The Wars of Light and Shadow (9) – Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon

by Janny Wurts

  ‘How can I?’ the disgruntled helmsman snarled back through the thunder of slackened sails. ‘Persnickety bitch has no way left to her. Whipstaff under my fist’s gone as limp as a lubber’s prick in a whore-house!’

  ‘Mind your course and shut yer gob, butty!’ bellowed the man in authority. ‘Want a stiff sword rammed up yer tucked arse? Lose our lead, and the Sunwheel armada will have us carved up for their admiral’s trophy.’

  The pintles squealed sternwards. Someone’s almighty shove threw down the strapped rudder to a lugubrious slosh of pressed water. The lugger yawed, wallowed amid the cross chop and nearly in irons. Her dumpling bow battered the wave crests to splashed spray through her ponderous swing, until the rampaging flog of her head-sails backed wind with a whump that shuddered her length.

  ‘Jibe, ho!’ screeched the captain, then changed target to singe his first mate. ‘Move those louses amidships, you star-gazing lummox!’ The tirade suffered a pause, likely because he ducked the main spar, which scythed across to a rattle of blocks and threatened the heads of the men on the wheel deck. ‘Like it or not,’ his rant resumed, ‘we’re hardening sail on port tack!’

  Booted feet thumped. Taut hemp thrummed and squeaked, as the harried hands sweated the sheets to make fast. Still, the prevailing breeze blew too light for the full-bellied hull to gain steerage. After the current turned back in her favour, she might be dragged northward on course to reach Barish. But not quickly. Cast out of sorts, she spun at the whim of the eddies, equally likely to fetch hard up against the bluffs of the Lanshire shore-line.

  As the lugger wallowed into a heel and her heavy, patched sails riffled taut, the cantankerous captain rode herd on his helmsman again. ‘Head her up! Three more points. Idiot! Because I said so! We have to maintain appearances.’

  ‘That’s serious, truly?’ the mate fumed, still riled from some bent of foolishness just sorted out on the foredeck. ‘You’re hell-bound to haul that forsaken mass of fish-tackle astern? Blight that daft notion! Already, we’re ploughing our nose in the bath like an egg-laying turtle.’

  ‘In a waffling tub, under safe-passage pennants?’ The captain bridled. ‘I don’t give a fish’s tit! We act like douce fishermen whether we have to hump down this channel, arse backwards. If we don’t make the effort to trawl, Light forsake us, we’re a suspect target. So toss off those damned nets and wag to the Light like a virgin, before we get hailed by a Sunwheel patrol with some fettlesome doggo aloft with a ship’s glass!’

  To the laggard crew, doubtless caught gawping, ‘You heard! Free those booms and cast out the nets!’

  Feet shuffled, underrun by a whiner’s complaint.

  ‘Blight take a ninny!’ the stressed captain snarled. ‘We’re bobbing along in a hull that a jettisoned beer cask could overhaul! Luff you for a mooner if you think that blockade’s patrols won’t try us inside of the hour.’

  The mate’s gravel tones rumbled through the splash of weighted twine, plunged over the stern-rail.

  ‘Worried? Surely I am,’ the captain responded, still surly. ‘But not over quibbling dark sorcery. That underfed mageling attacked with his fists when those fishermen cornered him. Shut up with the reek of dead cod, in a sack? When we haul the wretch out for the bailiffs at Barish, he’s sure to be green and heaving.’

  But except for sick air in the dark of the hold, the crab-netted prisoner suffered no landlubber’s set-backs. His adaptive ease suggested, instead, that he knew lines and sails with the intimacy of past experience.

  Canvas slatted, again. The captain’s bellow bristled the helmsman to retort, ‘Already, your orders’ve pinched her too tight!’

  While the lugger bucked into an ungainly roll, first head-sails, then main and mizzen revolted. Canvas riffled in protest, then thrashed. Blocks clashed and disordered spars rattled as the stout hull shook herself like a dog. Flogged across the eye of the wind, gripped in the spin of an eddy, she drifted backwards over her nets. Whence her iron-strapped rudder became snarled, wreathed, then wrapped, and finally roped fast by her ponderous coils of twine.

  ‘Dolts! Now we’re roasted!’ The captain’s orders shrilled beyond fury. ‘Hop to! Clear that fouled steering before I have you lot wading. Hard up in a clinch, you’ll be kedging this hulk off the mud, bereft of a tender!’

