Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

He grasped the likely outcome. His shared memory of Jieret’s death-wish in Daon Ramon knew the blast of the horn’s call that had raised a congruent event from the past. The blood rage of battle and the cursed grip of madness on Lysaer had been wrenched into abeyance and paralyzed.

  Today’s grand summons would strike with more crippling force, magnified by the attributes of a High King’s enabled crown jewels. Those in close proximity would be struck senseless, some surely never to rise again living on the worldly side of the veil.

  Knowledge made the experience at the margin no easier to bear, clothed in the quick flesh of mortality. Ears ringing, and sweat-soaked as though sapped by a fever-dream, Tarens clung to rough bark and wept for such grace, unleashed amid wholesale carnage. The bitter wail, risen, had no animal voice. The twisted cry wrung from the killing field reverberated from thousands of steel weapons, forged and sharpened for purposeful maiming and death, that now denounced the form of their making. Which shattering utterance of horror and pain might have squeezed widows’ tears from earth’s bed-rock.

  The grievous burden of remorse shouted shame, that a criminally blind ideology could reject the promise of birthright, then mangle the exuberant vigour of life, designed by nature to celebrate only creative abundance.

  All the remorse in the world could not unmake the toll of desecration. Harrowed by the need for sweet respite, Tarens crumpled. Undone, he clenched his forearms over his head, his salt-wet cheek pressed for comfort against the warm ground. A deafened part of him dimly registered the clanborn youngsters felled beside him in whimpering knots.

  ‘Rise!’ The deep voice boomed almost on top of him. ‘One liegeman among you must stand!’

  That imperative command could not be gainsaid, short of death. Tarens stirred to a shuddering breath. Confronted by a massive pair of cloven hooves wisped by flaxen silk fetlocks, his awed sight lifted, then took in the massive legs, four-square and tall as pillars in front of him. Quaking, undone, he picked himself up. Erect and trembling, nose to muscled chest, he squinted upwards, dwarfed and dazzled by the flame-presence of an Ilitharis – a centaur guardian – arrived before him.

  The creature towered, wrapped in sheets of gold light, his antlered head crowned in glory to burn mortal cloth past the flash-point of sanity. The broad straps of his harness glinted with jewels. His mane tumbled over his back and shoulders like sunbeams spun into corn-silk. No human eye could endure the brilliance of his naked countenance: fierce enough to stop the heart and reweave the drum-beat of living pulse to the purest, unbearable strains of compassion.

  Yet dark as cut shadow, a loose stallion walked in the creature’s presence. Bare of bridle and saddle, tail and mane snarled with the burrs and tangles of a creature gone wild, the horse rolled a ghost eye and dropped its neck to graze at the guardian’s feet.

  ‘One must draw the black blade, Alithiel,’ the Ilitharis intoned, alive with infinite gentleness. ‘The one fated among you must rise to the moment.’

  Esfand knelt, shamefaced with hesitation. ‘I daren’t.’ Scarlet yet from the recent rebuke of a Sorcerer, he unyoked the slung baldric and offered the sword, upraised across his outstretched palms. ‘Let your greater wisdom take her, exalted.’

  The centaur did not move. Pale turquoise, his eyes, piercing with regret. ‘Young man, I cannot.’

  Siantra’s appeal emerged, quick with pain, her scarred hands cradled protectively to her breast. ‘Exalted, we are, none of us, fit!’

  Tarens ventured, torn breathless, ‘The guardian can’t. You may not realize, real as he seems. We behold only a sending. Not solid in our shared existence. His hooves leave no track. The weight of the sword would pass through such a semblance, insubstantial as smoke in this place.’

  The centaur’s antlered majesty shifted, perhaps with impatience, or sorrow. ‘One must bear Alithiel. In truth, I cannot.’

  Tarens moved, willingly courageous.

  But Khadrien’s impulse leaped faster. His nimble hand snatched the sheathed weapon from his cousin’s numbed grasp. The instant the sword’s wrapped hilt had been claimed, the centaur apparition flicked out, vanished like a gale-snuffed candle. Dizzied senses recorded the tender spring turf in fact left unmarked by its passage.

  The desolate, stark impact of separation pierced the soul to the quick: that only the jet stallion with the ghost eye remained, warm and breathing. A stamped hoof and an impatient tail switch suggested an imperative invitation. Before anyone else rebounded from shock, Khadrien sprinted forward. Ever the bold opportunist, he tossed the loop of Alithiel’s baldric as a noose and captured the horse. Sword sheath gripped left-handed, he closed his other fist in the animal’s mane and vaulted astride.

