Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Unsheltered, alone in the open, Arithon built his appeal through the morning. As he entwined the painstaking frequencies to knot an etheric boundary, noon passed. The tide changed. The ebb swirled black waters through Mainmere cut and stranded the sprawling reed-beds. Raucously squalling, flocked gulls mobbed the shallows to feed.

  Their dissonant cries jangled the musician’s peeled nerves. The stiffened sea-breeze buffeted his ears to distraction. Arithon shut his eyes. Head bowed, he played, while the sun shifted angle into afternoon, then late day, and the tangles of marsh grass around him acquired backlit gilt rims. Persistent against the thinnest of odds, he shaped his adamant art like etched crystal. Moment to moment, nothing else mattered. Patience rooted him like set granite as each precise phrase unreeled after the next: until the precursor to change stole over his work with the delicacy of a pent breath.

  Filament fragile, the balance point trembled. His friend hovered between life and death, volatile as a feather wafted aloft by a vagrant breeze. The back-turn towards recovery might never happen. But for a minute, an hour, or a day, the remorseless bleedout had ceased. Tarens poised at the cusp. As the candle hand-shielded amid a black gale, he flickered, suspended just shy of extinction.

  The hard pressed musician lifted his head. Around him, the bay shore lay stippled with the ultramarine shadows of sundown. Gusts slapped off the water, brisk enough to dampen the moment’s hard-won encouragement. Arithon knew he must anchor firm stays before nightfall. In the deeps after midnight when the veil thinned, the ties between spirit and flesh were most wont to loosen. By then, his initiate mastery must strengthen and seal the ephemeral pathways through mystery. If such translated guidance could steer the lost crofter across the known threshold to heightened wisdom, every struck note must ring to perfection. If not, this tenuous passage for Tarens surely was destined to fail.

  More than mulish confidence steadied the bard’s hands. The echo persisted, that once before, somewhere, he had accomplished a similar feat. Remembrance whispered of a fire-lit cave, carved in carmine stone by a river-course. There, he had faced such a crisis at need, and sung another friend’s talents awake. Arithon recognized the stark discipline, firmed then, to withstand tonight’s brutal course. Ingrained training warned of the multiple perils should he slide too far into trance. Heedless, he could suffer crippling frost-bite, or perish of thirst, burned out by the fevers of back-lash. A man might forget hunger, though his tissues starved. His breathing might flag, or his heart stop, unnoticed, if the unearthly frequencies known to mage-sight beguiled his human perception.

  Skilled enchanter, Arithon fixed his art by the sun and the turn of the stars. He marked the time as nightfall unwound, and the hours of nadir yielded to dawn.

  By sunrise, he faced the edge of the abyss. The shimmers that rippled his peripheral vision and the hollow warning of nausea told of the strain on his faculties. Relief must come later. The ripple he raised in the flux must be lifted to resonate as a standing wave. Else if he stopped, his grand pattern would unravel when the lane tide reversed at next twilight. He dared not snatch any rest before then, even to stretch his cramped limbs.

  The set-back he dreaded struck as he tired, pressed near to over-extension. Arithon felt the burn of a hostile influence seeking him. Yet the invasive probe did not bear the taint of the diviner’s search he expected. Bone and blood, Arithon recognized the horrific sting of spelled sigils run through an enabled quartz matrix: ugly enough to wrench his beating heart, the dissonant pitch of the powers that once had spellbound his cruel captivity.

  Recoil disrupted his seamless engagement.

  Shaken, Arithon faltered. The harmonic weave of his composition distorted like light crumpled through rain-streaked glass. He steadied his strength, recaptured the thread, and forged onwards despite an onset of blind terror.

  Retreat was unthinkable. Failure to rally would cost Tarens’s life! Recognition followed: that this horrid quandary had faced him before! Koriathain had no scruples. They could, and had, destroyed those he cared for to leverage a past bid to break him.

  Arithon took grim charge of his talent. Fury hardened his focus. He acknow­ledged the risks, that the personal mastery unfurled to spare Tarens ignited the flux like a torch. Past question, the witches would pin him down. But the natural brine in the marsh where he sheltered diffused their crystal-based craftings. After they ferreted out his location, they must invade this remote shore, drive him at bay, then exert the muscle to collect him. He had a brief hour, or a handful of days, before the Prime’s hunters could touch him.