  Even afloat, dampened out by salt water, the discordant tension deflected the flux.

  Arithon mapped the on-going disturbance from the hold below. Eyes half-lidded, lapsed back into mage-sense, he followed the shimmer as the cascade rippled outwards. Here and there, he detected the odd, dimpled whorls where other inquisitive beings took pause. Lured away from their feeding upon the energies stoked by the tide, those primitive motes tasted the ripe charge of dissonant emotions. Excited into sudden alignment, these abandoned their random grazing to gorge.

  Always, the flare of human distemper became the hot magnet for iyats.

  A well-maintained vessel carried a fiend bane to ward off such an invasion. The lugger possessed one: an exemplary work of wrought ciphers, stamped into a green strip of copper and tacked to the midships hatch. Arithon traced its faint emanation as light, which enveloped the lugger with a subtle boundary from both mastheads through the full length of her hull. His refined awareness observed the effect as the defensive halo unravelled the iyats’ cohesion. The ward’s influence drained them, the closer they came. Any too recklessly thralled to shy off became sucked down to a state of null charge, which unravelled their penchant for mischief.

  The quelled fiends drifted aimlessly as limpid wisps, stunned inert until the ship’s passage moved the active ward out of range.

  The dim hold, the pestilent slosh of the bilges, and the creaked of complaint of caulked timbers, ringed about by the tang of prowling iyats – the ambience sparked a sharp breath of epiphany. Arithon stifled a manic laugh. In piquant fact, he might strike back at will. The tiniest flick of cast shadow might stop off the ciphers stamped into the vessel’s protective talisman. Douse the ward, and the mettlesome iyats would milk the crew’s rage and seize their free rein to wreak havoc.

  More, and far better, Arithon also recalled a past crisis, shut in another ship’s hold under threat of a fiend storm. He clearly remembered: a host of tiny lights, drifted air-borne like stars, shaded pale blue and bright indigo, to scarcely visible tints of deep violet . . .

  When Tarens’s affable temperament broke, his brow knotted first with a thunder-cloud frown, followed up by the lightning clout of his fists. But not this time. The latest, most bitter reverse saw him trussed in wet rope and thrown face-down, with his crooked nose spluttering bilge in the fisherman’s dory. The puddle sloshed to the stroke of four oarsmen, pressured at speed, a nuisance too shallow to drown him in earnest. But his miserable coughs as the salt stung his nostrils wracked him to dizzy prostration.

  Flung spray off the oar-blades spattered his back. Yet more than soaked clothes set him shivering: the awakened thrust of intuitive instinct also blew chill through his bones. Though he was not gagged, his husked warnings failed to convince his fixated captors to pause and listen to reason. Hell-bent, they pursued their crazed chase up the estuary.

  Their burdened craft wallowed dangerously low. Her nicked thwarts all but sheared the lapped wave-crests. Ninth man in a dory built to hold six, Tarens was kicked by rough boots each time the tired oarsmen spelled themselves in relief. Plots hatched, bandied in bursts overhead, concerned about bearings, and light wind, and shoals, betwixt fierce debate over vindictive strategies, aimed to retake their jacked lugger and reclaim sole custody of the bound prisoner.

  That the man they discussed was a minion of Shadow never dampened their rampant enthusiasm. Wedded to the pursuit of stark madness, they argued whether their effort to board should be launched under cover of darkness.

  ‘Nip in close, wedge the rudder with one of the oars, then clamber on deck with a noise to scare the daylights out of their livers,’ urged the current contender.

  ‘Wait for
nightfall, we’ll lose her. You think those animals are going to show lanterns to welcome us in?’

  The captain’s stubborn opinion prevailed, for a headlong assault at the rail amidships. ‘The first time those rats bested us, we were ambushed. Matched eye to eye, we’ll give them a rumpus to shred us fresh bait for our crab-traps!’

  None thought to weigh in the captive presence of the black-haired fugitive.

  Tarens alone fretted over that score. His attempt to speak out earned a kick in the ribs that knocked the wind out of him. At risk of worse injury, he lay flat and gagged, until the savage cold shortly made the drubbing seem merciful.

  The clan liegeman’s apparition had cautioned from the shadowy half-world of dreams. ‘Don’t be fooled by his Grace’s mild appearance.’ Yet even that counselled warning fell short at late day when the errant lugger was overtaken.

