Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon (The Wars of Light and Shadow, Book 10)

by Janny Wurts

  Candlelight gleamed on white silk and chased the glitter of bullion embroidery. Incense sweetened the miasma of sickness, and costly rose-oil anointed the wooden stool, currently occupied by an elderly servant who strove to lend comfort where none could be found.

  “Lysaer?” The attendant gripped his charge’s contorted shoulders. “Liege! You are safe. The nightmare’s not real! This is Dace, a friend at your side, even in this wretched place!”

  The cracked burr as Lysaer’s outcry lost wind brought no surcease. At next breath, his eerie howls continued, charged by the sudden, actinic flicker that fore-ran an eruption of elemental light. The vicious drive of Desh-thiere’s curse would outmatch all steadfast kindness and reason. Dace grasped the dread stakes. At risk of his life, he stayed at his post. “There’s no threat here! No Shadow, I promise. Be still, I am with you. The restraints are only to keep you from tearing at your damaged eye.”

  Steps approached the shut door. One of the sentries bellowed an anxious inquiry from without.

  The loyal servant never glanced sidewards. “My liege! This distress is not yours but arises from Desh-thiere’s malice. Fight back, I beg you. Hear my voice and reclaim your compromised will from possession.”

  The dedicate exhorted the avatar’s valet, “Shut him up, damn you! By Darkness, keep on, and he’ll bring the Light’s High Examiner for another bout of interrogation.”

  The presssured servant entreated, “Hush! Lysaer, please.” While desperation wadded the pillow-case to muffle the noise, Dace pleaded onwards to stem the insanity raving beneath him. “Don’t grant the True Sect their due cause to unleash The Hatchet’s war host for slaughter!”

  Whether the threat of armed conflict struck home, Lysaer’s half-smothered shrieking changed pitch, cranked into shrill terror.

  The latch tripped, and the dedicate sentry poked his crested helm through the cracked panel. “My watch officer’s bolted to fetch the priests. Duty won’t let me shield you. Once they arrive, I’m outranked.”

  Dace snapped without turning. “A healer’s required, not prayer! More, if that examiner butts in, we’ll all be destroyed!”

  When the doubtful man hesitated, Dace exploded. “Somewhere, the Spinner of Darkness is active! My liege can’t say where! Grace above, he’s beyond incoherent! If anyone pushes him in this state, the mistake will provoke a disaster!”

  Still, the guardsman demurred.

  Dace released his fraught grip. His liege’s chilling, feral wail drove him from the bedside to fly into the face of the sentry’s inaction. “Stay out! Are you daft? Your avatar’s frenzied beyond sense already. Crowd him, and the floor where we stand will run molten. Ruin will be your last sight of glory before divine Light burns us both to a cinder!”

  Flummoxed as the boulder battered by a moth, the armoured dedicate recoiled. Dace seized the moment and banged the gapped panel shut.

  Wafted air snuffed the candle. Darkness clapped down, while Lysaer’s outcry pealed into raw fury. Dace spun back, spurred by fear, groping blind for the flint and striker. He snapped off a spark and rekindled the smoking wick before Lysaer lashed out, ruled utterly by curse-born hatred.

  “My liege, settle back, here is light. We are safe!” Still speaking, Dace tore off his livery waistcoat. He snatched up the candle, shielded the flame with his palm, and hastened back to the doorway. Under peril of Lysaer’s instability, he jammed the crumpled cloth into the latch with no second to spare.

  Heavy footfalls approached. Erdane’s High Priest barged through the outside guard’s protest, unswerved. “Evil itself has infected our avatar. I will have the examiner here to put him to the question until we disclose where the Spinner of Darkness dens up. The Hatchet’s orders will go out by pigeon and march the faithful to rout Shadow’s scourge from Athera!”

  The latch twitched. Dace torched his placed rag with a panicked shout. “Stay back! Blessed Light, be mindful of Lord Lysaer’s wrath! Or his divine Light will see everyone burn!”

  The set blaze caught. A daunting burst of smoke and cinders shot through the keyhole, to a yelp from outside. The priest recoiled, his forced entry forestalled as he sucked on his scorched finger-tips …

  In the far-off heights above Ettin, a heart-beat before Lysaer s’Ilessid succumbed to ungoverned violence, the s’Ffalenn half brother dispelled his conjured wisp of darkness. Relief came in time: the Mistwraith’s cursed insanity burned no one alive in the distanced recoil at Erdane.

