by Janny Wurts
Dace swallowed, cast too far out of his depth. He had withstood Lysaer’s testy rages before, from aristocratic fury at being handled, deformed, to the ferocious blaze of righteous ire that challenged the helpless ground down by iniquity. Never this edge of caged desperation, born out of gut-wracked exposure: not the lacerating hurt birthed by recognized guilt or the visceral wound of a spirit strayed past the moral compass of experience. Here stood the stricken champion, seared awake by the soul-deep acknowledgement of reprehensible acts beyond human accountability.
“How will Daelion Fatemaster judge me?” Lysaer laboured ahead in torment. “How would I judge myself if due terms of redress were mine to decree from the seat of crown justice?”
Dace smothered tears, bled by hindsighted recall of the merciless sentence once pronounced on a corrupted True Sect examiner, when, as Daliana, she had been the defendant wrongfully tried at Etarra.
This hour’s criminal burden of wrongs outstripped any measure of equity. The s’Ilessid royal gift most perniciously whetted the thorns of embedded remorse and deepened the abyss of self-revilement without any bridge to forgiveness.
The tensioned shift in Lysaer’s carriage gave scarcely a split second’s warning.
Dace flattened his body against the shut door, distressed all the more by the warped twist of fortune: that his liege’s disastrously weakened left side lent the cruelty of an advantage. “You are not going out to disenfranchise the Canon! The High Priest will have you killed outright if you try to tear down the True Sect doctrine without a plan!” Against mettlesome anger, he augured on, “No way will I let you give way to suicide!”
Lysaer made a choked sound. His reaction back-handed the remaining candle with his unimpaired forearm. Battened in sudden gloom, head bent, while the knocked taper tumbled onto the carpet, perhaps he wept in balked frustration. If so, the sculpted nobility left on his undamaged profile showed no sign, rimlit with the purity of a cameo against the bedchamber casement.
Dace filled his strapped lungs, speech forced through brutal quiet. “You are alive, yet, and not subject to Daelion’s scales in the flesh. Culpability does not permit you the coward’s right to abandon yourself! Or grant the excuse to leave True Sect fanaticism to its uncontested devices. A man with your history does not shrug off the responsible charge of his legacy.”
A blurred movement, as Lysaer ducked into shadow and crumpled against the intact span of the altar rail.
Dace shut his eyes. Addressing a tortured hurt past imagining, he added, “Nor will I leave you. Not while you still breathe! No matter what you have done, or might cause in the unwritten future, you don’t go on alone. Never, before the hour you stand upright and learn to temper your ethic with mercy.”
Too careful, the halted words that emerged as though from behind muffled fingers. “You were not one of those widowed—or orphaned—or Ath forbid, torn by grievous loss as a parent bereft of a grown son untimely.”
Dace fought the tightness strapping his chest. “No. But I was saved from the gutter by kindness.” Impelled by instinct, he surged forward, picking his way through the scattered debris towards the huddled figure. “I was not struck down by an arrow, or scarred to infirmity for the upstanding denouncement of a corrupt doctrine. Your straits are not beyond salvage. Even under the grip of the curse, you never fulfilled the Mistwraith’s primary directive.”
Lysaer’s hoarse response rejected sympathy. “If my hand did not strike my half brother down, direct influence still finds me culpable.”
Dace offered the tenderness of ambiguity. “We don’t know for certain the Law of the Canon has determined Arithon’s fate.”
“No.” Lysaer seized a sawn breath. “Unless his body was burned in the aftermath, the priests’ account may endorse a premature conclusion.” The longevity endowed by the Five Centuries Fountain enabled that possibility. This moment’s self-poisoned freedom of mind in harsh fact might be only fleeting. “The risk is quite real,” Lysaer ground on, “I might survive to redouble the toll of mass slaughter laid at my feet.”
The shudder met by his tentative touch dropped Dace to his knees amid the gutted wrack of kicked cushions. “A way forward exists to dispel the nightmare.” Terrified to torch off the volatile struggle with self-condemnation in the tormented figure before him, he soothed, “Impatience won’t find that elusive path. If you fall by surrender, you’ll have given your flaws the fool’s license to trample your innate goodness.”
“How many more misguided dupes stand at risk to be sacrificed?” Lysaer agonized, stumbling onwards.
