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

by Janny Wurts

  ‘You’ll kill any scum who gets in my way! I won’t have my conquest blunted for nitwits, or piss away the chance to stage our assault past the Darkshiel River before Havish can bolster its routed defense.’

  At least one alert officer at the dock-front grasped what his pension was worth: he spotted The Hatchet’s streamered blazon as the armoured chariot cleaved into the moil. His orders shellacked the reserve troop in time to muscle the unruly populace from the path of the team’s studded shoes and the razor-edged slice of spun wheels.

  By then, the squad on the wharf had prodded their charges halfway to the landing. Both captives stumbled, their muffled eyes blind. The husky one thrashed in sullen resistance. His smaller henchman dragged heels and swayed, while two hassled dedicates wrestled him upright, forced to bear him on as his legs buckled.

  ‘Bootless cravens!’ The Hatchet’s sneer grew pronounced as his charioteer fought the horses and rig to a standstill beside the slap of green chop at the breakwater.

  Subject to their commander’s rapacious regard, the tried dedicates scrambled and miserably failed to redress their untidy files. They could scarcely remedy the misfortune, that prisoners dragged towards their last gasp at the pyre rejected co-operation.

  Scorched past tolerance, The Hatchet ordered both spearmen to prod the sorry business along. ‘I want those clowns roped inside this chariot without any further delay.’

  While the reinsman struggled to hold the aggressive team with no groom’s assistance from the ground, the sensible captain assigned to the cordon ventured an impertinent protest.

  ‘Lordship, is that wise? Those men are said to bid fiends through dark practice. Surely given the risk, you might send for another transport.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ snapped The Hatchet. ‘This vehicle has seals against fiend bane, aplenty. Or is your faith misplaced? Does the ordained craftwork of a temple-blessed ward not frame an adequate protection?’

  The cornered subordinate cleared his throat, red-faced under the implied blasphemy.

  Since The Hatchet viewed sacrilege with contempt, his rankled frown softened to irony. ‘Your worry is groundless.’ His scorn denounced the pathetic display as the smaller fellow in chains was pried away from his crimped grip on a dockline. ‘If that mawkish pair possessed uncanny powers, do you think they’d be cringing in fear for their lives? Were they Shadow’s sorcerers, and not sniveling wrecks, they’d have done for their keepers and dismembered the ship that delivered them!’

  The jackass parade reached the end of the dock, at which point the two spearmen became obliged to use weapons to curb the crowd’s rabid surge against the bowed line of the cordon. Peeled raw by The Hatchet’s signal displeasure, and against the roaring back-drop of noise, the dedicate escort on foot manhandled the summarily damned up to the armoured chariot. They heaved the slighter man over the rail first. Flailing in chains, he landed sprawled atop the discarded armour. The stained plate upset, which fetched him, head first in his sack, against the stumpy shin of the Light’s supreme commander. Agile, imploring, his cuffed hands latched their limpet’s grip onto the first bandy ankle in reach. The Hatchet vented his temper on his reinsman.

  ‘Roll us out!’ he cracked, repelled by a plea that the gag reduced to whined gibberish.

  The chariot lurched forward, rushed into motion as the bigger miscreant was dumped in a heap at the commander’s feet. But that brute roared and rose. Chains gripped in skinned fists, he rammed the hapless charioteer against the crescent front of the vehicle.

  The Hatchet snatched for his dirk, wrist hampered by the little wretch, who grabbed hold and attempted to claw himself upright. A brief, savage struggle failed to dislodge the burr cling of the craven’s panic. Worse, a dull crack and an agonized scream meant his reinsman’s crushed arm had just broken. By dint of a kick and a left-handed draw, the Light’s commander unsheathed his sword. Again, he was twisted off balance: the cowardly knave still weighted his knee. Caught up in close quarters that foiled his swung blade, he raised his leg for a kick fit to bash the clinched felon to his final judgement.

  His boot never connected. Beneath his shifted foot, the small fellow launched upwards. One shoulder rammed under The Hatchet’s squat crotch. Lifted sharply, unbalanced by the top-heavy drag of his chased breastplate and helm, he toppled head over heels. Crest plumes whooshed through the air. Flipped over the chariot’s rail, The Hatchet crashed head first onto the cobbles under the stamping hind hooves of his driverless horses. Dedicates from the escort snatched the hem of his surcoat and dragged him clear before he got pulped by the clattering team.

  ‘Catch the bridles!’ he pealed, curled over his groin in shuddering agony.

