The Wars of Light and Shadow (9) - INITIATE'S TRIAL

by Janny Wurts

  The other three guards split off with drawn steel to arrest Daliana. She allowed them to seize her. Nothing else could be done since the discharge thrown off the wrecked construct hurled her talent into a cognizant vision: the thing may have seemed an innocuous amulet made from scrap cloth and oddments. But windings of hair fixed in place with wax seals, then stitched with gleaming, spelled wire had encompassed the essence of a live man. Truth-Sight beheld him: black haired, green-eyed, with sharp features and a smile that flaunted challenge. With no other prompt but ancestral awareness, Daliana recognized the active semblance of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, his presence wrought by vile craft to break Lysaer’s will under Desh-thiere’s bane.

  Then the courier’s sliced palm stained the fetch and destroyed it by contamination. The thrumming howl of power snapped off, with Arithon’s conjured imprint drowned out by the initiate bearer’s unmasked aura: beyond all question that of a sister dispatched from the Koriathain.

  Daliana recovered her distraught awareness, restrained by the grip of mailed hands. Through the panicky screams of a witness, the Light’s priest cried murder. More than singed, beyond the misery of his soaked vestments, he also suffered a cut forearm from the knife’s deflected momentum.

  ‘Etarran justice will not forgive blood drawn on a temple ambassador,’ he accused, shoved forward and officiously incensed enough to cover the false courier’s chance to melt into the crowd without notice. ‘This assassin will burn as a minion of Shadow! All here witnessed her sorcerous move to attack me!’

  Amid the raw uproar, the gate guards closed ranks. ‘That will be a matter for the Lord Mayor’s magistrates, priest! Etarra does not acknowledge your canon’s authority.’

  Daliana shrank against the guardsmen’s armed bulk. Without fight, she accepted their custody. Her straits offered no place to run, and quick wits under pressure instantly grasped that submission became her the best tactic.

  For public assault on an accredited ambassador, she would be removed at rough speed to safe custody. The witch left at large could do nothing more here. The public uproar that surrounded His Radiance might threaten her order’s dark secrets. Better, the due process of a criminal trial must bring Daliana back inside the Lord Mayor’s fastidious defenses. Lysaer could not refuse to rule on a diplomatic offence except by state formality, in person.

  Brought face-to-face in the prisoner’s dock, granted her lawful hearing, Daliana planned to snatch the offensive and use the opportune moment to warn him.

  Late Winter 5923

  Ripples

  The servant who bears the daily breakfast tray to Lysaer’s private study encounters an unprecedented locked door; when his knock for entry raises no response, he calls out in appeal but receives no answer: he only hears a barrage of violent thuds, followed by frenzied crashes . . .

  In Halwythwood’s clan settlement, the Mad Prophet pleads for a fast horse to race northward at need, and when Cosach demands to know why Rathain’s prince should be abandoned to languish in Tysan, Dakar shouts, ‘That’s your task, not mine! Forget the ugly course of the reckoning when Arithon recalls I’ve betrayed him. A prescient vision just ripped up my guts! If I don’t ride now, Lysaer’s cursed nature will fall to an irreversibly vile entanglement . . . !’

  In a lonely tower westward of Ithish, the Reiyaj Seeress sits in her gimbaled seat with her pearl-blind gaze turned sunward and sees: an aspected raven abruptly soars north; a galley lately from South Strait rows eastward; a dark-haired prince prepares to leave Caithwood; while a crone in Sanpashir speaks a word beyond time that calls one of the oracle’s silent attendants to shoulder a critical errand foreseen for millennia . . .

  Late Winter 5923

  VII. Confrontations

  T

  he urgent summons pressed by Sethvir’s news overtook Asandir in the north wilds above Penstair, amid a tense altercation with a young dragon. The creature he faced was grown to full size but not yet fleshed out to maturity. Doused under the massive loom of its shadow, the Sorcerer stood as a mouse. If his adamant presence was not to be trifled with, the dragon’s perceptions were under-developed. Its cognizance had yet to evolve far enough to grasp the range of its own power. ‘Push!’

  The explorative tendril of curiosity shocked with a force to liquefy matter; air rippled to a shriek of recoil. But before the rock shore underfoot flew asunder, or the nearby atmosphere unravelled to dissolution, Asandir absorbed the wild energy into his aura with consummate skill, then transmuted the disordered blast into a precise word of reciprocal balance.

