raised his mailed fist and belted the jaw of the insolent heretic. Then, before shock dropped him prostrate, Dakar was dragged through the brush upon jellied knees.

  At length, spitting blood, Dakar found himself hurled face-down in the gravel road-bed, where he lay moaning in outraged complaint for loose teeth. No one listened. While his rumpled cloak wicked up mud, he stayed prone, unable to move for the prick of more weapons in the twitchy grip of three dedicate lancers.

  ‘Insult the Light’s grace, and we’ll skewer your heart! There’s enough stunt fir here to build a hot pyre, and sure cause for a quick burning.’

  If Dakar possessed the arcane means to resist, he was canny enough not to test the riled aggression of his oppressors. Mewling, he languished as the buffoon, an act better practised than the lofty use of high conjury or subtle patience.

  Hooves clattered up, presently. Several sets, shod in steel, attached to well-bred fetlocks, which circled his form until a drill captain’s bark ordered the milling encroachment into disciplined formation. A stopped interval passed, filled by restive equine stamping, and the swish of cord tassels and wind-snapped pennons. Through the jingle of curb chains and bits, someone cracked a sly joke, while another man’s deferent voice reported to his griped officer. ‘We’ve brought down the slinking sorcerer whose filthy practice was detected by our diviner.’

  But the polished authority that broke in and took charge was a voice Dakar recognized, even to the bitten inflection that screamed danger. ‘Get him up!’

  ‘Blessed Lord,’ someone else objected, alarmed, ‘that’s unwise! He could be a spy or a Dark-sent assassin.’ Anxious, exasperated, and strangled by tact, the speaker qualified, urgently reasonable, ‘Our lancers are capable. This matter’s beneath you. Let the temple’s prerogative handle this.’

  Instead, the sovereign order was repeated with searing impatience. ‘Get him up!’

  Spurs chinked. A lone horseman shouldered through the closed cordon and threw Dakar’s shivering frame into shadow.

  The prick of the lance points withdrew with cowed haste as two sets of mailed hands seized Dakar’s rumpled clothing, and bundled him onto his feet.

  The harsh move spun his balance. He swayed, dizzied to nausea because he dared not shut down, or dampen, the emotional tumult that hammered against his wide-opened mage-sense. Assaulted further by the rough handling, and subject to the lancers’ coarse jests, he also withstood the merciless inspection as the temple diviner’s crude talent raked into him. Dakar bore the inflamed interface of his unshielded nerves. While the temple-trained probes stabbed like wasp-stings to his viscera, he curbed every scandalized instinct. Survival demanded: he must stay immersed to the utmost degree of his attuned awareness without flinching.

  For the straits, now engaged, hung his life by a thread. A wrong breath, a mis-step, or the least careless choice would see him dead in an instant.

  With every alert faculty pitched to the razor’s edge, the browbeaten spellbinder looked up. Shot through by the watermark sheen of refined energies, his regard travelled over prime horseflesh, first: an animal radiant with the gloss of good health, superbly bred to reflect the quality of its rider. Its caparisons glittered with gold, stitched onto scarlet trappings, not white. The rider’s boot in the nearside stirrup was waxed calfskin, buckled with engraved gilt spurs. Dakar’s close survey combed over a sculptured knee in knit hose, then the polished gleam of chain-mail, and the shimmered light spattered off rubies. Sword-belt and accoutrements, no less than royal, adorned the confident frame, strapped over a surcoat emblazoned with the device of the Lord Mayor of Etarra. Beauty and stylish flair set off the gloved hand lightly clasped on the reins.

  Dakar sucked in a breath as most did as he measured the face of the aristocrat reined in before him. Yet the cameo-fair skin and blond hair remained exactly as he recalled, steeped in the scents of leather and greased steel, not the effete perfume of temple incense. The living man had once been a friend, whom Dakar had not met for over two and a half centuries. Which shared past was unlikely to help this critical moment’s reunion. Tainted by the change of allegiance that once had attached Dakar to a Fellowship Sorcerer sent as Prince Arithon’s envoy, he had been the harbinger of a bitter affront: Lysaer s’Ilessid would have no cause to forgive the dicey exchange for a ransom coerced for the safe return of a cherished first wife.

