by Janny Wurts
‘Show yourself,’ Cosach bellowed. ‘I promise your end could be made grotesquely unpleasant!’
Nothing moved. No sound arose through the din from the fracas outside, random crashes cut by the snarl of ripped cloth and outbursts of clatter as the possessed items tangled together, and hard objects banged in collision. Within the lodge, everything remained still. The chart chests, the lard barrels, the shelves with their casks of supplies and the crates of forged arrow-points, dearly bought, stayed inviolate. Although the doorway gaped open, no fiend broached the threshold. Either the storm was repulsed by design, or the stamped tin banes against infestation were not overwhelmed by the charge the spellbinder leaked as an attractant.
Which finicky trivia did not concern Cosach. He would ferret the verminous meddler out, whatever bolt-hole in the furniture sheltered his shiftless carcass. Spattered red with the droplets from his gashed wrist, chilled to gooseflesh and chattering teeth, the Earl of the North stalked towards the javelin rack, its socketed weapons kept honed for rabid wolves and forest wildcats.
A blanket unfurled into his path from above, tossed over the rail from the upstairs gallery.
‘High Earl Cosach!’ The Mad Prophet called downwards, his hopeful tone pitched to defang the hunt. ‘You’ll appreciate why I have to face you, disarmed! If you’re also humiliated, that’s only just. I’ve been handled in ways that defame charter law. Kenneled dogs have been better treated.’
‘The snake who sold out Rathain’s royal line should teach me the meaning of honour?’ Cosach chose not to redress his nakedness but snapped up a javelin and advanced on bare feet. ‘I say my border scouts were remiss! They should have knotted their rope round your neck and dispatched your misery forthwith!’
Overhead, a chair scraped. The insolent prophet leaned over the rail, his clothes rumpled enough to confirm his complaints of mistreatment. His ginger-and-white hair was screwed into rat’s tails, stuck with sundry leaves and small sticks. The brown eyes that glared downwards at the realm’s steward held a feverish gleam of annoyance. ‘Before you leap for my throat, hear me through!’
Cosach hurled the javelin. The shaft hissed upwards, speared through Dakar’s chest with a clean whisk of air, and slammed into the wall hanging behind. There it stuck, its stout ash shaft quivering.
Quite unscathed, the Mad Prophet snorted with glee from the opposite side of the gallery. While the hoodwinked high earl snarled a curse and seized the next available weapon, his missed target added with acrid sarcasm, ‘When you’re done skewering the heirloom tapestries, I’ll explain how your crown prince came to escape from Koriani captivity.’
Cosach froze. His aimed point fixed, he snapped, ‘Tell me the meat of the matter straight out!’
Given that scant second of truce, Dakar reeled off facts. ‘His Grace is alive. Free, and in refuge with the last clansfolk who stand ground in Caithwood. He’s surrounded by a tissue of wardings raised through his mastery of music. The reprieve cannot last. Tysan’s temples have called for a formal muster. To destroy the spawn of Darkness itself, they’ve pulled three thousand dedicate Sunwheel troops away from the border of Havish. Double that number have marched already from the garrisons at Cainford, Valenford, and Mainmere. More from Barish will join them. When the troops from Tysan’s south-east quarter reach strength, the Koriathain will have forged the twisted alliance they’ve angled to secure from the True Sect priesthood for years. Expect that such combined power will launch an invasion beyond your worst nightmare.’
‘Don’t think to blindside me, you milk-sucking toad!’ Cosach cocked back the javelin. ‘I’m versed in the history of our royal lineage. Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn would leave Caithwood’s protection before drawing the doom of a hostile war host down upon innocents.’
‘That’s what terrifies me,’ Dakar confessed. Not illusion, this time, he edged out of the shadow between the bench seats lately used for concealment. His short-strided tread creaked the pegs in the risers as he stumped down the open, plank stairway. Brazenly worried, he dared the lethal threat of the chieftain’s poised weapon, and pleaded, ‘If you will consent to convene Rathain’s council? Before you pass out from the cold, I need to know, quickly, exactly what you plan to do on behalf of your crown prince.’
