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

by Janny Wurts

  Unless the initiate asked for direct help, Sethvir could do nothing! Only weep, as the vile progression of sigils ripped her vibrant awareness to a mindless husk. The Sorcerer recognized the destructive construct. This twisted variant sprang from a ritual stolen by force from the Biedar. He had seen Elaira shape the same invocation in its undefiled form once before, when, by free consent, Glendien’s form had conceived a doomed daughter to Arithon s’Ffalenn.

  Yet this moment’s forged ciphers created no act of free partnership. Instead, flesh became an animate glove for Lirenda to use as a surrogate. Prime Selidie distanced herself from the weave until the last ripple of trauma was silenced.

  Sethvir blotted sweat from his furrowed brow, beyond troubled as the bent of Selidie’s dark practice resumed. While the Waystone’s citrine inclusion provided a secure foothold for entry, the Matriarch guided the procedure from outside, shielded behind Lirenda’s trained knowledge, and secure from hazard should aught go amiss.

  Lirenda threaded a cautious tendril of awareness through the initiate’s body. Slowly, her cautious probe unreeled into the altered Waystone. Deeper, where the citrine plume thinned, the chorus of demented voices inside stirred awake to the stealthy intrusion.

  Sethvir shivered, arms crossed at his breast. Even the nerve of a Fellowship Sorcerer shrank from the malice that lurked in the great crystal’s lattice. But coerced under Selidie’s intemperate need, Lirenda had no other choice. Now engaged, her own spirit stood at grave risk of becoming devoured. Her taut face dripped sweat as the jewel’s morass of hostile consciousness jockeyed to seize control. Jabbed in vicious assault, the inert initiate set up as proxy whimpered and jerked. Her twitches built into raked shudders until her back arched against the restraints. Tasked by Selidie’s prompt, Lirenda laid down protective ciphers to deflect the incessant barrage. Since the amethyst’s fractured alignment presented an unrecognizable pattern, she trod the razor’s edge of dire peril. A circle of ranked Seniors stayed poised for intervention should the effort to remaster the fractious focus stone go irretrievably wrong.

  No groundless fear, Sethvir knew, prickled to foreboding while the tissue-thin veils of unbirthed possibility spun off the shadows of sinister futures. Always, the Waystone’s restive nature posed danger, even when wielded under the hand of a fully initiate Prime. Too many millennia of subjugate service had clogged the matrix with ancient records. Beside the uncleared detritus of old spells and the imprinted memories of former Primes, the jewel’s bleak depths also seethed with the wrack of failed candidates for the Matriarch’s seat. Broken under the vicious trial to subdue the amethyst’s attributes, most of them lingered, consumed by ferocious hatred. Offered an opening after exhaustive centuries of insane confinement, their trapped spirits mobbed the body of the subsumed woman, until her possessed flesh writhed and moaned to their tormented cries. As their grisly gambit, she existed only to waylay their unleashed malevolence.

  Sethvir distanced his vision. He need not remain: already the smoke haze of probabilities coalesced to reveal the outcome. The Prime would seize her dauntless triumph with time, her victory reliant upon the doomed strengths of the culls she selected to serve. Until death, one by one, they would absorb the toxic dross from the Waystone’s turbulent core. The map of the stone’s altered matrix would be reconfigured in innocent blood.

  The moment Selidie tamed the jewel’s skewed focus, she would discover the change long since noted by Sethvir’s earth-sense: that the disastrous shift in the jewel’s main axis also altered the innate signature of the crystal’s identity. The former pattern, once evoked by the Fellowship, no longer enabled Athera’s resistance to dire spellcraft spun through the Waystone’s matrix. The vital stay would no longer be recognized, which forepromised the Prime’s fullest use of her power as an unbridled force in the world, once again.

  ‘Davien’s ghastly turn of invention had to backfire into our laps!’ Sethvir groused. The pitfall unreeled, pitched to yawn underfoot.

  Selidie’s crippling strike at Fellowship interests loomed from possible, to probable, ever nearer to headlong collision, until the interstices shone like fixed nails snagged through the unwritten future. If Arithon’s inventive use of wrought shadow had balked the Prime’s bid at Torwent, Sethvir’s prescience measured the on-coming crisis that darkened Arithon’s destiny. Peril gathered with each step he took, until the grim nexus contorted through Lanshire acquired the ink-and-lightning lour of a thunder-cloud.