  But the price of remission cost Arithon the tenuous stay that thwarted the shamans’ spy. The strayed vulture soon would veer back into range, enslaved again by the spelled jewel’s directive. The Prince of Rathain languished on his knees, senses still spun by rogue far-sight. Cold wind and bleak stone failed to ground his awareness and stem the cascade of raw prescience.

  Threshed in the slipstream, Arithon beheld blood and horror: as the raving of the True Sect’s avatar precipitated a blood-bath under the Sunwheel standard. Galleys loaded for war scudded across Instrell Bay’s winter spindrift. White against dirtied snow, gilded under the pale sun at solstice, dedicate companies debarked at strength in Rathain’s coastal wilds. Trees fell to the axe, erected as palings to fortify their encampments. Ox trains and sledges toiled from Narms supply until spring thawed the roads from Etarra. More than an aggressive invasion, Halwythwood’s clans faced extermination in their stand to defend the sanctity of the mysteries.

  No Fellowship Sorcerer answered the crisis. While temple bounties whipped the head-hunters’ leagues to frenzied slaughter, the current of augury showed Asandir crossing the bogs of Angelfen. A more urgent priority sent him to Northgate on the summer night a True Sect ambush targeted Rathain’s war band. With Halwythwood’s defences laid open, the reiving attackers poured into the heart-wood settlement.

  Massacre followed, horrific as the historic affray at Tal Quorin, a relentless onslaught that saw the hacked corpses of families sprawled in the smouldering ash of the chieftains’ council hall.

  Arrived in the grim aftermath, Tarens tempered the High Earl’s young successor with Jieret’s hardened experience. “Esfand, bear up! You suffer what no stripling’s inexperience should endure, just as other caithdeinen have before you! Duty remains. The outlying sentries may survive still, and Laithen’s shade is owed redress for Siantra, who sacrificed everything dear to send warning.”

  A young woman of such dauntless strength, the imprint of her vision resounded across time with crystalline clarity. Arithon’s threshed faculties received her appeal: not as the futile cry of a shade, but as a warning portent stamped through the flux by a spirit yet living …

  Crouched on the peaks above Ettinmere, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn beheld the young sender: a grave, dark-haired girl with Sidir’s flint eyes, awake to his presence through the driving spark of her uncanny talent. On this day, Siantra s’Idir had not met her death. More, her clarion call had never been aimed to alert the clans’ slaughtered war band.

  Her summons instead begged for an intercession from the Prince of Rathain: “Help us! You are needed! Support your people, that this dreadful hour never sees daylight.”

  Her plea to his crown obligation brooked no refusal against a campaign to be written in the wholesale murder of innocents. A last image seared through in graphic detail: of a matron with fair hair tangled with filth, speared while defending her infant, both corpses left flayed to the skull by the bountymen’s knives.

  Vision shattered. Released to his natural senses with a wrench fit to render his gorge, Arithon swore. He anchored his displaced focus, shattered under the distraught awareness: the shackles imposed by Ettinmere’s council could not be abided. Vivet’s child was not the sole victim set at risk, if Halwythwood succumbed to a broad-scale campaign of eradication in his absence.

  A frigid, changed wind sheered off the glacier. Clouds hazed the lowering sun, promise of an icy drizzle. Worse than the bad weather, the shamans’ infernal bird had returned to circle overhead.

  Aritho
n weighed his strategic choices. Shield himself, and he could mask a limited working of Shadow on his own person without upsetting Lysaer’s cursed instincts. But even that basic use of trained mastery would alert Ettinmere’s shamans. Which left only brazen intimidation to thwart their insidious prying.

  Arithon shoved to his feet and glanced up. Another carrion bird joined the first. Annoyed by their surveillance, he wished merry hell on their two-legged handlers. “Let your overlords cross my free will at their peril.” Done musing, he cut a dead sapling for a staff. Then, black head tousled by the risen gusts, the Masterbard of Athera engaged his artful talent and sang.

  Early Winter 5923

  Choice

  The temple novices who set the chamber to rights replaced the scorched bed-linen and wracked pillows without question, by now resigned to their avatar’s rampaging fits. Dace tucked his blistered hand out of sight until the doors closed behind them. In private, he finished the intimate tasks that saw his maimed liege resettled and fed.

