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

by Janny Wurts

  Tarens sucked in a delicate breath. ‘The conquered town’s fate is a luxury neither of us can afford.’

  The rebuttal snapped back. ‘Three boats are already sunk at the dock. Enough honest livelihoods have been ravaged!’

  ‘Worse will befall hapless folk if you tarry.’ Against even tears, urgency forced Tarens to shoulder the dead liegeman’s honour passed into his keeping. ‘The brunt of the tragedy can’t be undone. Your gift of Shadow has just put the torch to a war that must waken disaster.’

  Nothing remained but the dauntless task thrown to a man sorely unfit: to safeguard a prince through the gamut of enemies who sought his destruction, no matter the cost. Braced to mete out the most brutal reawakening of all, Tarens said, ‘Time’s come to recall the fact Desh-thiere’s geas still grips the son of your mother, named Lysaer s’Ilessid.’

  No sound emerged as that wrenching blow fell.

  But Sethvir also cringed for the scope of the impact, frozen between anguished steps in the distanced isolation of Althain Tower. Not blind in the dark, he also wept, while the bleak cascade of probability laid bare as the day’s events begat the bleak future. He could not intervene: even as prescient earth-sense unveiled the blood-soaked ground of the battle to come.

  Two men alone must thread the gamut as two war hosts clashed, and Havish’s untested young sovereign rose to engage the grinding axe of a war host fueled by fear and false doctrine. No Sorcerer might seize the initiative to salvage whole nations from chaos. Not while Asandir’s desperate oath stayed the Fellowship’s rightful authority. Unless Arithon s’Ffalenn could be restored to Rathain’s clans alive, and until he accepted the grace of the crown’s protection in Halwythwood, the fragile thread of his future might rest in the hands of three errant children.

  Early Spring 5923

  First Deflections

  Esfand s’Valerient pressed grubby fists to his temples to ease the throb of a flash-fire headache. Ever since the markers had moved, the surged pulse of the lane flux pushed his pressured instincts with ever-more-insistent clarity. The heritage of a caithdein’s heir apparent prickled his nape with the nascent awareness of war. No matter how often he breathed the stilled air or steadied his disrupted focus, he failed to dispel the waves of distress that rippled through his attuned senses. Repeatedly his ordered thoughts scattered, until the urgency of pending upheaval pressured him towards the threshold of gifted Sight. Grounded, determined to stave off the painful distraction, Esfand locked his teeth. But the queasy slip-stream continued to ride him, a half-sensed invisible tumble of motion that riffled the depths beneath self-aware cognizance. He felt primed to leap out of his skin as the quicksilver seethe of dire events jinked his thoughts like the dart of shoaled fish.

  At Rathain’s western border where the youngest clan wayfarers camped, the storm’s edge was ephemeral, still. Bird-song in the brush heralded only the spring-tide vigour of nesting, while dawn’s pall of mist dispersed to a dull pewter overcast. The open terrain at the rim of the foothills rolled away in soft folds, with cross-hatched thickets of leafless scrub tossed under brisk gusts, cotton-damp with the promise of rain. The spare fire made to roast the winter-thin hare bagged by Siantra’s bow had gone cold, with the ashes unburied.

  Which careless behaviour, born of delay, spiked Esfand’s already gouged nerves. The north spur of the Storlains was no safe place to be caught laggard with indecision, skulking as they were at the hostile verge of the True Sect’s defended territory.

  But daybreak shed no better light on their current fence-sitting debate. The brave trio who journeyed in search of their prince dead-locked over the least perilous route to broach Tysan’s sealed border.

  Always, Khadrien’s hot-headed opinion drowned everyone else in the breach. ‘That’s lame-brained!’

  Lounged on one elbow and stubbled as a mountebank in buckskins left ragged where fringes had been nipped off for tie-strings, he stabbed his dagger into the map Siantra had scratched in the dirt. His point skewered the crux where the trade-road to East Bransing threaded the narrows between the north scarp, and the cove inlet whose sandy shallows scalloped the south-coast of Instrell Bay. ‘If we cross an armed patrol, where could we duck?’ He puffed a persimmon strand of hair from his eyes, the better to glower.

  Esfand agreed with his volatile cousin. ‘The season’s too chilly to cower in a marsh. There’s no natural cover for leagues in this blighted country.’