  ‘No, boy! Hold hard.’ Tarens sprang and locked his ploughman’s two-handed grip on the strap cinched over the stallion’s neck. ‘Your liege’s defense is better off handled by a grown man.’

  Khadrien snarled and clapped in both heels. ‘You don’t understand! I was chosen for this!’ While the horse plunged and sidled, he yanked the sheathed sword in an upward arc and battered at Tarens’s left wrist. Shouted protest rang through the drum-roll of hooves as the stallion wheeled to dislodge the crofter’s determined hold.

  Tarens held on tenacious, dragged into an unbalanced stagger.

  ‘This is my task!’ Khadrien shouted. Red head turned, insistent, he struck again. ‘Let me go! I was called to the sword since the very beginning.’

  ‘No!’ Esfand cried, voice split by anguish.

  But Siantra blocked her friend’s distraught charge. ‘Khadrien has to! There’s no other choice. Don’t you realize? Esfand, as your father’s heir designate, you’re needed!’ Her gentian eyes eerily fey, and backed by a truth-sighted lineage, she also exhorted the blond crofter. ‘Iyat-thos, let Khadri go!’

  No true clanborn might argue bare fact: not when Khadrien’s Sighted dream had incited Alithiel’s theft from Halwythwood’s armoury in the first place.

  Even so, Tarens continued resistance; in conscience, he must. ‘No lad under my charge will ride alone into uncanny peril.’ The loss of his nephews and a brother’s bereavement had shown him the horror of children who died untimely before their parents. He spun with the bravest intent to mount up and ride pillion behind.

  But no man’s strength could outmatch the stallion’s ferocity, abetted by Khadrien’s wildcat recklessness. The horse reared, broke away and galloped, tail streaming. Showered by the gouged clods thrown off its hooves, two friends left behind stared in distress, joined by Tarens, who cradled a purpled sprain and a friction-burned palm. The large man hunched over, unabashedly weeping.

  ‘You could not go, Iyat-thos.’ Siantra grasped the crofter’s hide jacket, as pale as he with shared agony. When Tarens recoiled, she berated his anger with a mature sorrow past her tender years. ‘You could not! Stand tall. As the gifted bearer of Earl Jieret’s legacy, you carry the stamp of the ancient past. There will come the hour your liege needs that guidance! Esfand understands this, as well. Even though Khadrien’s larking idiocy shrugs off the gravity of the risk, we’re too late. His own mother would tell you. Once he’s hard set, nobody ever has managed to keep him at heel.’

  Yet the cold douse of reason left Tarens wretchedly unconsoled. He had one duty now, placed ahead of his liege by the dictates of his upright character: to see two clan youngsters safely back to Halwythwood, and worse, to explain his failure to guard a distraught family’s feckless son. There would be worried kinsfolk left disconsolate by this day’s toll of disaster. For Khadrien’s life, no excuse could suffice. Apology bought no forgiveness.

  The black horse was away with an untried boy, a puny retort to adult strife and ruin, quickly lost from sight in the glare of the heath and the dismembered wrack of the battleground.

  Spring 5923

  Diminuendo

  The Mad Prophet wakened from the debacle at Lanshire, already burdened by the aggrieved awareness the High King’s spirit had made final passage over Fate’s Wheel
. For the initiate mage, visionary perception often stayed manifest while the body languished in supine unconsciousness. Even out of his senses, Dakar had been aware of the rarified note carved out by Gestry’s green intent. His Grace’s sovereign charge, enabled through the crown jewels, shaped the plea to spare every feal liegeman his power might salvage and still hold the weal of the land. Among the sprawled wrack of breathing survivors, some individuals in Havish’s war band were spared from the coil of certain doom. Even a few companies of the True Sect host might arise unharmed from the debacle. A chastened minority would forsake their misguided pledge to break the realm’s tolerance for mystical knowledge. In repentant remorse, the bravely defeated might find their true heart and go home.

  But the feat that had called the Paravian spirits from the old way to end strife had been bought without thought for personal consequence.