  By servant’s protocol, the valet ate his own supper afterward. The rhythm of restored routine brought a kitchen drudge to remove the meal trays, Lysaer’s with its gilt spoon and bullion plate on lace doilies smeared with spilled gravy.

  Dace snatched the interval to change the clothes singed and despoiled by spattered broth. The cross-grained priest appointed as chamber steward grumbled over the excessive laundry, yet his fussy management begrudged nothing else in support of the avatar’s upkeep. The clean livery provided to Lysaer’s valet was tailored from quality silk. The True Sect’s high chamberlain also had offered the expertise of a healer, along with a day-and-night roster of staff for relief. Dace Marley rejected the additional help. Though his liege’s helpless condition confined him, he carried the burden despite the monotony.

  Little outside light brightened Lysaer’s curtained cell as the seasonal dance of autumn gave way to winter. Sealed within hallowed isolation, behind the bulwarks of Erdane’s High Temple, the days passed to the whispered drone of the throngs come to worship. The acolytes’ chants smeared sibilant echoes through the labyrinthine stone corridors, a tidal surge from dawn to dusk’s ebb, pricked by the clangour of cymbals and the sonorous toll of the bells. Near at hand, muffled by the strapped door, the tramp of hobnailed boots marked the watch change. Incense wafted in from the anteroom trailed the priests who observed their eightfold devotions at the niche altar, outside.

  Dace minded the room’s single candle throughout. He trimmed the wick before the flame sputtered and drowned in pooled wax. Lysaer s’Ilessid slept badly in darkness. Even while blessed with prime health and clear faculties, he had preferred light in his chamber past sunset. The habit became a necessity in the painful aftermath of his injury, when he was not lucid enough to escape the quagmires of nightmare. The erratic reflex as brain tissue mended scrambled his sensory stimulus into hallucinations.

  The candleflame sometimes kept terror at bay, until the horrific dreams took hold in the fallen stillness past nightfall. Dace watched Lysaer’s supine form without rest, perched on a footstool at the bedside.

  When the first restive flicker twitched the invalid’s eyelids, he applied a compress infused with lavender oil and chamomile. The mild soporifics eased very little. Narcotics to induce sleep were too strong. The temple healer’s experience claimed that a drugged stupor aggravated a comatose head injury.

  Dace persisted, no matter how inadequate his available remedies. While spoken words were not understood, he murmured as though to ease a whipped animal, while Lysaer’s fitful distress progressed to sped pulse and shuddering breaths. The eleventh hour sometimes brought respite. Lysaer’s thrashing subsided beneath silken sheets. His fevered skin chilled to moist marble. Dace seized the interval to freshen the bandages, braced for the dreadful moment the fragile calm tore away. No sand-glass was needed. Lysaer’s tormented screams resurged when the lane tide crested at midnight.

  The ghastly descent always wrenched the heart. Dace used soft ties to restrain the onset of convulsions, then wept for pity, devoted beyond peace. Naught else would spare his liege from taking harm under the relentless seizures.

  No measure of mercy eased the harrowing trial through the black hours before dawn. When the marriage of spirit and flesh became tenuous, and the veil of the mysteries thinned, Lysaer’s deranged ferocity forced Dace to take refuge under the bed. Cowering, he had to beat out errant flames, as flares of incipient light ran amok and levin bolts seared across the stone floor, and every taut second became a hard-won triumph of victory.

  Dace spoke gently, no matter that words never curbed the violent outbursts. Aware provocation would worsen the coming trauma, he stroked the tangles from sodden blond hair and waited, alert for the first sign of danger.

  Yet no such explosive eruption ensued. Only a whispered finger of draught ruffled his skin into gooseflesh. Then a nosegay of late-season wildflowers kited out of thin air and fluttered into his lap.

  “I thought you might pine for the glory of autumn,” a gusty voice remarked with amusement, then added, “My dear, no need for alarm! Go ahead, blaspheme the Light’s doctrine and laugh. The pious donkeys posted at your door will stay deaf. They haven’t two thoughts in their bone heads, besides, fed on the spout of the True Sect Canon.”

  “Kharadmon!” exclaimed Dace, jangled to pleased astonishment.

  “At your service, of course.” The Sorcerer’s breathy snort conveyed irony. “Luhaine is thankfully bound to a dragon, which spares you from his moping gloom and boorish advice.”