  But the torqued roll of the sharpened wheels drove back the spearman who leaped to respond. Then the horses reared. Another man’s hand dragged them hard by their bits: somehow the smaller prisoner had yanked off the sack and snagged their dropped reins.

  The Hatchet swore murder, overwhelmed by the close-up view as the matched team of four in their gleaming war harness changed their coat, stainless white rendered black as poured ink. Before his wide eyes, from proud heads to streamed tails, all four living horses transformed into an ebony apparition.

  Then the ejected body of his charioteer crash-landed, screaming, on top of him. He lost his wind for an instant, crushed under the mangle as the injured man passed out and hampered him. Though his crack cordon charged to recoup the disaster, hooves shod for war and the bladed hubs drove their belated sally to shambles.

  The Hatchet scrabbled out from under the scrimmage and shrieked to his poleaxed archers. ‘Fire! Take that rogue down!’ More choice words pinked his flustered lance captain. ‘Get your head out of your arse and launch your light horse in pursuit!’

  He reached to his feet finally, served the nightmare view as his own chariot was pivoted in place by the coal-blackened team. The sky-lit toss of their heads became hauled around with a skill that pitched them down off their hind legs. Sparks shot off the grind of edged wheels as the chariot skidded through an expert turn and rumbled uphill at a gallop. Then Darkness itself opened a fathomless maw and doused sight under nightfall as dense as the abyss.

  The Hatchet ground his teeth. Arrogant reputation in shreds, he sank to his knees and recanted his unbelief. By heaven’s Light, he vowed to repay the hour and serve Shadow’s minions their overdue reckoning.

  After Tarens was thrown flat in the racketing vehicle, his berserk surge to escape rammed against a back-handed shove. He crashed onto his shoulder, entangled in chains, and howled through the jammed cloth of the gag. The sack blinded his sight. None of which impaired Arithon s’Ffalenn, who shouted, frantic, ‘Stay down!’

  An inbound shaft creased the air overhead. The war-arrow thunked into the chariot’s side where the crofter lately had clung. Sobered by that near-fatal miss, Tarens lowered his head. As the unstable vehicle careered in mad flight, he clawed at the sack with ineffective, cuffed wrists until his struggle attracted the tweak of an uncanny working. Tarens shivered, tickled as a grue of cold brushed his neck. Iyats, he realized in dismay, surely dispatched at Arithon’s bidding. With an eerie stir, the draw-strings untied themselves. Underneath the loosened cloth, the knotted gag slithered undone as well. Then the ranging whistle Tarens recalled drilled through steel and sprang the pins on his locked shackles. The chains dropped away with a clank that left bruises, sweetly welcome as music.

  Tarens spat out the soggy rag and shucked off the sack, which kited away, still possessed. Through the dreadful, black maelstrom abruptly unveiled, he snarled, ‘About time, damn you!’

  Arithon withheld answer. Crouched low as he leaned through a hair-raising curve, he teased the reins. The racing team swerved. The chariot whiplashed and nearly hurled his agile stance off balance. Yet method followed his ferocious recklessness. The right wheel rim clipped a stacked pile of barrels in passing.

  The pyramid toppled and cascaded downhill with a throaty boom and a force fit to macerate
. Warned in the dark by the on-coming thunder, the dedicates pelting in armed pursuit hopped desperately fast in avoidance. They flattened bystanders caught in crazed flight, stuck their unsheathed weapons into buildings, or each other, or else became rammed in midstride and crushed flat. Where the casks struck at speed, their split staves disgorged, gurgling, a rank gush of fish-oil over the cobbles. The stalwart man ordered to light the street lanterns slid on the greased footing and fell. The lit spill clutched in his hand shed a flurry of sparks, which winnowed and caught. A blue gout of flame whooshed downhill and scattered the belaboured lancers tasked to restore civil order. Others afoot hopped aside with scorched ankles. Obliging none, the runaway spill sluiced into the gutter and dashed into the harbour as a lighted slick.

  Ships and tarred bollards fell prey to the flame, torched off like so much primed tinder.

  Through the crescendo of screams from behind as the singed cordon stampeded to safety, Arithon voiced curt instructions. ‘Snag the fish-net hung off that drying-rack, could you?’