  High King Gestry lay in a crumpled heap, unblemished and stilled in the scarlet splendour of his silk surcoat. His smith’s hands rested open in the soft grass, unmarked and tensioned with care no longer. The outflung wrists, clean as white bone, still wore the gold bands of the ruby-set bracelets. Beneath the ancient runes in the wire fillet, fronded under a spray of brown hair, his wide-lashed gaze glinted with sky-caught reflection, the slack pupils unresponsive. The sunlit arch of his brow showed no more furrowed stress. Instead, the unearthly youth of his features remained sculpted into sublime beatitude.

  Dakar choked on the futile apology owed for the misfit failure of his desertion. Left no inspired eulogy for the loss of a majesty that left a noble blood-line diminished, he stooped beside the departed, blind with tears. His saddened care gently straightened the rucked folds of the royal tabard and smoothed down the gold circle of Havish’s hawk device. Last of all, he stroked Gestry’s lids closed and veiled the peace that stared out of unseeing eyes.

  Nearby, the royal trumpeter stirred in fitful agitation. The plump banner bearer slumped over the pole of the toppled standard rasped and twitched, painlessly snoring. Every elite armsman in the king’s company lay winnowed like chaff, prostrate forms strewn across the swept gorse like tossed rags from a dismembered puppet stall. There would be dead among them: spirits hurled through the far side of the veil by the resonant surfeit of ecstasy.

  Dakar shivered. Somewhere, oblivious, their Named essence would be singing still, borne past the bounds of mortality on the crested wave of wild harmony.

  The spellbinder left to behold the razed aftermath was wrung too pithless to mourn. His heart weighed too heavy to measure the tally of bloodless casualties. He lingered only to place a hand on the sinewy, tanned neck of the realm’s irascible war-captain. The bullish, impetuous muscle of him remained sprawled, steadfast at his sovereign’s right side. The pulse beat strongly beneath Dakar’s touch. The man’s chest rose and fell with the calm of deep sleep. Disinclined to be caught on the field when the adversarial brute reawakened, and not yet prepared to shoulder just blame for the tragedy of the royal demise, Dakar stood. Let Gestry’s feal liegemen bear up his Grace and take responsible charge of the kingdom’s crown jewels.

  The Mad Prophet turned his gutless step from the knoll, braced to pass score upon score of dropped bodies, knocked senseless and scarcely breathing, or else shocked beyond life by the blasting pulse of the land’s higher mysteries. More men would be bled white, gutted by wounds. But unlike other fields of war before this one, the strident, rasped calls of the first carrion crows sliced through naught but the peace of clear air. On every side, the atmosphere hung untrammelled by the shocked steamers of etheric distress. No torn remnants lingered in the aftermath of violent slaughter.

  Shades did not walk here, confused and disoriented from the shock of untimely doom. The glorious working of Gestry’s last testament had cleansed all unsettled disharmony and borne the newly deceased without fragmentation through a swift crossing.

  Dakar dared not pause to marvel in mourning, nor even to succour the wounded who languished in the throes of stupor. Some would perish anyway, reaped by the brute stroke of cold steel. More would gasp their last before their hale comrades could stir and regain the wits to bind their hacked flesh into dressings.

  Weeping, conflicted by pity, Dakar forced the stern strength and strode past. He stepped over the sticky gleam of dropped swords. Picked his way through the muck of pooled blood, and skirted the grotesque, tangled toll of the fallen from both sides. He abandoned a man who choked with filled lungs, anguished beyond thought of stopping. The lapse on his part was not callous, in fact. He made haste, sore-hearted and driven by the most dire necessity. Someone must handle another concern: the frightening peril that still ranged at large, with no one else restored to clear sight or warned by the aware foresight to attend.

  The individual he sought with such urgency should be found a league distant from the carnage at the front line, sprawled amid what remained of the Sunwheel light horsemen dispatched on their fever-pitch chase to pin down the Master of Shadow. Dakar had no choice but to locate Lysaer s’Ilessid before the dedicate troops who survived recouped their shattered awareness.