  ‘Well, your crackpot plan to try the trade-road is worse.’ Grave and self-possessed, her knees tucked up behind firmly crossed arms, Siantra whetted her retort with cool female logic. ‘No, don’t tell me I’m chicken!’ she upbraided Khadrien. ‘To sneak a ride in a wagon is barking madness. Forget finding a stone-blind, ignorant driver, nobody born inside of a town travels through these hills alone. What about the gauntlet of temple fanatics? If they’ve got a diviner, their search at the border sees us cut dead at the check-point.’

  Khadrien grinned, minded to give cheek.

  Siantra pounced first. ‘No, you go suck donkey’s eggs!’ Then she trampled his tirade forthwith. ‘Don’t dream the Sunwheel dedicates won’t exercise their suspicions, jumpy as they’ll be over Shadow. Better we take the longer path, south. Araethura won’t leave us wrong side of Fate’s Wheel, pleading forgiveness at Daelion’s reckoning.’

  Khadrien’s insolence dared to object. ‘We’d need a boat to by-pass Backwater’s town garrison.’

  ‘No threat.’ Siantra squared off in earnest. ‘What townsman risks the old way to Lithmarin, scared as they are of the world’s greater mysteries?’

  ‘But we don’t have a season to waste on a roundabout route,’ Esfand said with intent to quench further squabble.

  But as usual, his tactless cousin stayed bereft of all sense of self-preservation. ‘Siantra’s a bird-brained female, what else?’

  Tucked feline poise uncoiled at speed and hurled the stick lately used for a stylus.

  Her spiteful aim met Khadrien’s cobra-quick catch. He brushed off the loam showered over his leathers, smirked with flushed challenge, and continued ranting. ‘Anyway, the shift in the flux surely has altered the ground. A dire proximity could be the more dangerous. Need I repeat the ugly dreams I’ve had lately, of purges by temple examiners? They’re hunting down wakened talent in force! If we get pushed west, the flux effervescence at Athili’s rim might as easily turn us at bay or maze us to confusion rather than hide us.’

  ‘And you say I’m the sissy?’ Siantra laughed.

  Esfand risked his neck and thrust between. ‘For sure that’s a peril we dare not ignore.’ Not under the heightened tide of the lane flux, which had not subsided. The caithdein’s heir scrapped his own daft idea, to float out by night and stow away on an anchored fishing smack. The rocky shore-line lacked timber to fashion a raft. Worse, the tidal currents that churned Instrell Bay were ferociously swift. Disgruntled himself by their foolhardy options, he could not fault his companions’ derision.

  Yet their vital mission surely would fail if caution led them to falter.

  ‘Certain as frost, we cannot linger here.’ Esfand shouldered the onus, as Cosach’s appointed successor. ‘Since we have no clue where to look for his Grace, and every proposal looks like a suicide, might as well flip a knife and spare guess-work.’ He fingered the dirk at his belt for the toss.

  But before the blade in his grasp cleared the sheath, sudden nausea folded him double. Esfand collapsed under the unbalanced swoop as his spun senses took leave of his body. Dizziness felled him across the crude map: no longer a pattern scored in the dirt, but unreeled instead as spontaneous vision that unfolded the Sighted vista of Lanshire’s terrain . . .

  Siantra’s cry of alarm reached his ears, thinned away into distance. Then Khadrien’s rough-house grip shook his arm, a heart-beat too late to matter. Esfand’s unleashed spirit already took wing, catapulted too far beyond reach to respond.

  ‘He’s likely driven himself faint from hunger.’ Practical even
while shocked to distress, Siantra asked Khadrien to untie a bedroll. When her brisk slap raised a flush on Esfand’s pale cheek, but no reflexive flutter of lashes, she sorely regretted her feckless decision to set off alone. In trouble and past reach of adult wisdom, she swallowed regret and took action. ‘Khadrien, hurry. Help me get him wrapped up.’

  Her tone all but shouted with censure: that on the uncanny night when they sensed the momentous change in the world’s flux, they should have given up and headed for home. ‘Earl Cosach will flay us alive if harm comes to his only grown son!’

  ‘Are you light-headed, too? Or only faint-hearted?’ Khadrien let fly, scared enough to fall back upon vicious bravado. ‘This is not starvation. I haven’t cadged bigger shares on the sly. Esfand’s eaten the same rations we all have.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ Siantra’s severe grey eyes never wavered. ‘He’s done things before to give friends the advantage. And you steal like a crow. The time we filched the stored nuts from the root-cellar, you ate more than anyone.’

