by Janny Wurts
“Rip off the bells,” said Arithon, succinct. “We don’t need the noise to betray us.”
“If you think we can save anybody, you’re mistaken,” Dakar snapped.
“Oh dear.” The innkeeper wilted. While the horseboy paused, the plink of bronze bells choked in dispirited fists, he implored, “Who else is left?”
Dakar shot a venomous glower at Arithon. Green eyes watched him back, implacable as glints in sheared emerald, with all the fresh sorrows of Riverton like a spiked canker beneath.
The Shadow Master insisted, “I gave my promise.”
No plea, but a warning; Dakar shut his teeth in balked temper. As the inn’s kindly matron fluttered out with a bulging pannier of provender, he shrugged; and discovered the coin sack still grasped in the hand underneath his rucked cloak. That saving fact raised his smile like gilt on bad tin. “Well then. We’ll give your bard’s rescue our diligent best.”
Dakar crammed the silver down the neck of his shirt before the innkeeper recovered his aplomb. The venture perhaps made plausible sense. Gifts of coin and horses were no sort of boon for two fugitives to spurn for the overnice scruple of honesty. While the innkeeper gushed his effusive relief, and Arithon took directions to the hamlet, the Mad Prophet busied himself checking the bay’s girth to make sure his fat bulk could stay mounted.
“The burning was to happen between the flour mill and the glassworks, ” the inn matron finished, while the horseboy tossed over the palfrey’s neck rope, and Arithon set heels to the mare.
Caught flat-footed, Dakar forgot to shut his mouth. Departing hooves churned up a gobbet of mud, which vengefully clipped him in the teeth. Hornet mad, he spat grit, clambered astride, and gave chase, while stirrups too long to suit his short legs clanged and battered his dangling ankles.
A league down the road, stretched flat at a gallop, he shouted through a stinging lash of mane. “You can’t mean to try this. The risks are enough to serve up our guts raw on the sword of Lysaer’s executioner! Even if we bolt now, someone will remember our foolish exchange at the tavern. Since you chose such rash lengths to be quit of those oxen, we’d be wise to turn off of the thoroughfare.”
“I spoke in good faith,” Arithon flung back, breathless, while the horses careened neck and neck through a turn. “Didn’t you recognize the silver bosses on the gray palfrey’s saddle?”
Dakar’s rank epithet allowed he had not.
Arithon steadied his mare’s stride and urged greater speed, rankled to acid impatience. “The free singer they’re to execute is Felirin the Scarlet.” As his mount stretched her nose and thundered ahead, his voice eddied back through the turbulence. “You’ll remember Felirin once helped save my life.”
“Red tassels, oh Ath, of course!” The Mad Prophet regained recollection; as well as loud clothes, the free singer affected complete indiscretion before bone-headed, townborn intolerance. “Felirin always did know just the right ballad to set headhunters brawling with fists.” Dakar tried and failed to match his companion’s sinuous agility astride. His seat smacked the saddle, his mount jibbed and pecked; left trailing by three lengths, he hollered admonition, “You know you’re turning one minstrel’s misfortune into a lunatic’s play for disaster.”
But Arithon by then had forced too wide a lead to bother to frame a reply.
The Mad Prophet scrubbed sweat from his neck and sagged against the gapped boards of the glassmaker’s shed. “Ath, I’m too old and fat for this.”
His breathing ran ragged. His heart sped too fast. The muffled thunder in his ears came as much from the beat of his own rushed blood, as from the rumble of the mill’s vanes, turning. The two frame buildings notched the mild rise, and beyond them, the tide-driven thrash of sea breakers, ripping a white, sandy headland. The hollow between held a spindly row of cottages, a cobbler’s shop, and a blacksmith’s: the hamlet they had lathered good horses to reach before the free singer’s burning.
A glance at the gathering packed onto the commons showed that the plight of the minstrel was hopeless.
“You don’t have an obligation,” he exhorted to Arithon, crouched motionless behind the glassmonger’s rickle of supplies. “What you face is a clear invitation to suicide, and if you try, I’ll have no choice but to invoke the blood oath you swore under Fellowship sanction at Athir.”