  While Talith’s unspoken name burned like fire amid the wire-stretched tension, the Mad Prophet endured the pinned grasp of the lancers, not fearless. Curd white with dread, he weathered the encounter as, wide open to vision, he let Lysaer s’Ilessid take the bare-faced measure of him in return.

  What looked out of those gemstone blue eyes was not sane. Fury paled, and obsession fell short. Under Desh-thiere’s curse, the man’s magisterial command raised an aura of glory that defied description. Human poise sat the saddle with godlike stature, enlivened by an upright conviction that poised on a breath to mow down opposition.

  ‘Are you Fellowship-sent?’ Lysaer inquired, crisp as chipped ice.

  ‘No.’ This truth arose, not from Dakar’s lips, but from the Sighted diviner. ‘He bears no trace of the signature mark, stamped on those advocates who come under the Sorcerers’ sanction. This creature is a minion of Darkness, arrived to dissuade your purposeful Light from the sanctified course of divine service.’

  ‘Prince Arithon’s cat’s-paw,’ Lysaer agreed, softly as the first patter of rain, before thunder-clap.

  ‘Not this time.’ Dakar gauged the steely flame in those eyes, and the rage that blazed through a geas-turned madman. He had but one line, perhaps less, to reach through before the Mistwraith’s curse triggered the order for his execution. Of two drives that swayed the s’Ilessid before him, he angled to waken the compromised character Desh-thiere’s warped directive cast into eclipse.

  ‘Do you truly want another innocent killed for the grasping ambition of factions who have played your hand, and worse, employed vile spellcraft to arrange a state murder, whitewashed under the guise of religious morality?’

  The diviner vented his incensed outrage. ‘This accusation is specious!’

  But against the ear tuned to birth-gifted justice, the denial rang falsely shrill. Lysaer wavered.

  Dakar sucked a tight breath. Not ready to die, he lacked Asandir’s courage; had never been heroic, quick-witted, or glib, caught in the pinch of a crisis. But his Sighted vision was accurate to a fault. Already reeling under the overload that frayed his seer’s talent, he finally tagged the dissonant pitch his frantic need had been seeking. The fetch carried the deadly, spelled shimmer of Arithon’s presence. Activated by a clipped lock of hair, and wrapped under three Koriani-made sigils stamped under the dark rune of chaos, the warped construct that triggered the Mistwraith’s directive rested in Lysaer’s saddle-bag. Worse, someone’s diabolical inspiration had jammed the monstrosity into the slip-case for his flask. More than a direct prod, its fiendish imprint would taint each sip of water its targeted victim drank to quench thirst on the road.

  Dakar had just one second to act, and no option for self-preservation. The least use of conjury would see him condemned. Eyes shut, a hung rabbit in the armoured grasp of the lancers, he unfurled a thought, shaped from a crystalline memory. With select clarity, he projected the corrected pattern of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn’s aura, taken after the triumph snatched in the King’s Grove in Selkwood, when his Grace’s bold appeal to the Athlien Paravians had risked everything to lift the afflicted curse. Lysaer’s bastard half brother had claimed his right to heal, sealed by the might of such presence.

  One projected burst was all Dakar possessed to negate the fetch’s crude influence. But a concept could move worlds, spun by intent from an initiate awareness. The spellbinder brought to bear centuries of trained experience, learned under the most exacting of Fellowship taskmasters. At the crux, he dared not waver from his entrained focus. No matter whethe
r the Light’s lancers moved against him, or struck to kill at the priest’s dismayed orders.

  Dakar said, strained, ‘In Talith’s name, Lysaer! By the sorrow inflicted by her assassins, hear my appeal for Daliana sen Evend, who faces the sword and the pyre if you should forgo reason and falter!’ Through shouts, as he wrestled the lancers, and beset by their blows that slammed him to his knees, Dakar cried, ‘Examine the flask case cached in your saddle-bag! Then let s’Ilessid character review a wronged woman’s case. Rise to my challenge, or be less than a man. On my life, dare to expose the truth.’