  Tarens grabbed the rail, almost thrown off his feet while the chariot rocked through another violent swerve. More arrows clattered and hissed overhead. The archers still fired despite blinded aim. Amid the ink darkness that smothered the harbourfront, the constant wasp hum of their wild shots sliced through the plumed smoke, more than likely to strike confused innocents. Tarens leaned outward, hooked the hung net, and braced hard as the stout twine snapped taut. The recoil nearly yanked him from the rig before the nailed mooring tore free. A shaft snicked against the vehicle’s armour and rebounded, skittering. Tarens ducked and held fast as another gouged up splinters inches from his white-knuckled grip.

  His trailed net snaked and flounced in the chariot’s wake to a shattered glass spray of smashed floats. The few lancers who breasted the barrage of live fire flailed into the weave, mounts noosed by the fetlocks in flat-out pursuit. Their horses pitched off balance, then wrenched, belly down, mangled as the net frayed and tore loose.

  ‘Rot in Sithaer!’ Tarens shouted, flushed to crazed elation.

  More bow fire shrieked overhead, close enough to pose an endangerment. The archers now shot in organized volleys, aim guided with better accuracy by the crack of shod hooves on the cobbles. Arithon loosed fiends to counter the threat. Deep indigo, and purple, and pale turquoise, the energy sprites shredded off his raised finger and tightened into a whirlwind that flung the launched shafts on mad tangents. War points smacked into Torwent’s brick dormers and clattered across the slate roofs. Others bashed through the town’s street-front windows to splashes of fragmented glass.

  ‘Hah!’ Tarens grinned, rocked to manic hysteria. ‘That should kink a few priestly necks and ruffle some self-righteous petticoats!’ Inspired by rage, he bent and sorted through The Hatchet’s discarded armour. The sword he retrieved was a superb weapon, honed to a murderous edge. A sweet gift of convenience, with the dais and scaffold ringed by desperate guardsmen obstructing their passage ahead. ‘Just steer a straight course!’

  ‘You’re primed for a blood-bath?’ jabbed Arithon, both hands busy. The fractious team steadied and kept running abreast.

  ‘Just get me in reach of that dog-faced examiner,’ Tarens insisted, sword at the ready. ‘He should be cut down. If you don’t agree, how long before his diviners come ravening after us? No matter how carefully you hide our tracks, whatever you’re doing to direct those iyats stamps the flux with a red flag of warning.’

  ‘Whose expertise have you borrowed from, now?’ Arithon snapped in whetted irony. ‘Mine? Or is this a death’s gift from Jieret, served up to hound me in the present?’

  But underneath that glass-edged attack, disclosed by the fresh instincts bequeathed to him, Tarens heard only sorrow shielded behind vicious defense. The deep anguish, that survival commanded a punishing cost: the wheel spinning beside his gripped fist flicked a fine spray of blood from the rim.

  Not every terrorized bystander had been quick, or able enough to jump clear of harm’s way.

  ‘No one’s died, yet,’ Tarens said, that bleak truth affirmed by a hunter’s instinct. No residual streamers of spirit light lingered, ripped adrift by the shock of violent dissolution.

  ‘No human casualties,’ snarled Arithon. ‘Just a few horses, broken for the knife. Never mind that the butcher’s bill here will work the bone-setters like teeming lice. Every quack who sells tinctures will be up through the night, plying a gut thread and needle.’ He tweaked the reins. The chariot veered. Nearly unseen in the flame-wracked dark, a young mother who carried a shrieking child just missed being trampled by the maddened horses. Arithon’s nipped glance sidewards seared Tarens’s blanched face. ‘You’ve called on my oath! Don’t you dare to pretend you’re not squeamish!’

  But the gut-punch rejoinder delivered no sting, disarmed by sore understanding. Tarens perceived today’s crux in the bitter light of Jieret’s experience: for how long could a masterbard’s sensitivity stave off despair against odds that demanded the ruthlessness of a killer?

  ‘Never mind my straits!’ Tarens crouched to absorb the bucked jolts as the chariot charged the armed cordon at speed. He groped, found the commander’s leather-lined helmet, and urged the protection on Arithon. ‘Look after yourself!’

  Arithon spurned the offering. ‘In fact, I should skulk in my enemy’s skin?’

  ‘No,’ Tarens rebuked. ‘But if you fail here, you won’t die alone. How many more helpless lives must be thrown into jeopardy after you?’

  ‘You tell me, friend!’ Arithon soothed the runaway team against the crazed shriek of wind, sucked into a vortex as he tightened down his cover of darkness. ‘I’m stymied, since you claim to know the past measure of my mistakes better than I do.’