  “I’d take a dull visitor as a relief,” Dace responded, despite his apprehension flushed pink by the fragrance whisked in with the posy.

  “You’ve enchanted Sethvir with your dazzling wit.” Kharadmon’s breezy sarcasm turned thoughtful. “Delightful to find your spirit still shines in this pit. You know you’ve confounded these pompous, frocked sheep? The Sunwheel priesthood’s afraid to a man to face your mad avatar’s presence.”

  “Perhaps they’re sensibly anxious, today. But who’s fooled?” A flim-flam ploy with a rag and a candle would scarcely withstand the righteous might of their doctrine. “How long before we’re all martyred in flames for salvation? What I’ve noticed,” Dace jabbed back, unappeased, “is that you Sorcerers don’t have the resource to spare for dalliance and flattery.”

  Kharadmon unfurled an image, his emerald velvet accented with orange-silk ribbon and dapper lace. “You should have suitors lined up for a league.” He clasped her wrist with an ephemeral touch and bowed over her scalded palm. “Do grant an unworthy admirer permission?” His insubstantial, mimed kiss quelled the sting and knitted her weeping blisters. “Regrettably, yes, I do bring hard news. Unrest troubles the dragons past Northgate. An outbreak from there could threaten Athera beyond any determined mayhem the True Sect stirs up against the clan lineages.”

  “Fiends plague!” Dace exclaimed, jolted. “You’re serious?” Great-grandparents recalled when the northern sky had been lit incandescent by drakefire. The mighty retort of the Fellowship’s defence, and cold wardings, had staved off wrack and ruin beyond imagining. “Are you facing another outbreak of drake war?”

  “Not yet!” Kharadmon said in swift reassurance. “But not every dragon sided with the Eldest who ceded Athera to the Paravians. Quite a few opposed the Second Age treaty that stabilized this world’s existence. Some of the great wyrms beyond Northgate disagree still. Their rash young, matured since, agitate to upset the ancient Accord. Our Fellowship is not reft of drake allies, not yet. The present upheaval attends a succession, while Chaimistarizog weakens as Gatekeeper. He has twice been forced to fight youthful claimants. While some dragons yet remain on Athera to forestall an invasion by their own kind, those guardians lie in deep hibernation. To wake any one of them now would place fractious humanity in mortal danger. Seshkrozchiel’s bargain with Davien’s consciousness has seeded a witch’s brew of novel concepts. Elder dragons crave original experience. The exciting allure of a meddlin
g encounter could shake the established priorities.”

  Dace weighed Kharadmon’s words against the dilemma sprawled limp on the bed: the murderous peril of Desh-thiere’s curse gloved in burnished hair and a one-sided profile handsome enough to shred sense. He said, a bit hot, “That explains why Davien’s made himself scarce. But if Lysaer’s wont to torch us to ruin at any outbreak of Shadow, the grim bent of your news is no boon to my predicament.”

  “My dear, I’m not here to fuel your worries. Only to convey Asandir’s earnest warning: the Seven may not be available to salvage a crisis or rake you from the ashes a second time. While Lysaer’s immured here, his name will be played to wage bloody war for the True Sect cause.” The harrowing stare of the Sorcerer’s image stabbed through the pause. “An armed assault against Halwythwood’s clans must force the hand of Rathain’s crown prince. Past quarter, your pledge to temper your liege’s insanity presents a challenge of epic proportions.”

  “I’m not leaving!” Dace snapped. “Since Lysaer has no better voice to speak in his behalf, suggest something else to assist his case.”

  Kharadmon’s image snuffed out to his restive impatience. “Well, you had to ask! By Ath’s grace, did you know that? I thought for a bit you’d plant mulish feet and stay stiff-necked as the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s benighted woman.”

  Dace received that pearl of gossip, unmoved. “His Grace of Rathain is not cast from the compact. Presumably, he’s of sound mind and able to appeal to your Fellowship directly?”

  The discorporate Sorcerer chuckled, breezy as wind through dense pines. “Athera’s royal progenitors were not selected for compliant dependency. A quality Luhaine laments at length, in tiresome monologue. You realize we confront certain limits? Indeed. You cannot petition us Seven to avert the True Sect’s spree of slaughter in Halwythwood. Not from here, by the terms of town law, and nowhere under the chartered grant of Tysan’s crown sovereignty.”