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

by Janny Wurts

  Lirenda’s raised hand quelled the outburst. “Yes! But the order’s recovery takes priority while we pick up the pieces.” Her salvo of orders was brutal and brief. “At the threshold of war, time is urgent. You’ll return to the Highscarp sisterhouse forthwith. The husks of the condemned go with your company, tasked under my thralled directive. They will catalogue the library. You’ll surrender every book, every scroll, every journal and folio of correspondence, and also the imprinted contents encoded in crystal. Throughout, your mindless sisters will work under lock and key, sequestered until I’ve reviewed the compiled index in person and detailed the list for initiate access.”

  Against stunned speculation, Lirenda rammed through her next point. “You Seniors, meantime, will conduct an assay of our underling talent. Determine which sisters are fit for promotion and submit them for a prompt investiture. Any endowed with augmented seer’s talent will be transferred from charitable service immediately and reassigned to the lane watch.”

  The new Prime trampled over murmured consternation. “An onerous tour of duty, I realize! But by stark necessity, our order must rally! Enact my commands with unquestioned diligence.”

  Lirenda courted no illusions. She had to strengthen the sisterhood’s defences, and where overt power was lacking, fresh resource must seek the levers for extortionate pressure against outside threats.

  “I’ll receive the summary transmissions twice daily, with the following topics marked for imperative report. Any change in Lysaer’s status at Erdane; also all forecasts made by Dakar the Mad Prophet. I want instant word of the forsworn third-rank initiate, Elaira, whose sanctuary under Davien’s protection thwarts her sentence for treasonous liaisons. Last and not least, if Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn should return to the continent, I’ll be told where he sets foot ashore. No more holding him hostage as a captive resource. For Selidie’s death, and for the vicious blow dealt to our order, I declare his life forfeit. Do whatever’s required to corner him.”

  That ringing closure flickered probable shadows, formless as smoke reeled off a snuffed flame.

  Sethvir whumped his book shut in vexation. The ephemeral harbinger fore-ran yet another on-coming nexus, with humanity’s fate already treading the ghastly precipice of reprisal. The new Prime failed to grasp the harsh scope of the stakes, or the blood-bath a mis-step could unleash if reaction compelled a Fellowship response. For Lirenda’s blind directive to sift through the layered sediment of history thrust the proverbial poker into the white-hot coals of disaster.

  Chills broke Sethvir to a cold sweat: for sooner or later, the witless sisters appointed to scour the Koriani library would disclose the forgotten annals of an event far more wisely left to obscurity.

  Late Spring 5925

  Unveilings

  Granted a gentle recovery at sea, guarded under the Ilitharis shipwrights’ unrivalled protections, Arithon sails into the Salt Fens of West Shand, leaves Alithiel in concealment with his anchored sloop, and knowing the auric flare sown by his Paravian exposure fires the Fourth Lane like a beacon, drives onward through Falwood towards the south spur of the Storlains to bring reckoning to his enemies …

  Lysaer’s fit of curse-driven rage shreds the night quiet at Erdane’s High Temple, alerting a wakeful priest at his prayers, and by dawn, a dozen messenger pigeons take wing to the east bearing word of the Master of Shadow’s return to the continent …

  The first spark of the on-coming fire-storm sends diligent lane watchers to their Prime Matriarch with the prioritized news: “The gambit to reel in your quarry’s in play. His Grace of Rathain has deferred his pursuit of Elaira in favour of closing his feud with the Ettinmere shamans …”

  Late Spring 5925

  XI. Black Dawn

  While Sethvir paced in his tower eyrie, stymied by the absence of divergent portents, and Asandir in the field looked askance at the inexplicable calm fallen over Northgate’s restive dragons, the Hatchet’s reorganized campaign in Strakewood readied its assault against Rathain’s entrenched war band. The oppressive dark prior to dawn cloaked its assembled position, the signal to advance awaiting first light.

  Dakar sensed the imminent clash of engagement, overset by a horrific vision of bloodshed, splashed over virid, crushed moss. He kicked free of his blankets, swiped down the rooster tails of tangled hair at his nape, and struggled to dress. Shaky hands snarled his points and laces. He snagged toes as he clawed on his boots and swayed as he stood on the crumpled-down heels.