  Faced by a dead liegeman’s dauntless commitment, Tarens rammed The Hatchet’s helmet headlong against Arithon’s complacency. ‘Put this on, fool! You’re too tempting a target!’

  Through the head-splitting thunder of hooves and steel-clad wheels, Arithon spoke with the horror of foresight, ‘The Light’s priests won’t relent. How many hapless talents will burn for their thwarted fury today?’

  Tarens struck back with unfair leverage. ‘Never before have you suffered your wounded to fall on the field in vain sacrifice!’

  ‘That grants me licence, in Jieret’s name?’ Arithon’s combative venom sliced through panicked cries as the four-in-hand team slammed across the first line of steadfast dedicates.

  Tarens was obliged to bloody the sword: a fanatical guardsman caught hold of the rail and vaulted to clamber aboard. The hero wore armour. A thrust in the neck bashed him into the wheel. The chariot bounced, and surged forward. The lancer who thrust to skewer a harness horse missed when Arithon’s quicker reflex wheeled the team. A string of white bunting snagged on their bridles. Torn loose, the streamered silk crepe lashed them onwards in lathered stampede. Somewhere through the dark, a priest screamed for the Light. His shrill invocation received an ill-starred intercession: Arithon’s inspired mayhem with the fiends overset the fire-pan that held the socketed torch.

  The stacked pyre went up with a whoosh of red flame. Gusts scattered the explosive burst of winnowed cinders, which also ignited the white-and-gold canopy over the dais. Priests pelted wailing, with robes set aflame, trampled in panicked flight by their singed executioner.

  ‘Them or me,’ snapped Arithon into the breach as he barreled the chariot recklessly past the wreckage. His wrestled hold on the bits snaked the skittish team around the inferno that consumed the scaffold. Breathless, he added, ‘Who sings the paean for a flagrant suicide?’ But amid the rained sparks, the gale wind and the dark, the defiant gesture that clapped on The Hatchet’s helm held a flourish that wept for necessity.

  Tarens stifled his poisoned regret for the ruin of a once-innocent trust. The changed dynamic that now altered a friendship already ran beyond salvage. He could not denounce the day’s ruthless awareness or erase the acuity that bequeathed him the whip-hand to drive Arith
on from the dangerous shoals of forgetfulness. Healing the emotional wounds became moot against stakes that brooked no sane compromise. Too clearly, the hell-bent course of their escape forged a fate beyond mere survival.

  Arithon said with keen desolation, ‘Not only Jieret threatened to haunt me, if I should ever fall short.’ He coughed, perhaps hoarse from the fumes billowed off his fiend-kindled holocaust. The contorted blaze stitched across Torwent’s water-front dropped behind. The chariot climbed with the roadway, that switched back repeatedly on itself as the rise of the headland steepened above the cove harbour. Past the outlying houses, shuttered and locked against fear, he minded naught else but his dexterous play on the reins. For an interval, only the pound of shod hooves and the slap of war harness spoke through the frigid blanket of darkness. Arithon steered briskly through the emptied streets. He kept his own counsel, while the team clattered up the narrow side lanes, then breasted the crest of the shoreside bluff.

  The pace had to be slackened once the land leveled off, and the cobbled road ended. Ahead stretched the flat, wind-raked heath that opened the way towards Lanshire’s interior. Arithon maintained his pitch pall of shadow but curbed the blown horses before they foundered. His unimpaired gentleness eased them back to a trot, then soothed their skittery terror and coaxed them down to a nervous walk. Wedged heads shook to a jingle of bit rings. Blowing nostrils flared red and snorted. The right-wheel horse sidled, sharply restrained, while the dense veil of shadow not yet released gripped the air like cold iron and sprouted whiskers of frost off the dimpled mud left by the thaw.

  Tarens found himself holding his breath.

  With sound reason: Arithon’s remark broke the desolate quiet with an unvarnished warning. ‘I should rather humiliate a pack of false priests than confront the bravest of my stubborn shades, turned forsworn.’

  He tied off the reins. Still crowned by The Hatchet’s plundered helm, he stepped out of the chariot. His careful hands checked the exhausted team, looking for wounds or stress injuries. The inspection stroked down each sweat-streaked leg, then picked up hooves and tested the shoes for loose clenches. Shown no sign of bruised soles or strained tendons, Arithon pushed erect. Worn-out or ravaged, he stayed expressionless as he took pause, one fist locked in restraint on the lead horse’s bridle.