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

by Janny Wurts

  Run dry of tears, shattered beyond hope, Vivet met defeat in the zealot’s enraptured eyes. She said, “Moral posturing may have misled me once. But not any longer.” At the anguished end of her strength, with naught left to protect, she discovered her courage. “Don’t spout your adulterated theology, or justify sanctimonious treason to me! Not after I’ve given over to you the two lives in this world I hold dearest. If Valien and Arithon die by the sword under your accursed Canon, their murder has already besmirched my name on the rolls of the Fatemaster’s judgement.”

  “You have sealed your damnation beyond all reprieve,” the examiner snapped, out of patience. “Receive your just deserts.” His strike followed, quick as a venomous snake. He clapped his palm on the crown of Vivet’s head and snuffed out her life like a candle.

  He prayed briefly over the pathetic remains, slack flesh hung like a gutted fish in the aftermath of his handiwork. Then he turned his back and strode away, clipped orders tossed over his shoulder. “Burn the carcass, Light brighten the day. Our beleaguered world supports one less minion of Shadow.”

  Summer 5925

  Triple Jeopardy

  Immobilized in the spelled grip of paralysis, Arithon bears aware witness, eyes sparked to savage fury by Vivet’s demise; and responsible charge of her tragic legacy drives his unwavering focus: to salvage her bereft, orphaned child from a sorcerer’s death on the scaffold …

  At Althain Tower, the stressed pitch of Athera’s electromagnetics stirs the unquiet spectre of Shehane Althain’s dread presence, while agonized suspense rides Sethvir’s leashed strength for a Fellowship given no ethical option, and Mankind’s survival swings on the cruel thread of Arithon’s choice of reaction …

  Astride his black stallion and streaming the sullen wind of a passage wrought through the chambered drake’s skull in the Kathtairr grimward, the field Sorcerer, Asandir, reaches the Paravian focus circle at Old Tirans, and stretching the fabric of time itself, speeds north towards Whitehold to play through the bitter closure of his long-term strategy …

  Summer 5925

  XIII. Expedient

  Arithon sprawled, paralysed, behind the locked grille. All but unmoored, at the edge of a black-out faint, he clung to awareness throughout the horror as the True Sect guardsmen cut Vivet down. The scrape of their boots rang too loud in his ears. Their unsavoury jokes ripped his helpless spirit to anguish. He could not turn his head or close his glazed eyes. His tormented sight absorbed the callous handling that dropped her corpse with a thump on the floor. He endured the sniggers and obscene innuendo spewed by the men’s idle boredom, while a litter was fetched from the armoury. None of their crude conversation escaped him. When their interest changed subject, he heard the grotesque details of his forthcoming demise embroidered by salacious speculation.

  He made no effort to shut out their speech. His distorted perception of sound warned how narrowly close he lay to unconsciousness. He must not react to his futile emotion, or let anxiety mire him in circling dread. Peril imposed the brutal priority: he must stay awake at all costs.

  Even that basic effort evaded his grasp. Sucking dizziness stripped concentration. Minutes passed before his hazed faculties connected his affliction with blood loss induced by the knife. He had suffered the ugly practice before. Grey Kralovir’s necromancers once had sapped his vitality to unstring his resources and keep him passive. Yet unlike that prior ordeal, he felt nothing of his chilled extremities. The desecration inflicted on him by Koriathain brought no attendant with honeyed water to relieve dehydration, or the salted mash needed to nurse his continued survival.

  Which patent neglect confirmed the grim bent of the dedicates’ gossip. His prize value, alive, amounted to nothing past the staged exhibit of a temple spectacle. Night was almost spent. Though flame-light illumined the windowless cell, changeless between dark and dawn, his crown prince’s attunement marked the lane tide’s cresting surge and measured the passage of time. He had only the fleeting hours before noon to recoup his plundered autonomy.

  Arithon engaged what sparse resource remained to rally his impaired mastery. Suspended, spinning, between past and present, he recalled his grandfather’s brusque remonstrance when he had been ten years of age …

  “No. Try again! You must be able to function clear-headed, even while holding your breath through a slow count of three hundred. Why is this necessary?”