  The men rowed through the scald of the westerly sun, gadded on by their game-cock captain, who perched with bristled hackles on the stern seat. Since his dory fetched in through the shimmered reflection, the bedazzled watch on the lugger posed little concern. More than the weather lay in his favour, since the negligent slop to the rig meant his stolen vessel lay dead in the water. Her tan-bark sails were down, but not furled. The starboard anchor still hung at her cat-head. Not underway, or gripped by the tide, she presented the round-bellied swell of her side, nudged by a white rill of current.

  ‘The useless louses have run her aground.’ The captain spat leeward in rank disgust. ‘Row, you buckos! Let’s have her back in our hands while she’s helpless.’

  Tarens could see nothing, while the gap closed to the pull from the benches. Still tied on his side, his cheek pressed against the dory’s soaked floor-boards, he heard only the captain’s colourful comments as the details spurred shock and astonishment.

  ‘Merciful Light! Will you look at her rig? Blast all to the damnable meddling of Shadow! She’s been trounced! Looks like a gale with a half dozen water-spouts swept her from stem to stern.’

  The stroke faltered, as the oarsmen swivelled to assess the grim picture. Then their speechless, awed rage begat curses.

  ‘Quit slacking!’ barked the captain, ripe to spit nails. The gawping pause broke to the bite of the oars, and a furious thrust hurled the dory ahead.

  ‘I’ll stake their gizzards to the last man,’ one brute husked, as though strangled. ‘That wasn’t a gale, boys. No natural happenstance. Spars thrown down like that! All her rigging unravelled? That’s no salvager’s work. Boat looks like a wrecker’s been at her!’

  The chap crammed in the bow seat groaned through his hands. ‘Don’t want to think what’s befallen our nets. Merciful grace! We’ll be sunk, and our families, too, if we don’t claim that Sunwheel bounty.’

  ‘Stuff your miserable yaps. Just haul for your lives!’ snapped the captain. ‘We don’t hop quick, there’ll be nothing to save!’

  The chopped bite of the looms increased rhythm, to taxed grunts from weary men who now were galled beyond desperate.

  The violent slew as the dory fetched up alongside rolled Tarens face-up against the tender’s worn ribs. Gulls launched overhead, screaming from their chock-a-block perches on the lugger’s bowsprit. The dory thumped and sloshed in the waves, rocked sharply enough to take on water as the men surged erect and seized the trailed ends of their vessel’s slacked stays. Yelling, they swarmed up the craft’s lapstrake planking. Tarens braced for the fight as they boarded, helpless to see past a sky-caught impression of bare masts, jumbled spars, and a wracked snarl of unfastened lines. No shouts erupted. Not a clamour of steel broke the stifled silence. Blocks and sheaves, the boat’s dismantled rigging streamed in abandoned disarray from her stripped masts.

  But the lugger’s deck was not deserted. Silhouetted against that rat’s nest of ropes, a stilled, black-haired figure with tied wrists: haltered to starboard, the contested prisoner braced his elbows against the gouged railing.

  ‘Your best twine is intact,’ said the insolent creature, hunted for acts of dire sorcery. Against outraged ownership frostily pitched to seize upon murderous vengeance, he qualified, ‘The standing rigging’s down, but not severed. If a few blocks went overboard, you will have spares. Once you’ve calmed down enough to inspect, you’ll find nothing worse than the splices holding the stays have unravelled.’

  With both fists cocked like battering rams, the captain swore back from the dory. ‘Here’s blight on your grave in the deep, and torment to chase you in the after-life! I see no reason my crew shouldn’t gut you.’

  ‘Your craft is hard aground,’ the pert stranger agreed. A curtailed gesture displayed his lashed wrists, made fast to the pin-rail. The knots were a mariner’s, expertly laid, while the breeze off his person belted the nose with the shocking stink of dead fish. Under full sunlight, the fellow sparkled, dusted all over with cod scales. ‘I was dunked in the catch,’ he apologized, glib. None the worse for the noisome abuse, he added, ‘Had your dastardly jackers allowed me the helm, your seaworthy dear would be floating.’

  ‘’Twon’t spare you, wretch!’ While the fishermen mobbed the open deck, the near-vacated tender bobbed like a cork as the captain launched from the stern and snagged the first line within his reach. ‘By chance are you claiming our fiend bane has failed? There’s a rash fancy for an excuse! I’ve lived long enough to hear better ones!’