  Late Winter 5923

  Fractures

  In the wake of the unforeseen defeat that secures Elaira’s journey to Sanpashir, just one enchantress in the Koriani Order gloats on the Prime’s failure with triumph: yet under duress to serve as her Matriarch’s hands, Lirenda lives for the mis-step that may bring Selidie’s downfall, and deliver her from anonymous slavery to the restored status of her stolen rank…

  Far southward in Kathtairr, rippled under the glare as noon blazes the parched rock beside the sterile waves of a mineral lake, a lean Sorcerer meets the gold eye of the dragon Seshkrozchiel, then ventures his considered opinion: ‘Undo the harm here? Ath wept! Try that, and you realize the shock wave you cause must upshift the resonance of the entire planet…!’

  Acrimoniously parted from Caithwood’s clan encampment, Arithon regards a battered lyranthe, locked into terrified silence, while the empath who bestows the gift pleads in earnest, ‘Your loyalty to that comatose townsman is what gave our clan council offence. But you should not leave us empty-handed. You don’t recall? Ath’s sweet grace, man, you’ve held the claimed title as Athera’s Masterbard. Legend says your talent’s unmatched anywhere in the wide world…’

  Late Winter 5923

  VIII. Trial

  Daliana was slinging invective to redden the ears of the obstreperous turnkey when Etarra’s enraged populace began to hurl rocks from behind the magistrate’s hall. As the first vicious missiles clattered down the barred window well and smashed against the cell floor, the pepper-shot pelt of chipped masonry cut her spate of curses to a chopped yelp.

  ‘Serves your foul tongue right if you sting!’ her tormentor jeered. While her outcry encouraged the spiteful crowd outside, he added with ripe satisfaction, ‘I’d lob stones myself. A damnable shame, that I’m stuck with the chore of keeping your carcass unscathed.’

  The retort from a woman versed at throwing knives was a shied fragment of rock, pitched with vengeful marksmanship. The routed turnkey scuttled to safety, hands protectively clutched to his groin.

  But his brief discomfort came at high cost. The Light’s dedicates on duty by the cell door did nothing to curb the mob’s hateful assault. They flipped her snide gestures to ward against Shadow, even taunted her to save herself through a feat of dark spellcraft. The rest watched, amused, while their sharp-tongued charge huddled in the far corner to escape the bounce and crack of the ricochets. They laughed, then placed bets over each strike that scored as the malicious barrages redoubled.

  Daliana shielded her face and endured, tucked in her crumpled mantle. She made no other sound. But that staunch pride only prompted the most rabid fanatics to try forcing the window grille from the street. Before the mob’s viciousness tore her apart ahead of the Light’s public trial, a belated squad of Etarra’s town guardsmen deployed to clear out the alley and block access from the main thoroughfare.

  Yet no vigilant cordon might quell the mass chants incited by the thwarted rioters. Their ugly revilement roared on day and night, with chilling demands for redress against evil and shrilled threats to be visited upon the witch’s close relatives. If Daliana’s widowed mother and young brothers had not yet been run out of town, they dared not chance a brief visit to lift her morale, at the risk of their very lives.

  As nothing else, that bitter abandonment wore her down as time crawled past. No other friend came to ease her condition. Branded an outcast, Daliana was despised by relentless strangers and named as a minion of evil past any redemption by the True Sect sacrament. She lost count of the long, lonely days, while time fed her formless dread. The keep guards no longer shot dice in the warden’s absence. Instead, they poked weapons at her through the bars, or amused themselves by describing lewd acts to bedevil her from sound sleep.

  When the turnkey came late with her supper, whining over a headache caused by the noise, Daliana spat in his teeth. ‘Serves you right for your tight, upright morals! Why not go bleat with rest of the flock or beat yourself off in a frenzy?’

  But her cheek only spurred on the cruel man’s wickedness: next morning, the dish on her breakfast tray arrived piled with dog scat.

  She might have hurled the mess through the bars, to the ruin of one temple zealot’s white surcoat. Yet better sense curbed her. Safest not to flaunt herself as a target before the humourless might of the Sunwheel dedicates.

  Empty and dispirited, Daliana stretched out to seek rest on the barren stone floor. She had no blanket. Her creased winter mantle served as her bedding and offered inadequate warmth. Despair made the chill seep down to her bones that much faster. The moon rose at length. Flooded by pallid light through the grille, too ground down in spirit to weep, she watched the sliced, oblate square creep across the cell. Hopeless as the hours slid past, and too soon plunged in jet darkness, she had nothing left but regrets, branded by the shame of her failure.