  For the critical breach had smashed the weave of Teylia’s stop-gap protection: Rathain’s threatened prince recalled too much to blind his identity from the Prime’s scryers. Fatally, Arithon knew too little yet to fight back in aware self-defense. His flight would stay harried by vicious pursuit, caught as he was between the poised jaws of two hostile war hosts.

  Armed with the enabled Great Waystone, in a week, or a fortnight, or a month, the Koriani Matriarch would renew the bid to take down her choice prey.

  ‘Like flies to a dung-heap, we’re plagued!’ Sethvir snarled.

  He whirled, wrenched open the store-closet door, and charged through the ink-powder puffed from his robes in his haste to mount the narrow stair. Emerged into daylight in the top-floor library, the Sorcerer stalked to the stone table. He removed the piled books. A sweep of his forearm raked aside the detritus of frayed ribbon markers and quill pens. Stray manuscript pages fluttered to the floor as he cleared the wrought-iron brazier that centred the obsidian slab. His Warden’s permission focused the flux lines that crossed in convergency through Althain Tower and ignited the fire-pan. Pure light without fuel shone like a star, blue-white and piercingly blinding . . .

  . . . while through his earth-linked awareness, Sethvir sensed the distanced thrum on the world’s winds, as the webbed sails of a dragon’s wings drove its sleek body in hurtling flight; while the beat of a black stallion’s heart clenched and faltered; to the raced tattoo, elsewhere, as a deer’s cloven hooves crossed the trail of three young clanborn fugitives. Which spontaneous event caused a head-hunter’s hounds to swerve from their course and run riot. More hooves drummed the ground: horses this time, as the pack’s outriders spurred ahead to whip the dogs off and recover the abandoned scent: a precious lead gained for the audacious children who carried the black sword, Alithiel . . .

  . . . as Sethvir shaped his singlar will and snagged the stream of the flux. The summons he fashioned at Althain Tower arced outward and vaulted the lightless, bleak void between stars . . .

  * * *

  The urgent call rang all the way through to Marak. There, two discorporate colleagues took pause from the labour of healing the fissures that damaged a distant planet’s etheric web.

  An inveterate prankster, Kharadmon was quickest with a tart remonstrance. ‘Didn’t I say that Prime Selidie has the persistence of a rooting tapeworm? I’d forfeit my staked prize straightaway if your wind-bag shade could be gagged into permanent silence.’

  ‘You’d ruin your days,’ Luhaine snapped back, ‘or fade moping from boredom with no by-play for your livid insults.’

  ‘Dharkaron Avenge! A dolt might agree.’ Kharadmon’s snort whirled a dust-devil out of a stony, dry gulch as his disengaged essence coalesced for return to Athera. ‘Forbearance on my part has lulled your wits to complacent senility.’

  Luhaine deferred the ripe gambit. Single-minded perfectionist, he double-capped the last ciphers, which fussy precaution as ever allowed his mercurial colleague the lead. But the point was contested with bull-dog persistence the instant he moved to catch up. ‘Your wager’s not honestly won, yet, besides. The Prime has not harnessed the Waystone’s might, fully. Before you gloat like a fox prematurely, I posit she’ll stage her catastrophe to lay us low after the solstice.’

  ‘Pessimist!’ The dust gyre unravelled, fanned to a hazed cloud upon Kharadmon’s abrupt departure.

  Luhaine’s more staid exit bored through and left a punched smoke-ring adrift above the baked earth. ‘Arrogant flit!’ he huffed in gr
umpy pursuit. ‘When I claim the victory, be sure I’ll embrace the boulder’s staid wisdom and blunt the knife’s edge from your insolence.’

  Sethvir resigned himself to withstand the tumultuous disruption of his solitude at Althain Tower. The fretful fingers that massaged his temples snagged in white tangles of hair. Nudged to redress his neglected grooming, he uttered a charged word to loosen old knots, then considered his frayed, ink-stained sleeves, and dismissed the pointless bother of changing to formal dress.

  While the tramp of the True Sect invasion pounded the spring earth to mud in pursuit of the Spinner of Darkness, and Havish’s clan war bands plotted their High King’s line of defense at Carithwyr, the dragon’s flight crossed the meridian between Athera’s east and west hemispheres . . .

  Sethvir wrested his grim consolation from the battery of future threats: the great drake bound at speed to the wastes of Scarpdale would not yet encounter the fatal glory of Arithon’s aura, intact.