  While his angry crew closed with punitive hands, the serene reply underwent a strained hitch. ‘Not precisely.’ A sharp break, as the mate’s punch clouted the speaker’s ribs. His protest resumed, a touch breathless. ‘The louts you actually ought to have beaten are strapped at your mercy already. Look for them. They’re laid out like stringers up on the foredeck.’

  ‘He’s truthful,’ a red-faced crewman yelled back. ‘I’ve seen. All eight, safely hog-tied and gagged. How in the black name of Shadow could a blighter hitched to the railing do that?’

  ‘Sorcery, surely,’ the bound heckler suggested, his expression wide-lashed as an owl’s through tangled hair flicked by the wind. His added complaint to the rightful captain smouldered with fettlesome irony. ‘By all means, welcome back aboard your command. I presume I’m still worth the bounty offered by the high temple? Or do you plan to hatch crabs in that boat, while your other bagged felon turns blue at your feet and slowly dies of exposure?’

  The stupefied quiet split into an uproar that echoed off the grey bluffs of the Lanshire shore-line. Gulls wheeled. Wading birds in the marshes took squawking flight to the taunted captain’s shrilled orders. While his pinched lugger groaned to the thrash of the tide, shoved harder into the mud, two subordinates jumped like singed stoats and hauled the stupefied landlubber out of the dory. ‘Get that brute warm and dry and be quick about it! Dead, he’ll pay less, since the public won’t have the spectacle of a live burning.’

  The stout captain dispatched the rest of his own to mend the disastrous mess of kinked rope and spilled tackle draped over his free-board. In the scramble to rove in the requisite stays and brace up the tilt in the lugger’s masts, then to secure her canted spars from sliding overboard, the precious prisoners were herded into the maw of the aft lazarette.

  ‘That sorcerer claimed he escaped from the hold,’ a deck-hand observed, eyeballs rolled to the whites. His plaintive fear saw a fisherman’s luck charm woven of hemp and hen feathers tossed into the locker after the pair, followed fast by a burlap bag filled with rock salt, pinched from the stores used to pickle the catch. The sack thumped into Tarens, to a man’s muttered prayer, earnest in the belief that such simples and faith in the Light might deflect ugly practice.

  Then the hatch banged shut. The hasp clanged, and the snap of a lock punctuated another fool’s soft-hearted protest.

  ‘Shouldn’t we leave water and something to eat, if not a warm blanket? We’ll be at least a day making repairs before we’re back underway.’

  ‘Going nowhere at all, we don’t kedge off this sand-bar!’ the captain rebuked in disgust. Sec
urely in charge of his vessel at last, he subsided to grumbling bluster. ‘Won’t risk my neck or my soul, feeding sorcerers. As for those blighted jackers? They’ll keep in the hold. They can gnaw the raw fish if they’re hungry.’

  Cramped in squalor atop mildewed bights of spare rope, Tarens heaved off the crushing weight of the salt sack. Sheltered from the wind, his chills eased enough that his teeth slowed their incessant chattering. Bound hand and foot, he squirmed and resettled, a hissed breath for each bruise rammed against the spare tackle, and another as his battered frame gouged the stiff rolls of hide, stowed for use against chafing. Above decks, the crew settled to their thankless work. The bump of their boots came and went through one perverse man’s cheery whistle, and a back-drop of disgruntled carping.

  Tarens resigned himself to discomfort. Stuck with his wrists knotted behind his back, he peered through the darkness at his companion.

  Arithon sat tucked like a ruffled cat, his roped limbs poised on his drawn-up knees, since his forearms stayed strapped in front. A haze of what seemed filtered light faintly picked out his angular face, blurred at cheek and jaw-line with swelling contusions. The lazarette’s vent holes, cut through to the hold, wafted the fragrance of cod from the black depths of the bilges. The overhead deck seams were oakum caulked, and the hatch cover sealed to be watertight. Which meant the locker should have doused sight in pitch-darkness and shown Tarens nothing at all.

  Clammy with nerves, the crofter wondered whether he discerned through mage-sight until a more careful inspection traced the source of the eerie glow to Arithon’s left hand. Thin bands of some uncanny working wrapped his smallest finger to the first knuckle. The rings glimmered with subtle tints that ranged from lightest blue through dark indigo, to the deepest ephemeral violet.

  The man had never worn arcane jewellery before. Uneasy, Tarens noted the fixated green eyes, immersed in a survey that tallied the embarrassing toll of his weaknesses.