  ‘Serenity.’

  The drake whuffed a startled tendril of flame. Ebon claws flexed. It minced the ground where it poised into shreds. Agile as a cat upon horny, scaled talons, the creature gleamed a glorious green-bronze. Its barely grown coil of exuberant strength did not recognize boundaries or know enough to counter the might of its own unfledged desires. Its eye blazed a searing sun yellow with challenge. The slit pupil, dark as primordial night, loomed as tall as its human-sized adversary. Nameless, unmated, too unformed to show the traits of its destined gender, this scaled invader smoked with aggression and failed to regard the Fellowship Sorcerer as threatening.

  A mistake Asandir preferred to disarm, if he could, without lethal damage. He watched in deceptive, poised calm, while the arched neck above him snaked downwards. Bared teeth like sparkling scimitars slashed at the speck that obstructed its path.

  ‘Push!!!!!’

  Enveloped in puffed fumes, rattled by thunderous roars, Asandir held firm. His counter-thrust whispered: ‘Tranquillity.’ Clear grey, his eyes, as his monstrous adversary blazed into a sudden, mad glory of colours, its agitated auric mantle unreeled towards the cusp of explosive attack. When the Sorcerer’s concepts for nothing and quiet failed to recontain that burst of impatience, Asandir braced for the next eruptive attempt to fray his shield of denouncement.

  Uncanny, reactive chills ripped his skin, as the young dragon wrestled with the novel discovery that it faced an obstructive presence.

  Then, ‘Push!’ became ‘Poke!’ followed up, hard, by ‘SHOVE!’ with the sudden, erect clash of crest spikes the brisk warning that its curiosity moved beyond an idle game.

  Asandir gave back unresistence, without sound or movement: ‘Emptinessssss . . .’

  But the restless drake shook off his blandishment. It refused to be swerved or blindsided. Not after being drawn to Athera by the latest, strayed ripple of an adult dragon’s entrancing discovery – Seshkrozchiel, who wielded her bargain with Davien, and who had not tired of the novelty.

  Asandir side-stepped a spurt of raw flame, while this creature’s exuberant frustration spiked yet again. Its pique flared into an active contempt, sparkled with dangerous annoyance. Any drake provoked into a full-blown rage could unravel the solid surrounds of Penstair, fast as jerked yarn from a knit.

  The flesh-and-bone wisp of Asandir’s planted form appeared frail as spun glass upon the vulnerable ground he defended. Which bare vista jutted against the storm-whipped breakers of the northern ocean, a place gashed across by the scars from the last outbreak of drake war, fought to a stand-off fifty-six years ago. Spume smoked over the concretion of slag, flash-lit to steam in the rippled air. Stone itself roiled like heat struck off a forge, as the drake’s tempest of ignorant emotions shimmered like a flare hurled earthward. Enveloped by the tortured clash of the elements, the Sorcerer gently shaped his own suggestive whisper as, ‘Boredom . . .’

  The drake’s lambent eyes narrowed. The stamp of a talon jarred stone into fissures, and shuddered, quaking, through the deep layers of magma beneath. One more vicious thought, or a clap of sail wings could wrench the region’s geological stability straight to mayhem. As boredom! netted the roil of back-lash, then crumbled away without quenching the young drake’s aggression, Asandir regretfully changed tactics. In silken, soft increments, he bled off a trickle of the drake’s intrusive emanation.

  Which crackling, fierce currents he fed to the gale
, already inbound for the headland. A savage gust ripped, seemingly out of nowhere, and bellied the drake’s folded wings. It staggered, surprised, then crouched, weasel quick to regain its balance. Flame sheared from its snout and boiled the nearby shingle to fumes that stung Asandir’s lungs. He coughed, a mistake.

  The small noise betrayed his animal aliveness. As the drake struck to kill, the Sorcerer sprang sidewards. Teeth clashed, and thought roared! Asandir was not thrown off guard. Neat as a fencer, he fielded the murderous charge, then cancelled the volatile wave as it broke with a rune that shocked a thunder-clap out of clear sky.

  Except for the last packet, flicked by his intent, which tweaked the world’s wind again. The deflected strike sliced the crests of the waves and razed off their foam tops like a cleaver. Sheared gallons splashed over dry land like poured ice, and the dragon back-scrabbled, hissing.