Late Winter 5923
Embassy
The temple’s appointed ambassador to Etarra departed in sumptuous state, by decree of the high priest enthroned at Erdane. Tasked as the Light’s Hope, he set forth to mend the infamous rift with the fallen avatar. The apostate founder of the religion stayed entrenched and, the most jaded theosophists claimed, blinded by a wayward obsession with his civil office. Lord Lysaer reigned as the elected Lord Mayor of Etarra, while his dispossessed temple kept the True Sect faith throughout the centuries since the Great Schism flawed the unity of the blessed canon.
Since earnest historic efforts all failed to reconcile the grievous fracture, each embassy since embarked to the fanfares and pomp of a ritualized pageant. The figure-head office was never awarded to men on the rise: instead, the politically difficult, the dangerously ambitious, and even the obstructively incompetent became saddled with the dead-end mission.
But not this time. No less than Erdane’s most adept examiner shouldered the duty to win back the Divine Prince’s good graces. His task forepromised a thicket of thorns. The archives kept the record in painful detail. Lysaer s’Ilessid had packed off his predecessor with cow-horns, blatted in flatulent chorus from Etarra’s gatehouse.
No such crude embarrassment could swerve the determined power of this delegation. Provoked by firm proof of Shadow’s rising, and fed by the machinations of the Koriathain, the current Light’s Hope set off eastward too late for travel by way of the Camris trade-road. His Radiance’s train forewent the port terminus at Miralt Head, where in summer’s calm, the Sunwheel priesthood ventured the sea, tucked like eggs inside their swift galleys. While the northern gales stirred Instrell Bay to a fanged hazard of ice-floes, and the sparkling fleet lay mothballed in sheds, the embassy weathered the journey in cavalcade, forced across the notched heights of the Thaldein Mountains before winter’s snowpack choked off the passes.
The priest-ambassador disdained the inconvenience of camp in the open. Therefore, his servants, his bannermen, and his armed escort of Sunwheel lancers veered south from the cross-roads at Isaer and greased the hands that fed the supply lines which sustained the stalemated conflict with Havish.
Wherever it passed, the Light’s Hope bolstered morale. It tightened the slackened reins of compliance with the guild-halls and soothed the cantankerous field generals stuck with locked horns at the border. From thence, it polished the rapacious gleam on its moral rectitude to squeeze tribute from the magnates, specifically those who gouged the Light’s treasury over the short-falls that troubled East Bransing. The passage of dispatches meantime overtook the ambassador’s sedate pace. The flow of news borne by the network of commerce kept Etarra’s apostate Lord Mayor informed of the embassy’s progress.
Even fallen from grace, Lysaer dared not ignore the perils stirred up by a dogma that maintained a war host.
His chess-plays as a statesman were expertly set: town ministers who owed favours stalled the high temple’s train with politic invitations. While the feasts fattened their gold-belted waistlines, Lysaer’s influence curbed their profligate bribes for trade favours, and diminished their bare-faced proselytizing the farther the embassy passed down the Mathorn Road. By the hour the priest-delegate’s party lumbered up to Etarra’s capital gate, the crisply stacked papers on Lysaer’s private desk detailed the personage behind the title’s wax seal. Covert reports had brought the background summaries of all his staff, even down to the menial drovers and chilblained grooms.
That list had preoccupied Daliana’s young mind since her impulsive foray broached Lysaer’s chambers a fortnight past. Ostracized from his court, and rebuffed by his steel-faced servants, she suffered the same treatment as every other female his lords
hip’s fickle eye had singled out for a conquest. The contempt of Etarra’s elite society also changed her circle of admirers overnight. From eager suits chasing marriage, she faced the interest of men who desired the piquant thrill of entertainment. She fended them off. First with scornful words, then by contests at knives with cutthroat wagers that fleeced their pride and their purses. The conspicuous lack of a treasury settlement lent her chastity no vindication: only low whispers that her nubile performance must have fed the mayor’s ennui.
Daliana met such salacious unkindness with laughter. For displeased and astonished the man had been, surely; as well as blindsided to judge by his effort to armour himself in retreat. Awakened to daylight amid his thrashed papers and tumbled jade animals, Lysaer would have understood she could not be routed by intimidation.
By the morning Daliana braved the bitter dawn streets in her stylish mantle trimmed at the hood with red fox, the only party in Etarra more coldly received was Erdane’s pampered priest-ambassador. His dedicate lancers were not quartered inside the gates, a lawful precaution to forestall needless outbreaks of armed rioting. Yet where even unfriendly accredited envoys were received in high state, the Light’s Hope enjoyed no such courtesy. Since His Radiance’s entrance five days ago, he and his noble train had been left cooling their heels at shameful remove in the outer town precinct.