  ‘Not this time.’ Stung red, Khadrien unfurled the moth-eaten blanket. ‘Our purpose here is no prank. More, we’ve come too far to go back.’ He lent his strength to arrange their companion in comfort. ‘This is not weakness,’ he added, insistent. ‘More likely Esfand’s been overcome by his ancestral talent.’

  Siantra conceded this might be the case. S’Valerient Sight had been known to provoke an unconscious state. Esfand’s skin was not sweated with sickness. His pulse stayed regular, his breathing, relaxed. If his spirit had withdrawn in trance, without the benefit of skilled knowledge, little else might be done. They must keep him warm, wait, and hope the pervasive visions would release him safely back into waking awareness.

  ‘You’ll stand the vigil, then.’ Siantra gathered her strung bow and quiver and sprang up with the grace of a lioness. ‘I’m off to hunt game and set snares. Just in case!’ Her arch glance silenced Khadrien’s wisecrack. ‘If Esfand is caught in true dreaming, or not, we still need more jerky if we’re to cross over the notch. Are you reckless enough to claim that a cookfire in the borderlands won’t draw the enemy down on us?’

  To blink was to miss Siantra’s departure, adept as she was at concealment. Khadrien found himself solitary, with the whisk of the wind storm-scented and dense. A wedge of geese honked overhead, northbound harbingers of the turned season. Khadrien tugged the marmalade tendril of hair whipped loose from his untidy clan braid. He cursed the benighted ties of blood-kinship that saddled him with the watch. Too restless for patience and, for once, too careful to whittle where wood shavings might tip off a league tracker, he settled on the stony, chill ground and pillowed Esfand’s head in his lap.

  The gesture eased nothing. Khadrien possessed no healer’s discipline. Untrained, he might recognize breaking danger, but only if something went terribly wrong. Without the herb-lore to brew exact stimulants, or the grace of an empathic attunement, he could offer no recourse. His best friend’s stupor might spiral unchecked into a fatal coma.

  The tentative palm laid on Esfand’s brow encountered no fever. Not yet, the fine tremors that warned of an imbalanced back-lash. Anxiety mounted, regardless. Change had thinned the veil. The deep pulse of the mysteries unsettled human awareness as never before. Since clanborn heritage heightened such sensitivity, Khadrien fretted that Esfand’s blood talent might pose a threat beyond precedent.

  ‘Just steer clear of entanglement with the halo of light that bounds Athili,’ Khadrien begged his friend’s inert form.

  Cosach’s heir designate remained unresponsive. His dark braid with its burled glint of red draped one slack shoulder, while the hardened palm once scarred by foolish knife play lay artlessly open. His face, with his mother’s triangular chin, seemed erased of all animate character. If today’s earnest placement of weapons bespoke his keen will to survive, the mouth, robbed of its mischievous curl, showed no twitch of boisterous laughter.

  Burdened with adult cares beyond measure, Khadrien ached for the carefree boyhood irrevocably left behind.

  Time crept. The morning advanced to the cry of a circling hawk and the rustled flit of the song-birds through the scrub. Then their wing-beats vanished with the changeable gusts, and a silvered veil of rainfall dimmed the clouds bellied in from the west. Khadrien fashioned a makeshift shelter, while Esfand sprawled, yet unstirring. His pallid forehead stayed warm, but not flushed. Chills did not lace him with clammy sweat.

  ‘Where are you, friend?’ Khadrien pleaded. Prolonged delay compounded their danger, and even Siantra’s stealthy touch at foraging increased the risk of exposure. ‘Ath’s grace, Esfand! What’s drawn your spirit away from us?’

  No answer arose. Only the uneasy prickle of gooseflesh stirred up by latent s’Valerient talent. Khadrien shivered, drawn in unaware as the Sighted gift shared through common blood heritage pulled him into a sympathetic reverie . . .

  Somewhere at a distance, a lone blond rider puts the lash to a horse that flags underneath him . . . while elsewhere, amid the gravel-stark sweep of a wasteland, a magnificent black stallion staggers in limping exhaustion, abandoned by his rider’s desperate urgency. Stripped of tack, his coat lathered, the gallant creature blows foam flecked with blood from flared nostrils, gaunt ribs heaving in fatal extremity . . .