Dace winced at the store of anguish left unbroached. If the ruinous lists of past dead in their thousands could never be reconciled, how much worse, amid the untenable cost, that not every life lost was a stranger’s? For Talith, for Ellaine, for Diegan and not least, for the loyal sacrifice rendered by Sulfin Evend, the steadfast heart now must not succumb to pity. “All,” Dace declared, blunt. “There will come no end to the slaughter if you leave the True Sect Canon its undisputed sway over the next generations. Or else some might be spared if you rise to the task and apply every resource you own to founder the Sunwheel behemoth.”
Silence gripped the following pause in an alcove too dim to map Lysaer’s expression. Dace waited. Through the anxious pound of raced pulse, he sustained the pressured uncertainty; held out, unsure whether his aggressive honesty had led Lysaer towards sane redemption or tipped him to broken defeat. Under covert identity and for aching, undeclared love, he listened, while the shuddering rasp of his master’s harrowed breaths resumed, jerked one into the next through clenched teeth. Dace suffered as well through each paralysed second of cruel indecision, while the damaged creak of spooled wood translated the shuddering tremors raked through the clenched body before him.
As the lowly valet, Dace hesitated to try contact again. He feared to move, even speak, lest another presumptuous intervention should unleash the pent tempest.
Then hard fingers reached out and gripped his poised wrist. A fierce tug rocked his braced balance. Dace blinked back his welled tears. For the battle on-going was not defeat, after all, but the struggle of mortal flesh and dogged pride, wrestling the short-falls of infirmity.
Dace shouldered the burden of Lysaer’s crippled weight and boosted him upright. Neither spoke through the laboured, erratic steps required to cross the wrecked ante-room. No haven amid the True Sect’s den of adders, their retreat reached the stonewalled confinement of the sick-room bedchamber.
There, Dace assisted his master’s collapse. He slid the cool sheets aside, noted grazed knuckles in need of salve, and with tender hands straightened the ungainly sprawl of atrophied limbs. Although by slow increments healing had begun to reduce the scope of Lysaer’s debilities, his one-sided body remained drastically weak. Daylight’s flood through the barred casement exposed his wretched state. Unflinching honesty also laid bare the long odds of this moment’s tenuous triumph.
Nor was Lysaer s’Ilessid the fool, to misappraise the lethal extent of his peril. The cavernous, blind eye sunk like a pit in the sag of paralysis did not impair his clear-sighted reason. Invalid, he lay in the innermost sanctum of the True Sect High Temple, a game pawn ruthlessly held at the dogmatic sufferance of powerful enemies.
Dace recoiled from the stacked probability in favour of full-scale disaster. Instead, he counted the formidable measure of his liege’s character. Lysaer s’Ilessid still possessed iron will, and the magnetic force of imperial sovereignty. Born and bred to the challenge of royal authority, he would not flinch before the daunting obstacles. The unaffected side of his face showed his iron determination. Dace watched the chiselled mouth flex with distaste, then firm, while the lucent gaze of the alert blue eye tracked his tactful ministrations.
Neither master nor servant cared to belabour the frightening prospect: that ahead, unutterably dreary and dangerous, their strategy of deceptive intrigue must withstand hostile scrutiny under close quarters. Years might pass before Lysaer s’
Ilessid regained the hale fitness to exert himself at full strength.
When his marred speech resumed, the magisterial inflection did not emerge without humour. “You’ll have some—difficult—explaining ahead.”
“Oh, yes,” Dace responded, patiently oblique. “Starting off with the costly new vestment I dumped like a rag in the course of your tantrum.”
“Light forfend!” One golden eyebrow rose, spangled in sweat against Lysaer’s pasty forehead. “Here I thought I’d prompted the temple’s most faithful to blaspheme by tossing them out on their arses.”
Dace stifled a smile. “You don’t want the worshipful lot at your threshold droning through tedious prayers? Then we’ll need to contrive a plausible way to abolish the ante-room shrine.”
A snort, from the pillows, perhaps prelude to a wicked burst of stifled laughter. “Certainly, that. Provided my heap of emphatic wreckage hasn’t reamed that point home already.” Then in sobered afterthought, as his confidante rose and delved into the remedy cabinet, “Please, I don’t want the posset. Since I cannot muster the spine to stand upright, surely I’m able to fake the convincing semblance of limpid prostration?”