  “Dharkaron Avenger’s almighty bollocks!” He staggered outside, blundering at a sprint across the deep-woods clan outpost: too late to do aught to defray the attack but to spare what he might through scant warning.

  Unchecked bursts of augury trampled his sight. He ploughed, clattering, through a rack of stretched hides and reeled into a hung bucket. Doused blind, he smashed into a cross-bar notched for javelins, woke someone’s baby to wailing complaint, then folded across a target sack, left by children for archery practice.

  “Fiends alive!” Back upright, shedding straw and blunt arrows, he griped, “Why not draw The Hatchet’s charge here for the nuisance? We’d have dedicates toppled like ninepins.”

  The comment earned him an urchin’s shied rock, which struck with a game hunter’s accuracy. The sentry at the encampment’s perimeter used insults, but Dakar owned no scrap of attention to spare for his injured feelings.

  His distraught haste located Deshir’s council seers, sequestered in their secluded lodge beneath the inked canopy of ancient trees. The best and most resolute plied their talent, still, against odds seeking last-minute guidance.

  Yet their most persistent courage was ashes, all hope of a pre-emptive action too late. Dakar barged ahead to sound the alarm, shocked again by the roil of imminent slaughter. He blundered into a guy string. Jerked tent canvas billowed. Entangled and cursing, he measured his length, while someone within broke away from the circle and pushed through the flap to investigate.

  “Dakar?” Siantra’s spidery grip caught his elbow, the brush of her braid a ghost figment against his flushed cheek. “You’re unwell?”

  The Mad Prophet scarcely heard her suggestion to seek refuge ahead of the onslaught.

  “You should go, yourself,” he entreated, against rising nausea.

  “In due time.” Her bravura was feigned.

  Dakar’s fraught talent pierced her reserve, tracking the stifled anxiety bound to the talisman threads on her wrist. She had linked her awareness to the family signatures of Esfand, Khadrien, and Laithen s’Idir, and other Names alongside of those she held dearest.

  “You can’t stay for them,” Dakar entreated.

  Siantra shook her head, voiceless. True-Sighted since Athili, she had been forced to recognize the locked nexus that fixed a course of event. A dissociate trance could no longer outpace the raw ripple of on-coming trauma. Wise counsel, caught blinkered, must split the clan lineages, some to fly southward into the Mathorn peaks, while others risked summer’s pestilent fevers in refuge amid the fenlands to the north.

  “Start the exodus. Now!” Dakar pleaded, sick at heart for the wakeful babe, likely doomed.

  Siantra sighed, shaken. “Esfand issued the order. Some families refused. Khadrien’s with the rear-guard, as protection. But truthfully, nobody’s fooled.”

  Fear shrouded the encampment’s flux currents like cobweb. Bogged in the miasma, Dakar fought to breathe, wrung clammy with feverish sweat.

  Siantra took pity. “You can’t linger. You’ll go mad. I’ll find you an escort.”

  “No.” Dakar pushed her away, before the forewarning tingle of his errant vision disclosed the ghastly scope of the catastrophe. Sorrow would come, though by grace not beforetime under his inept handling.

  No flight could outstrip what descended on Strakewood. The Hatchet’s onslaught was an invasive swarm, by foot troops alone pitched thirty to one against Rathain’s furtive defenders. When sunrise blazed red through green leaves, the waiting hush shattered, bird-so
ng fled before strident horn-calls. The front ranks advanced to a cloudless day’s thunder of hoof-beats and drums, rent by the screams of the first dedicate casualties. Others followed in a breaking wave. Fallen shuddered like mangled dolls in the fern-brakes, impaled upon pit stakes dug into the ground. More were punched down by bunched arrows as they avoided other men dropped in writhing agony by spring traps, or horses, collapsed, threshing in disembowelled heaps. Where Arwi Unfrey’s trackers ran their mute hounds, the dogs perished before they flushed out clan prey, convulsed without sound, noosed and strangled in snares. Over the sodden, torn ground with its wrack of butchered flesh, the second companies closed in tight wedges. Numbers told, over time. Steel blessed for the Light of the Canon and glory swept the routed resistance ever deeper into the forest.