  The ground rose again past the desecrate vale where the centre ranks had clashed in grim slaughter. Pushed to the next crest with his pounding pulse loud as a hammer-stroke in ringing ears, Dakar shoved through the stand of socketed banners that marked the True Sect’s central command post. Two high priests sprawled there, fine white­-and-gold robes rumpled like snow upon trampled earth. One shuddered in a mindless, fetal curl. The other lay still, a vacant corpse with a face seized into a rictus of stupefied dismay. Their talent diviner flopped face-down nearby, alive and gasping like a beached trout, but etherically blasted to infantile witlessness and soiled with puddled urine. The Hatchet’s charioteer had lost consciousness, also. A swathe of snapped poles and maimed corpses marked the trail mown down where his harness team bolted. The carnage left halberdiers with staved-in chests, and more men bled white by arterial gashes, cut down by the iron wheels or trampled to oozing pulp. Settled now, the loose animals grazed a stone’s throw down the rise, with the senseless, short frame of the Light’s Supreme Commander of Armies felled on the platform like cast-off armour across the heaped form of his reinsman.

  Mage-sight revealed that the murderous flare of ungoverned rage had been rinsed from the willful man’s aura. But the grace instilled by the Paravian presence in this case was destined not to last. Dakar shuddered under the prompt of the seer, forewarned that the Light’s testy commander would arise and rebuild his wounded pride through black hatred. The day’s brief epiphany would be crushed under denial and not realign the warped pattern of a stubborn character.

  Before The Hatchet recovered the will to give orders, come what may, Lysaer must be gone, far enough to outdistance the curse that inflamed him beyond reason within Arithon’s proximity.

  Past the hillock with its forlorn straggle of banners, Dakar waded into the field tents pitched behind the wracked field to attend the mauled casualties. There, soaked in sweat under shimmering noon sun, he commandeered a double team hitched to a flatbed dray, stocked with litters and blankets to succour the wounded. He added a store of supplies and provender, then raided the officer’s picket lines for a half dozen fresh mounts, readied with saddles and bridles to replace the ones killed or spurred to exhaustion. Dakar selected only the best horseflesh. He knotted their head-stalls to the dray’s baggage strap, clambered onto the driver’s box, and reined eastward at a smart trot.

  Spoked wooden wheels jolted over mossed stones and gouged a crushed track through the broom. While the rhythmic swish cut through laced canes of briar, and the shear severed crushed stalk from set flower, the spellbinder engaged his trained faculties. He plumbed his high art for every sly trick to bind his activity under concealment. For that reason, he became first to discover that he was no longer the sole opportunist who ventured amid the grotesque tableau of the prostrate.

  Someone else walked upright through the burnished glare, haloed in the floss s
heen of fluffed seeds scythed off by a cut switch of pussywillow.

  Dakar took pause and halted the lumbering dray. While the horses he towed behind the flat wagon jibbed and jostled the stance of the harness team, he reined them back to a jingle of bits and snubbed their nervousness with a firm grip. Then he studied the figure’s limping approach and identified the carrot head of the lanky clan brat, for some flit-brained scam parted from his companions and jaunted off on his own. The knave appeared plagued by the ache of thumped joints. Closer at hand, Dakar noted the grazed cheek; then the bent forearms which gingerly cradled brush-burned palms, both skinned raw. The lad’s fox braid was stuck with gorse shreds, and the leathers that sported a tear in the seat wore a green, foamy splatter of horse slobber.

  Rather than laugh, Dakar eased the skeined spells woven for invisibility. As his presence leaped stark to the heedless boy’s eye, he challenged, ‘Just what are you doing here, Khadrien s’Valerient?’

  The miscreant startled half out of his skin. Stopped in his tracks, hand slapped to the antler haft at his belt sheath, he almost threw his knife for the jugular.

  ‘Don’t,’ admonished the spellbinder. ‘Bared steel at this pass would be most unwise.’

  Nailed under authority’s jaundiced eye, Khadrien swore under his breath. He shrugged and relinquished his gripped blade with an insolence that knew when not to beg for a remount. Dared not, despite the evident fact that Dakar’s purloined string seemed excessive.

  The spellbinder addressed the lad with the smug calm of a mage who read guilty minds. ‘Lost your horse, did you? And got bitten to boot?’

  ‘The damned black devil ducked a shoulder and tossed me off,’ the rogue snarled with injured affront.

  Dakar raised his eyebrows with ironic amusement. ‘A dark stallion, no markings? With a ghost eye?’ Fixed by Khadrien’s resentful glower, the spellbinder slapped the rein ends across his knees and laughed. ‘Dharkaron’s own Vengeance! What did you expect? That animal was bred as a Sorcerer’s mount and dreamed back to life by a dragon! Of course it rejected your foolhardy bidding.’