“Perhaps.” Dace set about mixing a tonic instead, then added a salve and clean gauze to bind up his liege’s skinned knuckles. “Though you might regret the petty indignity. First of all, for your ill-tempered sins, I’m stuck with extracting your nasty collection of glass shards and splinters.”
Summer 5925
Last Vigil
Shielded within the impenetrable dazzle cast by the Fellowship’s warding, few eyes observed what occurred at the post on the scaffold in Daenfal’s main square. Asandir supported Arithon’s weight in his arms. With smoking impatience, he waited: while Dakar hauled his corpulent, dazed bulk from the pit, pushed erect, and struck off the offensive shackles.
Sword abandoned, no enemies left to withstand, Tarens shed his mail gauntlets. His ready strength joined the on-going labour that eased the crown prince’s maimed body down. They laid Arithon face-up on the spattered scaffold. Sight flinched to contemplate the gaping wound in his chest where the executioner’s sword had struck home. Dakar scuffed the puddled planks with his feet, while Tarens wrestled the savage outrage bequeathed by a caithdein three-centuries dead. None of them dared to broach their worst fear: the streaked body on the boards stayed unbreathing, while the steady calm of Asandir’s instruction asked Elaira to straighten her beloved’s inert limbs.
Healer’s touch shaking, near blinded by grief, she cried out through her ministrations. “His pulse has been stopped for too long! Is he lost?”
Kharadmon’s discarnate presence surrounded her urgent distress like a blanket. “Not just yet. Don’t let up!” His cool reason lent bracing support. “Davien’s seal of longevity grips your prince’s body in stasis to stem the gush of arterial bleeding.”
On his knees with Arithon’s head in cupped hands, Asandir added terse, “Elaira? Mend the wound where you can. Start with the torn heart and work outwards. Kharadmon will assist you, given permission. We hold lawful claim here through sovereign prerogative.”
Amid gristly, unspeakable carnage, even the corpse of a sacrificed child for necessity must be set aside. Steadied by the immersive skill of her calling, Elaira placed her hands on Arithon’s stilled flesh and yielded her faculties to the relief of unerring Fellowship oversight. “The sword-thrust also mangled his Grace’s spine.”
“My dear, we’re aware.” The surge of Kharadmon’s wisdom flowed into her, faultlessly poised to refine, augment, and, if needed, correct any gaps in her knowledge. “Once the spirit has stabilized from the shock, and after we’ve redressed the acute loss of blood, rest assured Asandir will attend that concern.”
In fact, the field Sorcerer’s directive to Tarens and Dakar pursued the exigency. “I’ll need a litter fashioned to move him.” Against a quiet as dense as balled cotton, words bit with preternatural clarity. “Scavenge whatever you can for the purpose. You won’t be harmed by our conjured protection. Though heed my warning, the extant defences serve life! Be careful not to touch any steel that’s been forged to inflict purposeful injury.”
Tarens shed the skinning knife sheathed in his boot. The cuts and contusions from his recent stand hitched his agility as he straightened. He set after Dakar’s shambling lead, not without qualms as he stepped into the unearthly blaze of the ward-field. Yet the daunting intensity of the active spell raised no trace of sensation.
Startlement provoked his surprised exclamation.
“That’s the fearsome mark of a Fellowship working,” Dakar grumbled under his breath. “Enough might to sunder the earth underfoot, transacted with scarcely a whisper. Don’t be misled. The cross-grained kick of fell consequence if you violate the directive doesn’t forgive. Makes Dharkaron’s Black Spear damned near toothless as a virgin’s kiss of forgiveness.”
Whether or not the Mad Prophet’s complaint stemmed from unhappy experience, the vista unveiled past the curtain of radiance showed the staggering scale of the Sorcerers’ power. The True Sect officials caught at close quarters on the dais had been hurled from their cushioned seats and flung prostrate. They appeared unbreathing, plumes and jewels wrenched still, as though time itself stood snap-frozen. Beyond the scaffold, the dedicate cordon appeared to be shedding their arms in arrested, slow motion. The fall of dropped swords and halberds seemed suspended in viscous glue, while the clangour of metal striking the brick pavement resounded in distorted, stretched echoes. The riotous throng of the faithful assembled for Arithon’s execution no longer stood upright. Stripped naked of hate by the clarion force of unbridled compassion, man, woman, and child, they cowered on their knees, heads bowed under the clean fall of sunlight. All had covered their faces in shame, while tears welled and spilled through their hands.