“Who would answer? The Sorcerers are all gone to Havish for King Eldir’s wedding.” Arithon did not turn his head, but shifted his vantage between the piled quartz sand, the green piggins of iron oxides, and the sacks imported from the fens of West Shand where saltwort was burned into soda ash.
“Why can’t you hear reason for once in your born life?” Dakar clapped his cheeks in frustration. “Now would be a nice time to start listening.”
Sweat trickled down his spine, steamed through his clothes by the kilns, which beat rippled air through the gapped boards. While the miller’s dogs yapped, and a woman’s railing punched through the sonorous bass of crown authority, the sun scudded under a burl of cloud. Catcalls from the bystanders maligned the prisoner on his pile of oiled faggots, no encouragement. With at least ten guardsmen attached to the official now citing the formal charges, Dakar read bad odds. The crown soldiers were from Lysaer’s elite division, their sunwheel cloaks white as strewn snowdrifts amid the drab motley of the countryfolk.
Arithon regarded the tableau with the unswerving attention that boded the worst sort of consequence. “Felirin is condemned for singing the ballad of Tal Quorin, as written by Halliron sen Al’duin,” he said. “Ath knows where he learned the rendition. He must have spent time with the clans.”
“Daelion’s bollocks!” Dakar shivered, hands latched in his cloak to shut out the plucking breeze off the sea. “Small wonder they’ll burn him.”
“They won’t.” Arithon ducked, doubled back, and slid down beside Dakar. “Since I can’t turn that crowd with steel in plain sight, I’ll need to borrow your mantle.”
The Mad Prophet rammed upright, swearing. “Man, that’s a death wish! You dare not be seen here!” Certainly not after an unexpurgated ballad which maligned the s’Ilessid prince as a butcher made blind by self-righteous morality and arrogance.
“Your cloak,” Arithon repeated. “Dakar, stop arguing!”
The Shadow Master spun in fraught urgency as the door banged at the front of the glass house. A boy hurried out with a torch from the kiln fires, streaming a tang of dark smoke.
Still Dakar hesitated. “I can’t sanction such risk.”
“Then I must.” The Shadow Master snatched up the drover’s oiled wool, ripped the cloth through unwilling fingers until his companion stood stripped to his jerkin.
“Felirin delivered no less than the truth! A free singer’s rights should hold his life sacrosanct, and I am Halliron’s successor! If I don’t stand forth and protest this injustice, can’t you see? Any minstrel in Tysan could burn for composing an ordinary satire!”
In Arithon’s hands, the vast, caped cloak flared and settled over taut shoulders. “I need you to frame up two runes of mastery for elemental fire. Draw them here, in my palms.”
He pressed a twig of charcoal scavenged from the glassmaker’s midden into the spellbinder’s nerveless grasp. “Damn you, think! Dakar, I can’t douse live flame with bare shadow. Not when my mage talent’s blinded.”
A surging cry from the onlookers marked the moment the sunwheel guard captain bent and set torch to the faggots.
The Crown Examiner hailed over their noise, “May Daelion Fatemaster find you repentant as you pass his Wheel in judgment!”
“Dharkaron, Ath’s angel, avenge me instead!” the condemned musician hurled back. Disheveled, not young, his face scraped and bruised, he let outrage fuel his dignity His voice sliced through the burgeoning crackle of flame and carved the first lines of a bard’s curse.
Dakar pressed stubby fingers to his face. He could not look, lest he weep. While the singer’s defiance clipped short in a rasping cough, speech failed him.
His throat closed, too parched to shape words to garner the ritual permissions.
Arithon’s prompt spurred on laggard memory. If his talent was silenced, he still had trained knowledge. The graven discipline of a masterbard’s diction bridged a channel for clear concentration, even through the first stifled whimpers from the victim chained on the pyre. Then his slim, urgent hand, thrust through Dakar’s damp one, firm enough to steady them both as the branching runes to blight fire were inscribed in crumbling ash.
“Touch anything, even your weapons, and the marks are going to smear,” Dakar cautioned.
Arithon tossed off a nod, tucked cupped hands out of sight in the folds of the cloak.
Irrevocably committed, he emerged from the cover of the glassworks, strides limned by the diamond-shard heaps of white cullet. He advanced past the rain-channeled mounds of pure sand, straight as Dharkaron Avenger’s ebon spear in the furling layers of his leathers. When his head tipped that familiar listening angle askance, a friend could do naught but feel the heart tear for the moment’s brazen, doomed courage.