Daliana did not hesitate to tread those brick streets, or to rub shoulders with folk in the district’s mean taverns. Places frequented by common travellers and labourers, with tiny let rooms packed four stories high, and walls of squared stone, crammed at street level with tap-room warrens where master craftsmen wrangled over sour beer by day, and where their aproned artisans brawled, drunkenly boisterous, after nightfall. In contrast, the early hours were tame, the reek of yestereve’s carousing chased out by the breeze through the latched-back shutters, and bright with the sunlight filtered through the panes of the street-front casements.
Flushed from the chill, tawny eyes sparkling under her dark lashes, Daliana skirted the outdoor sweepers and the sleepy drudges who shuffled at large to fill buckets. She tripped the iron latch at the Red Cockerel’s front door and paused with a shiver of unease at the threshold. She checked the throwing knives tucked into her girdle. Something about the banal correspondence spilled from Lord Lysaer’s desk had continued to ruffle her natural instincts. Though the temple’s embassy presented its grandiose figure-head with the usual train to furnish a spectacle, Daliana shoved in to inspect the Light’s Hope for herself. While Lysaer forestalled her close guard in his presence, she could scout the perimeter on her own merits.
The unlit common-room loomed empty of customers. A listless slattern with ruddy hands scrubbed the floor with a bucket and brush. Another, more alert, mopped the trestles, and recognized the distinctive fox hood. ‘Come to collect on some gallant’s debt on the sly?’
Daliana flashed back an edged grin. ‘Don’t all of them skulk from their angry fathers?’
‘Shouldn’t wonder, the rich idiots, played until they’re milked dry. It’s breakfast for you? No wonder you’re slight, eat like a bird as you do.’ The tavern maid bawled towards the kitchen. Presently, a puffy-eyed scullion poked out with hot tea, honey butter, and bread.
Daliana paid up as her basket arrived. To discourage chat, she perched where the boards remained wet, farthest from the warmth of the chimney wall. She ate, tucked in gloom, while eight off-duty gate guards stamped in, noisy and armed, their tread harsh with the grate of hobnailed boots. They ripped off sheep-lined gauntlets, chafed their numbed hands, and bellowed for food and a jack of mulled wine from a lass in the mood for a kiss. The baker’s boys came, cheeks smeared with ash from their pre-dawn stint, stoking ovens. Then two out-bound carters clumped down the stair, cheerfully talkative, followed by four aproned lads with dye-stained hands, and a one-eyed smith flecked with cinder burns, whose broad wink thanked Daliana’s flamboyant skills, the stakes for which lined his pockets.
The raunchy remarks overheard from the beer tap did not dismay the uptown young woman. Randy goats who sought an unpartnered wench were not these, rousted early for honest labour.
She kept to her corner, while the badinage and coarse laughter swelled with the size of the crowd. As the off-shift hostler trooped in, and the horse-boys emerged from the stables, she bent a keen ear to their gossip. Either the Light’s embassy was as it seemed, or her qualms meant the Lord Mayor’s superb network had admitted a pack of wolves in priestly trappings.
The ambassador’s servants kept to themselves. Their distinctive white livery filled several trestles, at least two dozen grooms required to tend the cavalcade’s equipage. Their talk remained insular, not a surprise: the True Sect branch of the Light’s faith had never taken firm root beyond Tysan. Their unguarded comments sounded coarse enough to verify their lowly station.
Daliana still listened with formless unease when the east-bound relay of fast couriers burst in, voices shrill with excitement. Shadow had struck east of Valenford, they said. While comment erupted around them, she tightened her grip on her mug. At long last, the first hand news of the outbreak disclosed the cause that sourced Lysaer’s struggle to quell Desh-thiere’s curse.
‘Save us, there’ll be war!’ The smith’s exclamation rose over the clamour. ‘Damned to Sithaer! I’ll be tempering steel for guild notes at my forge, with my raw stock attached for the armourers.’
As shouts of dismay ebbed to rumbles of worry, only the stablemen in the True Sect’s livery failed to share in the excitement.