  Perched on the rock rim of a tide-pool, sodden clothing plastered to his wiry frame, Arithon reasoned the purpose behind the arduous exercise. “For defence and protection? Because invasive spellcraft cannot be imposed against the alignment of a stronger will.”

  “Yes, and also for improved performance under adverse stress. A master cannot afford a mistake! All the more when you’re caught solitary. You’ll have no one else to catch you short by the scruff if you stumble and fall to a back-lash under high stakes.” The high mage encouraged, impatient to resume, “Practice must heighten your intact awareness and extend the boundary of unconsciousness …”

  Self-command sprang first from impeccable focus. Light-headed, Arithon laboured to deepen his breathing and relieve the fluttered heart-beat of a sapped body starving for air. Discipline gradually steadied his vertigo. Slowly, he recouped the fragile semblance of grounded control.

  The grisly activity outside the grille subsided also in due course. Coarse laughter and complaints dwindled as the detailed dedicates bore Vivet’s body away. The strapped door to the corridor slammed shut in their wake, while the fortunate pair who had drawn the long straws kept the layabout’s post, standing watch. Sentries’ protocol silenced all frivolous speech. Amid fallen quiet, Arithon engaged the requisite self-survey, comparing what should be to what was not.

  Beside sight and hearing, the fust of dank stone and the sour odour of his clammy sweat affirmed his unimpaired sense of smell. He could not swallow. His tongue and throat remained numb. In horrific fact, he felt nothing at all: not the chill floor underneath his slack body or the bite of the steel manacles on his chained limbs. Every nerve that enabled touch and voluntary movement stayed deadened in disconnection.

  His painstaking search for the cause found no underlying trace of narcotic. Instead, Arithon encountered the signature whine of the sigils locking him under paralysis. No simple construct, imposed from without, this ugly impairment was tailored to match the pattern of his Name. The interface was not perfect. The signature template for the entrapment had been imprinted before his transformative encounter with the Paravians upon their warded isle.

  A small loop-hole, sufficient to enact an unbinding, had Arithon been in prime shape. But his flawed concentration marred the integrity needed to challenge the invasive ciphers. He could not dissolve their grip at one stroke or indirectly negate their effect using counterpoint resonance. His sorry state disallowed intact recourse, still less where the temple diviners’ hostile oversight might detect a concerted attempt to change his condition. He would have to worry at the enchainment. Wear down by persistent rebuttal the mismatched points where the spellcraft was weakest, until each flawed seal fractured under attrition. The course proved onerous, like fraying a triple-stitched seam with a needle, thread by resistant thread.

  His labour received no peace and no privacy. Priests came and went, chanting prayers and fanning noxious fumes from lit censers. Guards were added, then changed, their numbers redoubled, the latest replacements bedecked in plumed helms and the dazzle of ceremonial parade armour. What measured progress Arithon managed was slight. An hour passed before he regained the muscular control to shut his stinging eyes, a paltry relief too quickly offset by the torment of his unslaked thirst. He walled off the distraction of his dry mouth. Against noise and discomfort, he turned all of his attention inward to worry at the ciphers that hampered him.

  Reward came at last. One linked chain of spellcraft gave way. Barely, Arithon suppressed the tremor of recoil as command of his elemental mastery resurged. Small gain, and no victory: he lacked the fines
se to harness his inborn power of shadow. Denied the refined touch to apply the effects, he feared he might trigger a reaction that would wreak havoc upon Daenfal’s blameless populace, or much worse, destabilize the lane current that underpinned the volatile border of Athili. The explosive reach of his rogue far-sight crushed the vicious temptation to sow rampant fear in the country-side. At all cost, Arithon refused to provide impetus to spur the True Sect religion. He would not gift Koriathain with more fertile chaos as leverage to up-end the compact.

  Valien’s safety rooted his intent.

  Stilled as the coiled adder, gripped by granite patience, Arithon subdued a fresh rush of vertigo and tackled the next layer of sigils. Acute tingling surged through his extremities, followed by the ache of cramped muscles and the excruciate agony where steel cuffs had cut into his inert flesh. He regained slight movement in fingers and toes. Then the turnkey arrived and unlocked the grille. Several more dedicates crowded inside, under orders to ready the Spinner of Darkness for his appointed fate on the scaffold. These brought a white-robed diviner in tow, a trained talent primed to sound warning at the least suspect stir of arcane practice.