“Daelion Fatemaster wept!” the Mad Prophet ground out. “For merciful sense, turn back.”
For one hagridden moment, dogged by the leaping surge of the flames, Arithon raked and measured the backs of the crowd ranged against him. They were fifty against one: the curs circling the fringes in whining excitement; the knots of weeping women; and the glassmonger’s burly craftsmen, bare arms and furrowed foreheads ruddied by the heat. They still wore hide aprons smeared with ash and the singe prints of cinders, while the rods and tongs of their trade hung cool between idle fists. Beyond them, drawn in from the plow, farmsteaders watched with their droves of barefoot children, the clappers to scare the wild birds from the seed grain clenched silent in slender fingers; next the hands from the mill, blanched head to toe with musty flour; then the grandames and old men, stoic as aged oak with the soldiers between them, impassive in their white-and-gold cloaks and prideful, expressionless faces.
All eyes tracked the fire, braiding hot tongues of carnelian through the snagged heap of faggots. In horror, in macabre, slack curiosity, the manifest presence of death held them riveted. The free singer writhed now for their sick fascination. His suffering became a spectacle, supple hands rammed taut in steel bonds, all the gifted splendor of his voice broken hoarse as the inevitable, blistering pain cracked through its fallible timbre.
Arithon’s survey touched last on the crown’s high official, his brilliance sullied by the risen smoke of his sacrifice, and his righteousness backed by the helmed ranks of his retinue.
Lord Examiner Vorrice sat enthroned on a plank propped across the clouded bricks that were pigs of raw glass, stacked ready for export to town craftshops. He wore the sunwheel of vested authority with an unswerving dedication, his jowls shaven, and his fleshy mouth tucked like pleats basted into raw silk. His view was untrammeled as the slight, dark-haired Masterbard broke his stance and stepped forward, voice raised and soaring in song.
The verses and melody in sere a cappella were the same ones performed long ago for Halliron’s widow at Innish.
Dakar heard the words, mute. He sensed the true notes spin their harmonic magic. This was the appeal that Arithon’s dead master had written for his art, a plea for mercy and a cry for understanding from a family abandoned through the demands imposed by his talent. In an expression of distilled pain, Halliron had claimed freedom to pledge his life to the immortal tradition of music.
Flattened against the glass shed, Dakar felt the first lines stab through him, whetted to a lance of bright power. Stripped of accompaniment, Arithon’s voice became a honed weapon. The spare, severe handling of each flowing lyric came tempered to unassailable force. Another step, a second verse; song unstrung every tie of resistance and stormed the floodgates of emotion.
Arithon crossed the beaten earth of the commons. Through the riptide of release as his powers reached resonance, his directive held true: to captivate, then to bind, through a suspension of irresistible beauty. On his makeshift dais, the Lord High Examiner’s pouched chin jerked in startlement. Below him, heads turned, those hatless and wind tangled and bald, and others in gold-blazoned helms. Then the bard who demanded in naked, clean song reached their midst.
He would be recognized. The yelping cur silenced. Humanity paused, pierced through by a masterbard’s construct of absolute, unalloyed sorrow.
A figure alone, Arithon parted them. His nerve stayed as iron. Above the evil crack of caught flame, his melody unreeled, simple and fine as poured water.
The sea breeze now wafted a sickening stink of singed flesh.
Sheltered, still safe, Dakar laced his hands over the clench in his gut. “Ath, merciful Ath.”
Nearest to the pyre, Arithon s’Ffalenn must endure through the reek of the fumes. His concentration must not waver. Pitch and syntax must cleave to perfection, even through the ugly, shuddering moan as the victim’s gray head thrashed to the first nip of agony.
The bard’s step trod its measure, nerveless, detached. His voice did not quaver. Each sustained note razored out in true pitch, harmony and word interlaced to create one matchless tapestry. Power as wide as new morning forced the horror at bay; drew each of the onlookers singly and turned them. Pitted against time, and the fire’s cruel lead, Arithon s’Ffalenn weaned the watchers away from their morbid fascination. He thralled them to his art with spellbinding clarity. Each step, each staid beat, he must be aware: once Felirin gave way to a full-throated scream, his effort would be shattered wholesale.