  Brightening day saw the third and fourth assaults surge in, relentless as tide, each enemy onslaught trampling over the savaged ground scoured by the last. The shock recoiled through the free-wilds flux and riffled the gyres spun off the forbidden glades, the ancient well-springs of the mysteries besieged as red chaos enveloped the heart-wood. Dakar flinched and wept in dread of the consequence. The percussive knell would rattle Althain Tower, if violation upset those sacrosanct sites. Failure was unforgiving, should Strakewood’s lane currents become harrowed to dissonance that tipped the spiral towards entropy. The Sorcerers had not intervened, which grave absence lent weight to the stark dearth of auguries. If Rathain’s clans lost sovereignty, defeat weighed the grant that permitted Mankind’s cohabitation. The harsh reckoning loomed, however valiant the stand taken by the day’s feal defenders.

  Dakar careened down a bank, lashed by spruce boughs, too heartsick to grapple the reason behind the Seven’s delinquent presence. He splashed through a stream, skidded on mossy rocks, and plunged waist deep into the swift eddies. He veered up the far bank, away from the falls that frothed in stepped descent towards the grottoes. Sodden hose blistered his heels as he clambered for handholds in scrambling ascent.

  Arrived at the ragged rim of the ravine, misted by the flung spray thrashed off the River Tal Quorin, the Mad Prophet collapsed to his knees. Distance from the battle-front brought little relief. He shuddered with dry heaves, while the mangling press of clashed steel and the sucker-punch shock of fatalities pummelled him helpless. He clung, curled in spasms, while dislodged pebbles bounced off the brink, rattled down the cliff-face, and flicked through the sun-motes that dappled the canyon below. Bird-song trilled overhead, a live counterpoint to the past resonance of a Masterbard’s paean of release: mage-sense still captured the residual echo, ghosted through the ravine. Dakar wept for the remnant of Arithon’s inspired healing, which had settled the slain in a historic conflict as bitter as this one.

  Mercy on today’s vivid fallen, who would receive no such requite peace in the aftermath. Their on-going, agonized passage brutalized the Mad Prophet near witless with ungoverned empathy.

  “Twice brainless and ten times the fool,” the miserable spellbinder groaned through his teeth.

  Wisdom had better sense. The carnage at Lithmarin had established his uselessness, mired under the misery of a battle-field. Hands clutched to his reeling head, Dakar rocked in sick wretchedness, addled as a skin full of jelly.

  The nearby, rhythmic stroke of a knife carving wood at length penetrated his shattered attention. Surprised to find he was not alone, Dakar glanced sideward and discovered Iyat-thos Tarens worked almost on top of him.

  “You didn’t appear to want company, either.” The laconic apology masked bitter rage: despite a renowned war captain’s experience, he was not bearing arms alongside Strakewood’s defenders. The exclusion hit hard, given that his harsh counsel to relocate the clans had not lifted the threat of extermination.

  “I’ve always shirked the glory of sacrifice.” Dakar sat, sweaty hands clasped over his knees. “My equally ostracized vantage suggests no moral need to explain yourself.”

  “No,” Tarens agreed. “But were Arithon here, he would seek to buy time for the children and mothers in flight.”

  “Not in that way!” Dakar objected, appalled by what Tarens crafted. Old injustice fuelled the vicious calm, busy shaving a pointed stake. The knife flashed, angled for the expert, last cut, which split the green wood with the wicked, hooked back-slash. The flexible barb would open on recoil, sunk deep into dedicate flesh.

  Dakar jammed his palms over his mouth before his roiled guts revolted. Too readily, the bumpkin drawl sugared over the fiendish precision of Jieret’s touch with a spring trap.

  Misapprised by Rathain’s clansmen himself, Dakar grumbled, “You’d think these backwoods ferals might credit an ally, given you skewered a Canon examiner under the lances of an arrest squad.”

  “Well red-handed murder wasn’t my birthright,” Tarens remarked, his snarl forced past teeth clamped on the peg for the trigger latch, “until the unnatural creature threatened my family.”

  For him, as for Jieret, hatred of the fanatics carried the septic sting of experience. The last host to storm Strakewood had visited atrocities upon women, children, and elders: a legacy never more poignant than here in the verdigris gloom above the grottoes, where a mother and four innocent younger sisters once had passed over Fate’s Wheel in an unparalleled act of atrocity.

  Dakar had not witnessed that ugly debacle. But he had Seen Jieret’s array of brute tactics savage a campaign march staged through the narrows at Valleygap. That memory raised chills, despite the felt blanket of summer humidity. The burden of that uncanny influence more than hardened the kindly, straight grain of the crofter’s character. Strakewood’s war woke a cold-cast ferocity better off left buried and sleeping. Rightfully, Jieret Red-beard had been feared for the ruin visited upon his enemies.