  And her final dawn came. The first seep of grey through the bars brought the temple’s dispatched escort under brisk orders to fetch her. The six select men were life-pledged, and agleam in parade arms and full-dress surcoats. Their proud young faces displayed no expression. None would meet her eyes, as though a mere female in rumpled finery posed their righteous souls an endangerment.

  ‘Shine for the Light so brainlessly bright, be careful you haven’t blinded yourselves,’ Daliana snapped, irked enough to challenge their superior mask while the smirking turnkey unfastened her cell door.

  But the True Sect’s unnatural creatures did not rise to her baiting comment. Silent, they pinioned her with mailed gauntlets and locked heavy cuffs on her ankles and wrists.

  Chained like a felon, she lost her balance when they prodded her forward. Her stumble was yanked up short by brute strength before she crashed to her knees. She asked for a comb, pleaded at least for a moment’s respite to tidy her hair.

  Ignored, she was shoved onwards down the corridor, in step with the stone-faced escort.

  ‘The Light’s judgement won’t bide for your vanity,’ the superior captain denounced.

  Daliana planted her feet. ‘Heartless pawn!’ She jangled her shackles in brazen contempt. ‘Is your emasculate priesthood so driven to fear, you can’t stop for one act of kindness?’

  The man coloured. His subordinates dealt her a yank towards the stairwell. Since each upward step posed a trial, in fetters, the soldier who reached out to steady her elbow caught her incensed glare, before thanks.

  ‘Do you think I might swoon if I was unbound and permitted the grace to walk upright?’ Fright gave her humiliated snarl sharp teeth. ‘Tell me, does the temple also chain butterflies? Do you pin down the innocent, night-flying moths, lest some lunatic granny should stir the poor flits into a poisonous potion?’

  Her spouted sarcasm was given short shrift, and no answer, as the polished procession hustled her upstairs. She passed by the warden’s office and the gouged trestles in the emptied armoury. More guardsmen stationed by the outside entry fell into step as she was thrust through the stone arch at the threshold.

  The plunge into daylight was dazzling, after days spent in unrelieved gloom. Gold braid on white surcoats and the flares of reflection thrown off polished armour watered her eyes. As she blinked to compensate, Daliana sighted the open, flat wagon parked in front of the magistrate’s hall. The cargo bed had been rigged with a cross-bar on a post, and fitted with bolts for her shackles.

  ‘You will be paraded on public displ
ay,’ the captain confirmed, beyond sympathy. ‘All of Etarra will witness your shame before the priest’s judgement condemns you.’

  Mortified, haggard, with disheveled hair and the hem of her jaunty, fox mantle frayed into tatters by the dragged chains, Daliana retorted, ‘I pity your mother. May you wonder lifelong what base coin she was paid! Surely desperation brought her to breed with a lout too crass to be worthy of fatherhood.’

  His slap, gloved in steel, laid open her lip.

  ‘Violence, but no manners?’ Daliana observed, and spat blood. ‘If the apple hasn’t rolled far from the tree, doubtless the sad woman was raped.’

  Metal clashed, as her verbal jab goaded the brute to draw steel, which move became waylaid fast by a sensible colleague. ‘No, brother. Not here! A premature death is too good for her.’

  Daliana showed the dangerous conduct her back and brazened her way forward in clanking steps to the head of the stairway.

  A wall of sound slammed her. Shrieked curses and catcalls, obscenities and vilification: the sheer volume of noise made her weak at the knees. Vivacious, endearing, quick-witted in scrapes, Daliana had never imagined such horrendous spite existed in the wide world. Debased as an icon, she dared not give way. While the sky overhead seemed to spin, and the icy cuffs gouged her flesh, she shut her eyes to the howling mob and wrestled the drag of the chain in descent. Someone hurled a rotten onion. It splattered the carved lion atop the left balustrade, while tossed stones rapped and belled off the plumed helms of her immaculate escort.

  The harassed captain bellowed, ‘Close ranks!’

  Armoured guardsmen eclipsed her from hostile view and shielded her awkward course down the stair to the street. When the high step into the wagon defeated her, Daliana sustained the rough grasp that hoisted her, then fastened her upright against the cross-bar. Throughout, the restless crowd chanted abuse.