  “He’s too small to seem dangerous,” one man remarked, his nervous contempt gritted at each step by the scrape of hobnailed boots.

  “Shut the loose talk! Pay attention!” cracked the captain in charge by the door. “You stand in the undilute presence of evil, endangered as you’ve never been in your sorry lives. Shoulder the task and escape in one piece. The quicker we finish, the better.”

  Arithon felt the diviner’s obscene talent comb through his aura. He stilled all subtle activity, granting the probe no reaction to read as the dedicates bent to their work. He stayed limp, inert, even as his partially restored sensation delivered the bite of cold steel where their mailed grip manhandled his person. They cut off his shirt. Aware feeling delivered the jolt to seized limbs, as the pins that fastened the chain to his manacled wrists were jerked free. A shove rolled his prone body over. Pinned flat on his back, he forced the endurance to withstand the pain, breaths kept even and his abused flesh held flaccid as though still devoid of nervous sensation. The dedicates yanked his arms to the front. They shackled his wrists back into restraint.

  “Light above!” one man swore. “You see the murderous hate in his eyes? Fair loosens the bowels and gives me the shakes.”

  “Don’t look,” warned the sentry stationed by the grille. “Are you daft? Belike he’ll remember your face if he can. Noose a sorcerer’s curse on you, body and mind, fit to ride you to grief and destruction.”

  The acting captain quashed the untoward comment before unease ignited hysteria. “Pack it up! The Koriathain have bled the wretch nearly dry. Damned certain they left him too weakened to put up much fight.”

  “Yes, but what if the sisterhood’s stayspell gives way?” The jittery official jangled his keys, quick to snap the lock shut once the last anxious man cleared the cell. “Torwent burned, don’t forget! And our town saw a brave squad of lancers slaughtered, cursed to their demise without a mark on them after they tried to corner the demonic creature on the necropolis.”

  “No bother, today,” the officer dismissed, talking fast, as his men formed up for departure. “Dark talent or not, he’s leached to the point where he’ll probably faint when the executioner’s escort hauls him upright.” His parting conclusion cast echoes behind as he hastened his squad from the ward-room. “Forbye, when the criminal’s led to his reckoning, the Lord Examiner’s arts will hold him in check until ritual death flings him to black oblivion.”

  Asandir strode into the grand hall at the Whitehold sisterhouse, his booted step brisk on the white-marble floor, and his gaunt shadow thrown before him, distorted by flame-light. He did not wear the stark splendour of his formal robe, indigo as a moonless midnight, starred bright at collar and cuff with silver braid. This sombre errand saw him clothed in his trail leathers, flecked with foamed horse sweat from the saddle, and pungent with the reek of volcanic sulphur and the lightning-struck taint of fresh ozone.

  Twelve Senior-ranked Koriathain had gathered ahead of him. The Prime’s most trustworthy circle sat enthroned on the canopied dais, their carved, high-backed chairs tasselled with gold and cushioned in scarlet velvet. The deep amethyst brocades of their state dress clustered like funeral lilies, they surrounded a tranced scryer with a crystal sphere, tuned into a long-distance engagement. Her focus tracked the momentous event yet unfolding in the packed plaza sited at Daenfal.

  Asandir knew what transpired there in his own right, in tacit touch with one discorporate colleague and kept tightly apprised by the Warden at Althain Tower. Leashed power itself, the Fellowship’s emissary passed the wide harbour windows, sunlit on this day as the hour advanced towards noon. Beneath vaulted stone, his approach scattered echoes, fallen to whispered reverberation when he stopped at his appointed place. Graven at his feet like an epitaph, the lines of runes inscribed by the potentized force of his given word.

  The Matriarch acknowledged him from the Prime seat. Black hair, tawny eyes, the woman who bore the mantle of office was a sharp change from Morriel’s tempered poise and Selidie’s coquettish innuendo. Altered beyond recognition by the impact of cruel enslavement and the stigma of her irregular succession, Lirenda spoke with the punctilious snap of the born aristocrat.

  “You’ve cut your timing extremely fine. Provided, under your sovereign oath, you’re here to verify the completion of our debt held against the Crown of Rathain. If you have a speech, make it quick. Your royal heir is already bound for the scaffold.”