Cold in the midst of the steamy common-room, Daliana studied the temple servants’ calm faces and watchful eyes. A talented spy would be tucked in their train. Very likely a vested diviner, since the breaking word out of Tysan did not unsettle their poise.
As the carters dropped their napkins and bolted before the alarm upset commerce, cadres of tradesmen with furrowed brows sought the privacy of the back corner. Jostled among them, Daliana almost missed the slight, mantled courier who darted in from the street. Agile, gloved hands unslung the strap of a dispatch bag bound in unseemly haste for the trestle that seated the Light’s delegation.
Chills chased over her skin, a warning raised by her ancestral instinct. Daliana whipped up her furred hood. She braced for the shock just barely in time as a burst of true vision stormed over her senses. She saw snow sprawled with masses of battle-field dead. Where the trampled ground wore the pink stains of carnage, and the hacked flesh of the fallen still seeped, the air carried the crisped smell of burning . . .
Then the partial glimpse fled.
Daliana bent forward. A swift, scalding mouthful of tea masked her choke as her gorge rose, but no quiet moment allowed her to rally. Ruffled again by the whisper of trouble, she froze: late to rise, another patron came down the inn stairway, this one ostentatiously robed in the gold-and-white silk of superior rank.
Immaculate in his Sunwheel regalia, the fellow looked discommoded. A big man, imposing, he was no puppet. The splintered gleam of light in his collar studs bespoke choice diamonds, not glass. Florid skin glowed from the use of fine soap.
Fresh from the attentions of his valet, the official dealt the noisy, packed tap-room an irritable survey down his flared nose. Which was wrong, utterly. Billeted far beneath his genteel station, he should have sent for a private meal, served upstairs in more select company.
Instead, the priestly aristocrat shouldered into the hurly-burly. He bullied one of his servants aside to gain the head seat at the trestle. Conspicuous in the morning light, his thinning brown hair, cleft chin, and thoughtful blue eyes identified him as no less than His Radiance, the Light’s Hope, himself.
Daliana had no chance to steady her nausea. The road-muddied messenger who unsettled her nerves already elbowed a path to the delegate’s table. This unlikely meeting seemed prearranged. Worse, observed carefully, the mantled courier displayed the suspect shimmer caused by a talisman or a spell-cast glamour. Daliana’s perception was not eas
ily fooled. Truth-sense keen as the hot blood of her ancestry noted the hip sway that revealed a woman cloaked in male dress.
Which subterfuge spurred overwhelming alarm. Daliana reeled under redoubled foreboding. The encounter before her unfolded too fast. Caught unprepared, she acknowledged the fear, that whatever occurred here involved a conspiracy beyond her depth. While Daliana’s instincts raised gooseflesh, the disguised female courier pawed through her document pouch and withdrew a wrapped packet.
Like the voided charge after lightning, Daliana’s gifted senses saw blankness: nothing. The packet contained nothing with such emphatic force, the contents could only be swathed under wards. Wrought spellcraft, for certain, and something else: the faintly electrical taint that suggested the work of a Koriani initiate.
Daliana muffled a gasp, bolt-struck by reflexive terror. Again, she saw slaughtered bodies in snow. Then the trampled drifts became paper and ink. The let blood streamed scarlet through Lysaer’s reports, which detailed the temple’s sent embassy, scattered amid the fragments of tumbled jade ornaments.
The vision let go. Left with the sinister certainty that death would follow if the item in that covered packet changed hands, Daliana had no chance to plan. Her distress, or her gift already betrayed her. She had flagged the courier’s notice. The beardless face in its outdoor hood swung to stare, while the priest-ambassador tensed, pushed back from his seat and half-risen to stage an innocent retreat. Another rendezvous would be arranged, with the dangerous peril to Lysaer untraceable.
Impelled to act first, Daliana shot erect, whipped one of the knives from her girdle, and threw.
Steel sliced the gloom. Bystanders yelled, without time to scatter. The little blade flew on course, slit the packet, and gashed the gloved grip of the courier. A tavern wench screamed. The off-duty gate guards reacted and charged. As they closed, tumbling benches and trestles and plates, Daliana caught the brief flash of burst wards. The spelled wrapping parted and bared her marked target: a swathed object fashioned of copper thread-work and silk, barely glimpsed before the breached wardings unbound with a singeing back-lash.