The enchantment he fashioned was founded on nothing beyond a fugitive brilliance of sound.
Second to second, he fused his art’s focus. His will, his voice, his irrefutable bearing netted guards and bystanders, and held them in rooted attention. Dakar watched them, terrified, aware of the flaw in the odds; his heart skipped for cold knowledge that one whelming dissonance would splash those superb ties of empathy to ruins.
All eyes tracked the bard, now, except for one rheumy, bent grandmother.
“Damn her, she’s deaf,” Dakar whispered through the unbidden, salt taste of tears. Sweat dripped through his beard. His lungs felt strapped in lead. The thud of each heartbeat slammed hammer to anvil against the locked bone of his sternum.
Arithon threw back his head. Face tipped to sky, he hurled all he was into the song’s final verse.
The talent he commanded ran through him like light, and snatched the stilled air into feeling.
Nothing moved but the flames. Dakar, himself paralyzed, felt mage-sense cry warning. Such winding power as this could not be indefinitely sustained. The tension had climbed to the threshold of peril, with each listener poised like blown bubbles of glass that the first jarring tap must collapse.
Then, at last, elbowed by the wizened grandfather at her side, the recalcitrant old woman turned her head.
“Now!” Dakar whispered. “Arithon, you have them, act now!”
Immersed mind and heart in the throes of his art, his audience netted like fish, the bard freed his hands from the cloak. Dakar croaked the ritual word of release; and the sketched charcoal runes to bind fire laid into Arithon’s palms raised their element to primal awareness.
The bard responded, still singing. Through that offered gateway to conjury, his gift of spun shadow descended, sharp as the snap of flung wool.
While all eyes were averted, an unnatural darkness clapped down and smothered the flames on the pyre. Felirin broke into choking, hysterical sobs.
Throughout, the descending beat of sung melody never once missed precise rhythm. Each note rang true, each word stitched its place to hold the disparate bystanders enthralled. In timing to raise the fine hairs at the neck, Arithon s’Ffalenn reached the dais. He stopped. He hurled down his falling, last line like a gauntlet; and fell silent at the feet of the crown’s Lord Examiner.
In the absence of art, the unchanged voice of nature ground as a shock on the ears.
Past the ramshackl
e eaves of the craft sheds, surf slammed and hissed over unyielding sand. The racketing creak of the mill’s turning vanes, and the shrill calls of gulls grated on dream-wakened nerves. Against that structureless absence of melody, Felirin’s whimpers struck like a whiplash of shame.
Through the riveted focus cauterized by his art, Arithon s’Ffalenn addressed the robed man on the dais. “What is a song, or a word but a thought given wing? A man should not burn for expression of ideas. The sentence passed here offers frightening precedents. Or has forthright speech become one and the same thing, to be tried as a deed that caused harm? Do we allow you to end a man’s life in a fire because you disagree with his music?”
“That’s rank impertinence!” Vorrice leaned forward, one hand raised to summon his guardsmen, and the knuckles of the other splayed over the pristine lap of his robe. “This was a crown trial, held under seal of the realm’s lawful regent.” His tight, narrowed eyes refused the appeal, and his brows clumped above his wedged nostrils. “I see no grounds for any commoner to intervene with the works of Prince Lysaer’s justice.”
Arithon stood his ground, arms lightly crossed beneath the caped shoulders of the drover’s cloak. “I’m Athera’s titled Masterbard, affirming the law of the land and a free singer’s right, as you see.” Chiseled, imperious, yet in the crowd’s sympathy through the spelled meshes tied by his song, he cracked a command to the guards. “You there! Unshackle the minstrel you have wronged. He’s no felon, but the victim of injustice.”
The ploy almost worked. Two soldiers broke ranks in reflexive obedience.
Vorrice surged to his feet. “Hold hard! Are we half-witted dupes to jump for the first softhearted meddler who speaks?” To Arithon, he shouted, “You presume far too much!” The snap of his rage reordered his guardsmen, and a murmur arose, as one, then another of the bystanders awakened to the fact that the flames in the pyre had extinguished.