  Of all things, great drakes detested a dousing. This one trumpeted, startled into a crouch. Before it sprang, Asandir topped the aggressive force! of its distress with a gushed resonance that shouted, ‘MORE WATER!’

  The dragon whirled. Knife-edged tail flukes clove the wind, whistling, while spread sail leather cracked, and clawed talons scrabbled for purchase. Hazed to awkward flight, the youngling fled from Athera and dived headlong through the oiled film web that spanned the massive stone archway of Northgate. Across the barrier, designed only for drakes, its unbridled might was banished offworld just in time to avert broadscale mayhem.

  Asandir clawed back his singed hair and blinked briny spray from his eyes. Shaking, beset by the turbulent eddies that hammered the shore-line, he recouped his upset priorities. Three hours belated, he acknowledged the emergency dispatch from Althain Tower.

  ‘I’m on my way, shortly,’ he snapped off to Sethvir, ‘unless greater need commands my presence soonest?’

  His colleague’s earth-sense must acknowledge the anvilhead tempest poised to slam into Anglefen. The gale ought to be settled before the disruption raked through the groves in Deshir, and unnatural stress wracked the mysteries there and snarled the fourth lane with lightning squalls, out of season.

  ‘Our culpable colleague sends his regrets,’ came the abstruse response, which told Asandir that his requested stay was cancelled forthwith. No cry of emergency might stem the whim of Seshkrozchiel, coupled with Davien’s errant genius. The energetic allure of their paired activity involved an obscure work of invention, done for drakish fancy, and set in motion from the desolate, far continent of Kathtairr. Sethvir added, ‘You couldn’t determine why Chaimistarizog’s not minding the watch on the drake side of Northgate?’

  ‘Not yet.’ The youngling had been too rash to test its incoherent intelligence with questions. Tall and wind-whipped, a gaunt figure as austere and grey as the storm front, Asandir hastened past the glassine fissures and slag craters pocked by drakefire, both ancient and present. A whistle summoned his horse from the sheltered vale where it grazed in safety. He replaced bridle and saddle at speed, then mounted and turned the black stallion’s head towards the Second Age ruin at Penstair. The lumped towers and vine-tangled, melted stonewalls lay fifteen leagues distant, an unpleasant ride under pressure. Yet the Paravian focus there must be engaged before sundown for his transfer to Althain Tower. Sethvir’s cagy reluctance to disclose the reason for speed raised concern. Asandir extended his vitality to augment his mount’s stamina and galloped with reckless disregard for reserves.

  He arrived in fraught state, met by no helping hand at the third lane focus circle set within the tower’s guarded foundation. Alone, the field Sorcerer passed through the grand warding. He saw his tired horse rubbed down, stabled, and fed. Cloaked, and still clad in leathers ingrained with the sulphurous reek of drakefire, he raced up the narrow dungeon stair to the ground-floor trap, lifted by counterweights. The nine flights that spiralled above the first level were ascended as fast. His rapid step echoed past the closed doors of the storage vaults that housed the world’s treasured antiquities. Sethvir’s quarters loomed empty, with no fire laid against the on-coming night. Above, the King’s Chamber was deserted and cold. Asandir climbed upwards, silted in shadow, the wall sconces unlit to greet his return. Other rooms, higher up, bound in iron locks and wardings wore their grim silences, undisturbed. Without pause to recover his breath on the landings, Asandir strode into the library housed on the tower’s top floor.

  Afterglow spilled through the western sills and chased fading glints off the rows of leather-bound record books. The haphazard jumble of chairs remained vacant, as well as the threadbare tapestry cushions in the single uncluttered window-seat.

  Icy air past the threshold replaced the cozy fust of parchment and wax. Except for weighted papers and a quill pen frozen upright in an uncorked horn ink-well, the table-top’s obsidian polish reflected the wan silver glaze of first starlight, sky-studded, from the eastern casement. The carved dragon pillar that supported its base cast a sinuous shadow across the carpet, with the looped silhouette of the candelabrum snaked against the glass panes, shut and latched against the bitter gusts.

  Cued by Sethvir’s absence, and led onwards by the influx of draught, Asandir turned towards the left-hand rank of shelves and pressed a brass stud that looked like a fastener. He stood back as a click released a hidden catch. The shelving swung away on an oiled pivot. A recessed ladder hidden behind led upwards to a trap-door that nestled between the overhead rafters. The small balcony under the outside eaves above had been built for Ciladis, who once had enjoyed the dizzying vantage on summer evenings to encourage thought.