  The laugh lines weathered into tanned flesh at the plough underscored the wolf’s gleam in the eyes. As though the flash-marked vista was not centuries gone, where Lysaer’s levin-bolt strike had immolated a tent refuge to carbon, the large, farmer’s hands worked with terrible steadiness, lashing the trigger string onto a sapling, toothed with vicious spikes. No generosity softened the set of the jaw beneath the crooked nose. On this day, ruthlessness re-birthed the cycle of murderous slaughter.

  Or maybe not: Dakar realized the crofter expected to die here, haplessly bound to the iron resolve of a caithdein’s responsibility. Dread sparked by the gift of the seer held in common, he blurted, “What do you See?”

  Deft fingers looped the trigger noose. A deliberate foot lifted, tenderly, off the arched wood until the bend stabilized under tension. A killer’s preternatural concentration suggested Dakar’s question would dangle, unanswered.

  But then, Tarens said, “That no trespasser lives to desecrate this place. I promised Esfand.” Which statement blew like a cold wind from the past, rejecting anew the untenable agony of a generation fallen to butchery. For Tarens, who mourned two nephews taken by fever, the sorrows of untimely death bit too deep. “I met The Hatchet’s measure at Torwent. He is the High Priest’s rogue mastiff, an outcast raised without nurture, then baited to ravening madness.”

  Slaughter would not stain Tal Quorin’s banks uncontested, nor would reiving troops run amok without penalty on the savage license of victory. Jieret’s legacy and Tarens’s tender pity rewrote yester-year’s script, and riddled the sunken ravine with a diabolical gamut of snares.

  Rushed by the tingle of battle-charged prescience, Dakar bit his tongue, expecting to silence the grisly barrage of this moment’s lethal handiwork. Pain failed to curb the onslaught of vision. Instead, the coppery tang of fresh blood unsealed his runaway faculties. Vertigo pitched him onto his face. Reeled limp, he howled until his lungs emptied. Then starless darkness swallowed his fit and dropped him, witless, into prophecy.

  Dakar woke to the thump of his nape on a rock. A stick slapped his ear. Then stiff stands of bracken whipped his cheek under a fluttering fringe of bent fronds. He moaned, sneezing spores, knotted helpless with dry heaves. His feeble at
tempt to fend off the abuse trounced him over a rotten log. Split lids dealt him the punishing dazzle of sunlight, speared through a spinning view of the tree-tops. He hung upside down. Someone’s barbaric grip on his ankles dragged him headlong through the forest.

  His garbled attempt at a protest half-choked him on an inhaled leaf.

  Movement stopped. The merciless hold let him down. Tarens’s chalk features swam into his revolving sight.

  “Fatemaster’s mercy,” the crofter admonished, voice blurred under ringing overtones. “Thank me later. Your thrashing fit almost carried you over the cliff.”

  Dakar spat out bile and grit, and husked through a percussive headache, “What did I say?” Always, his unconscious bouts were true augury, fated with inexorable certainty. Fear spurred his alarm. “What did I say?”

  Tarens averted his glance in discomfort. “Enough not to wait out your puking back-lash.”

  “Don’t imagine you’ll keep the impact to yourself.” Dakar wrestled distressed equilibrium and propped himself onto one elbow. Near movement showed him the crofter, back turned, knife busy disarming a spring trap. “Tarens! What are you doing?”

  “Saving your hide from my miserable work.” The snick of the blade severed a laid string. The arched-over sapling whipped straight in release, spiked stake whistling in harmless recoil.

  Dakar mewled, “You’re leaving?”

  Tarens’s reply rang on the ear like clashed chimes. “Southward! At speed! Before Strakewood’s verge is surrounded.”

  Cramped double by sickness, Dakar ground out, “Forget the traps. We can’t outrun the slaughter! When Deshir falls, and The Hatchet’s conquest defiles the forbidden glens, Mankind’s tenancy will be revoked by the terms of the Fellowship’s compact.”

  Tarens ignored sense and plunged on, “Don’t descend by Split Rock, there’s a pitfall with stakes. The scouts’ markers will show you the safe trail across the Tal Quorin.”