  Since that sore point posed a back-handed blessing, Althain’s Warden muttered an expletive and boxed up his better quill pens. He cursed again for the corks mislaid from his ink-wells, then stacked his loose parchment sheets under weights and whisked off the litter of shavings strewn by his compulsive habit of resharpening nibs. Everything must be tidied. Not just to spread the black cloth for the casting of strands for a long-sighted augury: on good days, Kharadmon’s tempestuous arrivals wrought chaos and worse, drove Luhaine’s obsession for neatness to dithering fits.

  ‘The spat between shades will curl both my ears anyhow.’ Sethvir clapped a clay jar overtop the wheat paste, frazzled enough to rip hair from his beard as another hitch rocked the world’s befouled affairs from a dingy inn cellar by the Mathorn Road . . .

  The last nameless madman could not be salvaged despite Dakar’s heroic effort. The stricken fellow screamed and frothed at the mouth, then lapsed into a rigid silence. Daliana wrapped his contorted frame in dry blankets. Nothing more could be done for the lunatic except keep him comfortable until he passed over Fate’s Wheel. Since the depleted spellbinder slept off his exhaustion as though he had been kicked unconscious, Daliana weathered that vigil alone. While the tormented stranger’s crazed eyes stared at nothing, she talked soothing nonsense. Whether or not the old man found ease, her voice at least masked the rustles and squeaks of the inn’s brazen rats.

  Miserable and gritty in her unwashed clothes, with her braided hair snarled for want of a comb, she counted two days since Lysaer had abandoned them. Held yet in duress, she and the Mad Prophet had been without food since the past morning. The slop pail left by the stair for disposal also remained uncollected. Which pervasive reek stained the cellar’s already noisome miasma, the flint smell of damp masonry mouldered to decay by the soured hops breathed from the tapped-out beer kegs.

  Daliana checked the comatose grandfather’s limp wrist, found his weak pulse, and caught herself nodding off. Unable to finish the death-watch, she rousted Dakar to spell her.

  His sawn-off snore transformed to a grunt. ‘Go away. No more can be done.’

  ‘Best think of something before the loon croaks,’ Daliana insisted. ‘Else we’ll be condemned for dark practice.’

  ‘I’m no substitute for a Fellowship Sorcerer,’ the Mad Prophet objected, distempered as a hazed walrus. ‘Quite likely the old coot has chosen his time. I can’t hold any spirit that’s wearied of life. Such a working would invoke the vile arts of necromancy, an offence that would justifiably see us staked out for the sword and the fire.’

  But despite his complaint, the spellbinder sat up. He knuckled the sand from his pouched eyes and relented enough to arise. Wasted to dough pallor from grueling days spent in trance for the stricken, he grumbled, ‘No more water’s left?’

  Daliana sighed. ‘You drank the dregs yesterday.’

  ‘No matter. We won’t have the chance to perish of thirst.’ Dakar parked his rump upon the sagged bench that cradled the pumice wheel for sharpening knives. ‘I’d bet my last copper that our poxy gaolers have swanked off to stack oiled kindling.’

  ‘Well, curse them with crotch rot if you have the means.’ Daliana yawned and curled up in the nest of stale straw begrudgingly sent from the stables to succour the stricken. She slept through the victim’s last fit of convulsions, and missed his collapse when he finally expired in the nadir of night.

  The slam of the hatch at the stair-head awoke her at dawn on their third day of incarceration. She pushed herself upright, made aware of the tormented creature’s demise by the shouted argument between Dakar and the innkeeper’s burly oafs. Offered no pay for the filthy service, they refused to collect the stiff corpse.

  ‘Yon Shadow-touched body rots where it lies. As for you heretic maggots, you can sup on dead flesh if you’re hungry!’

  The board stair creaked under Dakar’s weighty tread. ‘What loutish seed quickened the wombs of your mothers? Even worm spawn has brighter intelligence!’ Through the outraged roars provoked by his insult, Dakar rolled off a curse in actualized Paravian, guttural as thunder and brimstone.

  A blinding flash flared off the trap-door, to yelps of dismay from above.

  Daliana blinked, dazzled, her snarled hair ruffled by the blast of hot air unleashed in recoil. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Set a boundary ward that’s seized up the hinge pins with just enough sting to raise blisters,’ Dakar said with self-satisfied spite. ‘I have a more difficult working to do. Can’t let some bungler waving a knife venture down here to mince us to collops.’