  Tonight, the wide-open trap let in the black sky of winter. Unlike Ciladis in peaceful repose, Sethvir communed with the heavens when he was inconsolably troubled. Asandir set his bare hands to the rungs. Hungry and tired, already bone cold, he outfaced his dread and shouldered the climb.

  Acute distress never made Sethvir thoughtless. He tended a small flame to brew cinnamon tea, tucked into the niche where the sheltered observatory caught the last rosy tint of the afterglow. His cache also included fresh bread and warm stew in a cauldron, a waxed wheel of cheese, two raisin puddings soaked in cream, and almonds crusted in molasses from Southshire: enough sweetmeats to sate the ravenous appetite of the colleague returned from the field.

  Asandir surveyed the spread, then folded long limbs and seated himself. ‘Where will the next crisis take me?’ he asked outright, since Sethvir’s sly tact had not troubled to mask the spell-clad restoratives laced into the readied meal.

  The huddled Sorcerer painted in fire-light stirred out of earth-sensed entrancement. His locked fingers stayed clasped to his tea-mug, and threadbare maroon robes flapped in the stiffening breeze. A moment passed. Then the question’s cryptic response emerged, muffled, through snagged strands of hair and white beard. ‘Havish.’

  Asandir all but lost his grip on the ladle as he scooped the lamb savoury over a wedge of brown bread. ‘Havish!’ Which outburst fell away without echo into the deepening cobalt sky.

  Sethvir qualified through a shared fragment of vision: of an argument in bitten clan accents over the fate of a blond man with a broken, scarred nose, just loaded comatose into a horse litter. ‘This afternoon,’ the Warden added, morose.

  ‘That’s Tarens!’ Asandir exclaimed, appalled.

  The misery behind Sethvir’s nod left his colleague to assemble the logic: that the brilliant defense wrought by Arithon’s talent, which deflected the march of the True Sect’s armed zealots, also had provoked an unforeseen back-lash. The ancient lineages were bred to withstand the sharp rise in resonance that now rendered Caithwood’s reactive flux currents a dire hazard to hapless outsiders. Town-born, and brought far inside the forest as a guest of the clans, the crofter possessed no such protection. Afflicted by dreams, then stunned to raving madness as the shock unhinged changed perceptions, the beset mind would shut down. Left unattended, the false haven of unconsciousness could progress into wasting decline. Tarens risked death without an initiate’s knowled
ge to seek restored balance.

  ‘My oath prevents aid if the man should succumb,’ Asandir snapped with gruff bitterness. ‘Unless, of course, someone overrules Arithon’s headstrong loyalty. Can the chieftain’s enclave shake him to his senses, or press him against his grain to abandon a friendship?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Sethvir whispered. ‘Rather, the clan healers have drugged Tarens senseless with possets. They acted by Arithon’s request, hoping to buy enough time to carry the stricken crofter past range of Caithwood’s uncanny influence.’ With his Grace’s active involvement, no Fellowship Sorcerer might intervene.

  Asandir railed in bitter exasperation, ‘Ath forfend! Such adamant heart will drive us straight to ruin. Our prince might break outright for the loss of another man bound under his protection.’

  ‘His Grace doesn’t recall that history, yet,’ Sethvir admitted. ‘He’s barely encountered the sorry fact his own hand caused Caolle’s death.’

  Even so, the instinctive contour of yesteryear’s horrors shadowed Arithon’s determined choices. The cruel roll-call of names, and the grief impressed by more than one steadfast friend’s fatal stand had firmed a character that would not forsake another comrade to die. No argument might swerve the foolish departure shouldered in Tarens’s behalf. Sethvir allowed, not resigned, ‘The fellow does have a chance to survive, perhaps even recover his wits without harm.’

  ‘If he escapes the reach of Caithwood’s raised mysteries in time,’ Asandir cracked in frustration. ‘And at an unconscionable risk to Rathain’s irreplaceable blood-line!’ Helpless to defang that intractable thorn, the field Sorcerer ploughed into his meal, and chased the suspiciously side-tracked purpose for his destination. ‘Then I’m bound back to Havish to hasten the High King’s unfinished training? That doesn’t explain the rush on my recall.’