  Until then, he would stand off this assault. Win or lose, his friend’s fate must resolve. Then woe betide the ruthless enemy who threatened an innocent life to subdue him!

  Arithon dropped the tissue of subtlety. He hammered his music into the flux, warned that the reverberation he shaped must withstand far more than the bore’s shift, at sundown. The empowered guidance he fashioned for Tarens must ring true through the course of calamity, a harmony shaped to outlast his defeat should his lyranthe come to be silenced.

  Night arrived once more. The moon shone, a nicked crescent that spangled reflections off the ruffled sheen of the tide-pools. The cold settled in, and hoar-frost whiskered the mud of the verges. Hunched against the relentless chill, Arithon laid his lyranthe aside only to cat nap. Wakened again to a pearlescent fog sifted in off Mainmere narrows, he snacked on jerked meat, and the sour, dry fruit and hard biscuit the clan scouts packed on extended patrol. Then he unwrapped the lyranthe, retuned, and resumed. For each measure unreeled, the order’s seeresses circled him closer, like vultures.

  Tarens breathed, yet. The flow of his life-force had not shifted towards healing. But at this pass, Arithon’s sounding touch met the barest whisper of brightening change. He played that slight difference to clarion strength, though he streamed clammy sweat to the fever of over-extension. Hope could hurt too much, while the flare in the flux currents also informed that his adversaries stepped up their search.

  Arithon flexed his cramped fingers. He danced chord upon chord, raised tensile melody into a shout of pure light in defiance, then welded his resilient harmony into an unstoppable force to illumine, resolve, and bind into cohesion. Through midnight, then into another cold dawn, as the pewter mist of an overcast day mantled the reed-banks and marshes, his desperate cry went unanswered. Tarens did not find his way back to consciousness before the Koriathain ran their elusive quarry to earth.

  One moment, Arithon breathed the free air, while the poisonous touch of the seekers plumbed the flux stream, beckoned on by his music. Braced and aware of their immanent closure, he did not let his hands falter. He thought himself prepared. But when the seeresses snapped their spell closed, he encountered the scope of that miscalculation.

  The trauma inflicted by his long captivity almost spelled his defeat. Arithon cringed, unable to stifle the terror that lanced like iced glass through his viscera. Through the recoil that squeezed at his gut, only firm choice and discipline rallied him. He kept his head, with eyes opened to mage-sight. Just as the enemy beheld him, stripped naked, as a trained master so also could he steal his insightful knowledge of them in return.

  But that reverse twist yielded him no advantage. Instead, he uncovered the shocked revelation that his lost memory had been no long-term impairment, but in fact an impenetrable veil of protection imposed by the clever crone who arranged his escape. The damage wrought by his blindside disclosure was done, the consequences irreversible. The Prime Matriarch and her circle of witches grasped how severely his innate defenses were compromised.

  Their counter-move struck.

  Maliciously sure, the Prime offered Arithon the seductive temptation, to know himself as he had been before the enspelled term of her imprisonment had stripped away his greater faculties.

  Shoved against the noose that would seal his doom, Arithon shut his eyes. He did not succumb. For Tarens only, he plied his strings, steadfast and true, while his enemies lash
ed back in redoubled retort and tried uglier means to unseat him. The wisped faces of his past ghosts were brought forward to sting him to aggrieved defeat. He saw others like Tarens, struck down in cold blood for the singular fact they had cherished him. From the brash, blond woman who had been a superlative blue-water navigator, to the surly grey war-captain spoken for by a centaur guardian’s wisdom, to the redheaded caithdein who had perished alone under enemy torture, to others cut down by the sword in defense: Arithon suffered the gamut. He mourned the cruelty. Their brave spirits must stay unbearably nameless for the sake of today’s harrowed crofter, still living. Masterbard, he surmounted the fierce upwell of his personal tears. Unconsoled, surely damned, he endured the punishing roll-call of his fallen, turned upon him as a weapon.