Beyond the packed square, Daenfal’s slate roofs shimmered untouched. Farther distant, the natural breeze stirred the banners atop the peaked guild-halls. Sails carved the course of on-going trade through the indigo chop in the harbour. The water-front ferry crept shoreward on its cable, while the eerie, spaced toll of the noon carillons shivered deep, dopplered notes through the stunned air.
“Ath wept,” Tarens murmured in awe.
“Fair strikes the wind from your chest,” agreed Dakar, having withstood his share of Fellowship stays that cast slip-streams across time and space. “You don’t ever get used to the upset, forbye. Tosses your guts inside out through the final course of the unbinding release.”
Fat as a fluffed partridge, the Mad Prophet tacked a course through the threshed sprawl of dignitaries. His eye sized up their resplendent finery and seized on the gilt hem of the mantle draping the loftiest temple official. “Bad cess to the fact,” he grunted, and pulled, “there’s no cloth at hand that’s not blighted with a forsaken Sunwheel blazon. And curse the True Sect’s foul doctrine to Sithaer,” he blasphemed as the unfrocked priest tumbled clear of the garment.
Tarens attended his assigned charge without comment, absorbed by the caution of picking his steps through a hazardous maze of dropped swords and halberds. The flag staves affixed to the platform’s outside rail provided a ready selection of harmless poles. Momentarily, he regretted his abandoned knife. But when he set out to untie the flag halyards, the knots slid free with uncanny ease under his battle-sore fingers. He ripped off the banners, cast their gaudy silk into the stunned muddle of guards, where the bullion fringe perhaps might recompense the underpaid rank and file. Then he retraced his steps.
Dakar waited in a cleared space on the boards, seated amid a glittering hoard of pillaged state brooches. “Pins,” he explained, his smug smile flecked with the sun-scattered highlights flung off by faceted citrines and diamonds. “Rightful booty, since we need these to secure the sling. And besides, the Fellowship owes us. Here’s a decade’s stashed consolation of beer coin for sticking our necks on the block for their crown prince.”
“If you say so.” Tarens chuckled, then bent t
o the task of creating the litter to bear a living prize far more precious.
Twilight’s deep shadow mantled Daenfal when the party bearing the Spinner of Darkness descended the scaffold at last. Behind them, just stirring, the prostrate officials began to recover their disgruntled wits. The stupefied cordon of dedicates who permitted the procession to pass raised no protest. Scarcely an eddy of turbulence flanked their path through the spell-bound onlookers who had gathered that morning to witness the demise of evil. Past the waning influence of the Fellowship’s ward, the quartet with its scarlet-stained parcel emerged at the south edge of the square in plain view of the workaday populace. Though the darkening streets beyond remained crowded with celebrants, none of the bystanders could have said how, or from where, the uncanny foursome had come.
The tall Sorcerer in the lead wore stained leathers, the silver spill of his hair in tangles over straight shoulders. The townsfolk who stared with wide-open eyes later argued whether or not his frame shimmered with a golden radiance. The face they remembered without error: carved by deep sorrow and an ageless care that saw past pretention and scoured the spirit to tears of release.
Tongues fell silent before the mercy reflected in his mirror-bright glance. Even the most raucous revellers melted clear of his stride. Vendors stopped hawking their meat-pies and cheap trinkets, while the scrapping dogs and barefoot children ceased their boisterous play in the gutters. Silence fell in his wake like the well of flood-tide and settled, leaving the cries of the scavenging gulls flocking to roost overhead.
At the Sorcerer’s back, the scarred, blond defender in bloodied mail carried no weaponry. He bore the poles at the front of the litter, partnered behind by a shorter man, plump as a bolster, with tired, hound’s eyes and a tousled white beard streaked with cinnamon. He puffed, red-faced, although the load he supported was not onerous, his stumpy gait forced to hustle to match his longer-strided companions.