  Khadrien startled alert, shocked to terror. ‘Almighty mother of storms!’ Yanked back from the surge of a waking vision, he wept, grieved by the sense that one of the world’s greater powers had gone irretrievably wrong. He had never been overcome by dire dreams! Always before, his ancestral gift manifested through natural sleep. Scared pithless, Khadrien could not read the sun’s angle through the slate sheets of banked cloud to know how much time had slid past. Through the tap and trickle of rainfall, he heard no sign of Siantra’s return. The hawk’s cry was absent, the game long since fled to ground ahead of the storm front. Icy wind hissed through the thickets, and the mercury veil of drizzle drummed into a steady downpour.

  Run-off already beaded the oiled wool of Esfand’s blanket. He lay still in the throes of deep trance, not cold, but violently shuddering. The clench to his jaw suggested the Sight he witnessed bordered on nightmare.

  Khadrien strove to recoup his rattled poise. Worse for them both, that his volatile faculties proved to be susceptible to rapport. The concern that sapped his courage was not groundless if the powerful visions that gripped Cosach’s heir charged the flux with the potency to sweep a by-standing talent into hapless empathy.

  Khadrien understood he must stand his watch at a safer distance. He marshalled his stiffened muscles to stand when dizziness upended his senses. The whelming surge caused by the outbreak of war rent his prudent intention to tatters . . .

  * * *

  To the west, where the rainfall had rinsed nothing clean, the wreckage of flesh sprawled on the killing field was too fresh to attract the large scavengers. Only pilfering crows cruised the site, chased to raucous, indignant flight by the rumble of an armoured chariot’s passage. Flocked five or six to the cluster, the birds launched almost from under hooves of the lathered team. Tossed scraps of black crepe amid pearly mist, they fluttered in gyres and resettled to their grisly industry, gorging on the eyes and the tender, gored flesh of the rag-bundle corpses. Few wore mail or armour. Most of the fallen were weaponless males, clothed in the wool plaid and homespun of field-hands. Cut down with their scythes still in hand, with no more than the muscle used to shear wheat, they had fought the Light’s dedicate pikemen.

  Their futile stand had been brutally short. The air reeked yet of their desperate, quick agony, ended in the hour past daybreak.

  None moaned or twitched, though the wounds that had killed steamed yet in the cold, and the bitter fog coiled above the drab ground still sparkled with the ephemeral, shed streamers of undispersed spirit light.

  To the eye without mage-sight, the low, flattened ground spread dull brown as napped burlap, blued to a sullen cast by the damp. Mud sucked at the wheels that gouged the c
hopped earth, milled to clods by the lancers’ destriers. The more delicate hooves of the white horses in harness jogged across the same ground, legs ribboned with spatters, tinged pink. They had been hard-run. Their soaked flanks heaved with advanced exhaustion. The war rig jolted to their laboured strides, the sole movement amid the vista of savaged landscape.

  Ahead, a smear of smoke marred a view not soothed by the liquid splash of the puddles. Piercing, the distanced, terrified screams wrung from traumatized human throats. That shrilled note caused the slightly built man of the pair conveyed in the chariot to stiffen.

  Leather showered its fringe of hung droplets as he firmed his wet grip on the reins. The spoked wheels squeaked on the axle as the tired team swerved in response. Their ragged pivot turned towards the site where the Light’s dedicates slaughtered still in the course of their ordained invasion.

  The fair man hunched in misery at the driver’s side protested the change in direction. ‘Arithon! No.’ Bull-shouldered, his tall frame braced by his nervous clutch on the rail, he sawed on in a crofter’s broad vowels. ‘No way on this side of Sithaer’s ninth gate are we fit to challenge a war host! Have you addled your brains? We’re still hunted men under hot chase from the scaffold.’

  ‘Watch me.’ The fierce creature revealed as his Grace of Rathain twitched the lines and brought the blown team to a halt. He snapped, ‘Steady the horses,’ and passed over the reins, which were fumbled, then dropped by the other’s ham-fisted startlement. ‘By Ath’s witness, you’ve shown you can kill like a soldier. Surely a four-abreast rig’s not beyond you?’

  The sarcasm floundered into an inimical silence. While the spraddled harness team stood with drooped heads, the royal scion sprang from the chariot, which granted the distant clan dreamer’s vision a clear view of Rathain’s sanctioned prince.

  Small and neat as a cat on his feet, his Grace had expressively angular features, stubbled by raffish neglect. A light step that suggested superbly drilled skills advanced him to the hind leg of the left-side-wheel horse. There he bent with decision, lifted a hoof, and used a short dagger to raise the nail clenches and pry off a shoe.