  No matter the toll of yesterday’s grief, his fight in the present had yet to be lost. Still, Arithon’s call to raise Tarens pealed outward, etched light sourced by sound, and quite bold enough to quicken the trained instincts of a temple diviner.

  Which peril had cause to destroy him, already. Rocked by a bolt of rogue far-sight, Arithon captured the posited tangle of interests that shadowed his movements. In horrific fact, he discovered that the Koriathain had been the covert hand that unleashed the True Sect’s armed fervour against him. Once his gifted perception knew where to look, the manipulative strings of coercive spellcraft sprang stark to his eye in the flux. There, and there, he discerned the entrained sigils that twined the Light’s faithful on puppet strings to see him run down and killed. He saw worse: that the Prime’s malignant meddling also heaped the false blame for the lane shift’s explosive catastrophes at his feet.

  The wave of overheated reaction already spurred the muster of dedicate troops in retaliation. First response to the Light’s call for action against the Spinner of Darkness, the temple fleet that patrolled the blockade over Mainmere Narrows changed course for the marsh that fringed Caithwood.

  Against an invasive landing by troops, Arithon stood quite defenceless. His hands were tied: a move at that pass would kill Tarens. Unable to flee from the True Sect hunt, Arithon gave rein to his rage. He cast off every restraint and sang out! Unfurled his vindictive passion with the actinic charge to raise the dire stakes and seed tempest. The whipped flux responded like fire and storm, and heightened the Prime’s stealthy measures to havoc. Let the manipulative thrust aimed against him spin wildly out of control! The effect would draw in all comers, and worse, inflame their desires to indiscriminate savagery. The Prime’s Circle could chew nails till they choked on that suicidal, volte-face reverse.

  Arithon’s shout leveraged the enemy’s own game, until the vicious greed of every blockade runner and bountyman aligned like weathercocks onto his trail.

  Let the wrong party set hands on him, first! Against plain steel and muscle, he might have a chance. Therefore, as day brightened, he plied voice and strings, till the thunder-clap fugue of fierce harmony seemed all he lived for within the wide world.

  Shot through that mad theme, he still played for Tarens, a delicate pattern of caring that rang on in the sheltered eye of the hurricane. Arithon’s silver notes sounded yet, when the splash of intrusive footsteps smashed through his thin cover of reeds. Wrapped in mage-sighted glory, he scarcely heard the shrill shouts of discovery, peppered in salty vernacular. But the fish-taint of oilskins stained the dawn breeze, and lifted his head, when the first, hostile party arrived to lay claim to his head price.

  Though his blistering courage still had wrought no victory, Arithon burned his last chord into the streamed flux like a brand. Notes pitched in closure to honour the life of his comatose friend described Tarens! until the brute prick of a knife at his throat drew blood and forced him to silence.

  Early Spring 5923

  Transition

  The planetary flux tides waxed and waned, each cycle a high-pitched emission that crested like an intense burst of fireworks, then subsided as keening static. Human nerves were never designed to withstand the electromagnetic maelstrom. Thrust beyond range of his natural boundaries, Tarens languished, awash in an ocean of chaotic pain. Name and identity had abraded away, until his entire existence became the sussurant stream emanated by the naked elements.

  His wracked mind did not think. Being became an extended torment, played through a forgotten burden of flesh, and denied any concept of ending. Had he been able to access the natural ties to warm-blooded awareness, Tarens could have remembered the gateway to death and sought surcease through mortal release.

  Instead, benighted, he hovered at the threshold, shackled to inertia by hopeless despair.

  Then out of nowhere, a note pierced the void. That clear, ranging sweetness melted his misery and inscribed a bubble of fragile stability. Another tone followed. Then another, sustained, which framed a melodic triplet. The harmonic resonant lifted, then soared, striking an aligned sequence that shattered the vise grip of his insensate existence. A rainbow of blinding light was unleashed, followed by a thunder-clap shock wave that toppled disorder and rearranged everything.