  ‘We were certain to burn without evidence, anyway,’ Daliana agreed, irked to sarcasm.

  Unmoved by the subsequent thudded barrage as the inn’s pair of clods bludgeoned the planks and failed to achieve a forced entry, Dakar laced pudgy hands on his gut and reseated himself on the bottom step. ‘No way those arse-kissing temple fanatics intended to let us go free. We’re condemned for criminal sorcery, no matter whether I produced miracles and salvaged everyone stricken.’

  As the banging assault on the hatch overhead showered down gauze shreds of cobweb, Dakar laughed. ‘Go ahead! Belt yourself full of splinters, you fools.’

  ‘Light torment your dismal shade for eternity!’ came the incensed rejoinder. ‘I’ll see the chit you brought forced till she squeals, and dump her cursed ashes with yours in the hog wallow!’

  ‘May your innkeeper waken with asps in his bed!’ Dakar howled in cheerful rejoinder. ‘You can hatch eggs on your piles of fire-wood and grovel in prayer to the Light till your knees hurt! But no mumbling piety will lift the blight that sours the beer as it crosses this threshold. No priestly blessing can salvage the roasts that char black as Sithaer’s ninth hell on the kitchen spit.’

  Daliana raised her eyebrows. ‘You wouldn’t!’

  ‘Saddle this sty with a curse of misfortune?’ The spellbinder’s raffish beard split to show teeth. ‘In case you slept through the interesting news, these gutless yappers decided to toss our fates to the temple delegation just banished for fraud at Etarra.’ Dakar routed a spider that dropped onto his scalp and flipped an obscene gesture towards the task squad assaulting the cellar. ‘What’s to lose? You heard what they’ve left us for breakfast.’

  Daliana arose, goaded by frustration. ‘I won’t sit on my backside waiting to burn. If you plan to spring us, how can I help?’ Afoot in the cold dark, she salvaged the snapped broom-handle, discarded since she had chafed her hands raw in failed effort to wrest open the root-cellar’s outside entrance. ‘I could bash a few heads with this.’

  Dakar clamped her shoulder, arrived from behind, and nearly startled her out of her skin.

  Despite the semblance of a fat buffoon, he moved with uncanny stealth if need warranted. ‘Instead, pulverize some mortar for me, and be sure to make plenty of racket.’

  ‘For false cover?’ Daliana sought to read his expression by the filtered light through the floor cracks.

  Dakar ducked her regard in shameless retreat. ‘I am planning to sp
iritwalk. Any such use of my talent is hell-bound to excite every Sunwheel diviner in range. The clamour will bring the Light’s priest at a gallop. We could face resistance at dangerous strength, since the temple’s false cause is now covertly backed by a gamut of enemy interests.’

  ‘What enemies?’ Daliana slapped the broomstick against her raw palm. ‘Like a skin rash, you pick the most awkward moment to spring your surprises.’

  Dakar’s clipped head-shake cut off further inquiry. ‘Ath on earth, it’s bad business. I was hoping for luck, that events might not push me to take extreme action.’

  Daliana narrowed shrewd eyes. ‘Does this suggest I should worry more for those simpletons above stairs?’

  ‘They’re not threatened, yet,’ the spellbinder evaded, scarcely audible over the clamour to stave in the warded trap-door.

  ‘What happens when those bullies start tearing up floor planks?’ Daliana inquired. ‘I could break up a cask. Ding a few heads with the staves, even trip the first sally by rolling the barrel hoops. That won’t stop a mob. Every whoreson’s bruised friend will be hot to tear us apart without the formality of a ceremony.’

  When Dakar clamped his jaws and stumped off through the dark, Daliana pursued with more questions. ‘You realize if you harm these yokels through spellcraft, you’ll spur on the witch-hunt to burn us?’

  ‘These people are more likely to drop like flies from eating a plate of bad shellfish!’ Dakar snapped. ‘Daelion Fatemaster revels in the irony. Nobody survives. We all die at life’s end from something.’

  But Daliana chased her stubborn point all the same. ‘Do you still plan to stand guard for Lysaer? Then your tactical choice is fatally flawed. If anyone’s hurt by your arcane works, you know his royal justice won’t rest! My lord will not only repudiate us, he’ll be moved to defend your wronged victims. You’ve said Desh-thiere’s curse will align to exploit even the traits of good character. If you force the virtue of Lysaer’s blood gift, that surely would twist his strengths to embrace the True Sect’s agenda.’