  “I am here for full closure, exactly on schedule.” Asandir’s mild correction belied the steel in his bearing. In fact, he had staged his moment. “Could an early arrival have made any difference?”

  “No.” Lirenda watched like the mouse playing the cat. The frigid distrust in her narrowed eyes expected some disingenuous wile behind the Fellowship Sorcerer’s claim of good faith. “I would not have succumbed to elaborate pleas. You’ll be granted no stay or revision of terms.”

  “Why not?” Asandir said, for distraction.

  Lirenda returned a smouldering glare. “Because this is my overdue victory, and the last bequest of my murdered predecessor. I hold firm today to honour Selidie’s legacy and discharge a just recompense for her requital.”

  Palliative words, not the actual truth, Asandir perceived, lent the Warden’s perspective. Lirenda’s past meddling once had spoiled the finest of Morriel’s impeccable strategies. The sore set-back to the order’s interests caused by that ambitious error of judgement had withered Lirenda’s career, while Arithon walked free without scathe. Against natural reason, the repeat mistake would not happen today at Daenfal.

  “You do not wear mourning,” Lirenda attacked, while the vulture stares of her attendant Seniors dissected the Sorcerer’s carriage.

  Asandir faced their gamut, every nerve under glacial control. “Should I? My dear, you have overstepped. The Crown Prince of Rathain is still living.”

  “You cling to an empty hope!” Gemstones shimmered as Lirenda gripped the curved necks of the swans fashioned into the arms of her chair. “Which offensive notion proves I shouldn’t trust you, or Sethvir, given his sneak penchant for a cheater’s tricks up his sleeve.”

  Which remark cracked the lid on Asandir’s annoyance. “I stand on my oath of nonintervention.” Almost, his frame flickered with bursting, white light. “The Teir’s’Ffalenn’s fate continues to rely strictly upon his own merits.”

  “If any such opening exists at this pass.” The gloss shifted on the coiled ebony of Lirenda’s braid as she tilted her head towards her dutiful scryer. “Our seer’s quartz shows the True Sect officials in place for the ritual execution.”

  Whether or not his Grace could save himself, only minutes remained before he faced his reckoning. Asandir need not consult the engaged crystal’s reflection: Sethvir’s stricken silence informed him the margin for action was slipping away.


  Lirenda rubbed abrasive salt in the wound. “Do you suppose Elaira will manage to withstand the unbearable trauma?”

  Asandir did not rise to the bait though awareness of the enchantress’s danger brutalized his concern. Handfast to Rathain’s prince, she could not be defended under his Fellowship’s auspices. Her perilous case rested with Tarens and Dakar, reliant upon the precarious foothold of their better sense. Kharadmon lurked on station, unknown to them, and constrained as a passive observer.

  Linked contact with his discorporate colleague delivered the frightful moment when the gathered crowd at Daenfal sighted the prisoner’s escort. Their atavistic roar flared the flux, to the cry of Kharadmon’s seething frustration. “His Grace damned well left his move in the Kralovir crisis bitterly late!”

  Shared resonance spiked a response from Sethvir. “That was Davien’s irregular influence, a perilous asset we cannot afford.” The remark sparked an earth-sensed glimpse of the scaffold, a raw lumber platform etched under sunlight, packed with the scintillant white-and-gold panoply of the temple priests. Beneath surged the ravenous crowd: a shifting, restless sea rammed against The Hatchet’s dedicate cordon, a veteran company gleaming in full arms and stationed in files of twenty ranks deep.

  “As if the Betrayer would stir his arse to brake the hard fall to disaster,” Kharadmon opined in disgust. “He can cosset himself in relentless seclusion, but that does not excuse his refusal to bring the rest of us into his confidence.”

  A gloomy quibble, belatedly raised, that the estranged Sorcerer had yet to leave Kewar, or contact Sethvir. Granted the renegade’s presence or absence, the Fellowship Sorcerers could do nothing to shift the pending stroke of harsh consequence.

  Asandir held the drawn line with the rest of his colleagues, pinned under Lirenda’s rapt expectation. He moved not a muscle, while mankind’s right to inhabit Athera swung in the balance, suspended, fast tipping towards the harrowing moment a True Sect sword fell and murdered the future.