  Featureless noise broke out into bird-song, and meaning returned, lifted free of the inchoate continuum of discordant sound. Hearing recognized the sigh of the wind through a forest’s bare branches. Awareness recaptured the salt-wet pound of blood in warm veins, then like echo, picked up the rolling, back-drop refrain of splashed ocean foam, where the hissed surge of breakers rolled against a firm shore-line. The purl of the lane flux, vast beyond conscious thought, re-formed under shifted perception. Patterns emerged, jolted into formation out of abstract bewilderment. Life spoke of itself. As a being reborn, he encountered the rich texture of frost-browned earth and the nacreous glow of daylight through morning mist. Memories returned and meshed into cohesion, and the refounded sense of a solid existence rushed back with a roar like flood-waters burst through a breached dam.

  He was still cast adrift. But at least in suspension, the raw static pulse of the elements spoke in language his beleaguered spirit could translate.

  The simple triplet progressed to a chord, the tensioned transition from major to minor tones an exquisitely wrought, complex tapestry. Touched, then gently haltered, he felt the clock-work impact of each measure’s adamant clarity. Then a shift in tempo and a tingle that pulled drew his scattered frame of awareness inward through a hard spiral. He crossed a threshold scribed in florid light. Hurtled past, momentarily dazzled again, he plunged through a sharp drop, akin to the scarcely remembered sensation of falling.

  Breath swooped into lungs he had forgotten he possessed, keen as the plunge of cold steel. Shock hammered a whimper from his parted lips. Tarens recovered the weighted awareness of self like a bird netted down on the wing. He might have screamed, harrowed by the sudden trauma. But the peal of the music surrounded and steadied him. Eyes closed, he dreamed, tenderly married back into his flesh, but not roused enough to awaken. Minutes passed, while his restored consciousness realigned and adjusted, propelled past the crucible of flash-point change. He was not who he had been! The shift just embraced was not going to be revocable, should he resume his existence, incarnate.

  The lens of his innate awareness had become melted down and recast. Peace. The music whispered of patience and care, while he reclaimed the courage to choose.

  Wrapped in protective measures, Tarens was shown the Name of his being, one indelible thread woven into the timeless fabric of Ath’s creation. Supported by a ribbon of melody that reinforced his unique awareness, he recognized the musician whose shining talent extended the posited gift of renewal. Step forward, embrace life, and Tarens understood that his faculties would be altered: the gateways through the mysteries of initiation were Arithon’s own, offered to suspend the fatal onset of entropic disorientation.

  Such constant love held nothing of Shadow, no whisper of evil purpose. Just as Kerelie had, and Efflin before him, Tarens embraced the Masterbard’s intimate welcome, sung for him only, without reservation.

  Response flooded back, an immediate reas
surance that should have been flawless, had nothing gone wrong.

  But a discordant whisper rippled the weave, slight, but enough to disturb Tarens’s augmented awareness, still twined into the skein of the lane’s flux. His sympathetic alignment with the Masterbard unfurled into Sighted, first hand immersion. Hurled outside of himself, he became Arithon, shoved by rough hands to his knees in the reeds of a salt marsh nearby.

  While one weathered fisherman nagged his exposed ribs with a knife, others clad in sea-boots and redolent oilcloth bound him at ankles and wrists. They knotted the lashings cruelly tight. Tarens tasted their triumphant greed, spurred by the ferocious thrill of the hunt, and blind with the Light’s creed of righteous belief.

  These brash adventurers intended to claim the temple bounty for minions of Darkness.

  Like a spark dropped to tinder, that concept kindled the fire of prescient dread. Many more ambitious parties than this one scrambled to seize the same prize. Bountymen, smugglers, and the blockade fleet’s warships joined the chase like moths drawn to flame.

  The flux exposed every last vicious twist of motivation with transparency. Also the desperate cost in self-sacrifice that Arithon had paid on the chance he might rescue a jeopardized friend.

  Tarens gasped.

  Ripped awake by horrified grief and the echo of the musician’s despair, he opened his eyes to the sight of bare tree limbs, etched against an overcast sky. He felt flayed. The brush of the wind scoured over his stripped nerves, each sensation unbearably amplified. The least breath barraged his nostrils with scents of last year’s rotted leaves, and wet mud, and the keen chill of salt and snow-melt.

  Nearby, the disturbance of another creature burned him to jagged alarm. That presence included outbursts of snuffling that savaged his ears like a spike through the brain. Tarens turned his head, scraped almost past bearing by the abrasive wool-blankets that covered his body.