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

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Keep a tight watch while I’m in trance.’ Siantra knelt amid the stems of dead bracken, her peaked face obscured as she bowed her head.

  Khadrien chose not to mock her unease or vent his raw tension by chaffing. Siantra possessed the more delicate touch. She would be quickest. Also the most able to shield the ripple of disturbance that might ruffle the instincts of the True Sect diviner. Since the temple’s talent would not have abandoned the hunt, Esfand stepped forward and claimed due position to guard her back.

  ‘May there be a safe path farther east,’ he murmured. ‘Bright guidance help you to find it.’

  The pause hung, while Siantra gathered her strained concentration and aligned her subtle senses to access the flux currents. Trained as a hunter to recognize the stamped patterns of all nearby animate life, her reflexive skills should have answered her seamlessly. Instead, thrown into sluggish confusion, she groped, then pushed on in the foolish belief that her tired faculties missed the connection. The mistake overtook her, beyond help to remedy. Too recklessly open, she blundered as the potency of direct contact roared through. She gasped. Inwardly wrenched as though punched in the viscera, she tried and failed to break free. Already the flux surge poured down her stripped nerves, beyond her experience to curb. The tingling jolt shuddered her from head to foot. She cried aloud in stark terror. Never before had her skills overridden her flesh or threatened to wreak untold damage.

  This time the flare that savaged her awareness erupted into a blaze of visible light. She lost the wits to anchor herself. The wild intensity sizzled and snapped, an electrical burst that seared her damp palms with the branding heat of live flame.

  The discharge laced golden static through her aura, then whirled into a vortex that fountained skywards. Khadrien shouted, stupefied, ‘Ath wept, what has taken her?’

  ‘Siantra!’ Esfand blistered the hand he flung out to support her slack shoulder as she collapsed.

  The raised nimbus flushed needles of light up her spine and over the back of her neck. The flesh beneath her leathers felt flash-point hot, the skin under his touch as he cradled her cheek paper dry as though parched by a furnace. Dread unmanned him. Afraid that her clothing and hair might ignite, he called upon Khadrien. ‘Pour your water-skin over her. Now!’

  But the shrill command passed unheeded. Amid the desperation of crisis, Khadrien’s attention stayed fixed on the forest. ‘Look!’ He pointed, aghast.

  The black wall of trees that surrounded the glen flickered and gleamed with the bale- fire dance of electro-luminescence. The galvanized air reeked of ozone. More, the dormant vegetation underfoot spontaneously quickened. Brown stems rustled, invigorated to tender leaf, while the grass speared up pastel shoots, scattered like stars with the tiny white blossoms of snowdrops.

  ‘Ground yourself!’ Esfand shouted. ‘Hurry, Siantra!’ Dropped onto his knees at her side, he risked immolation and shook her wracked frame.

  Khadrien joined him. Clumsy with terror, he beat out the sparks that singed her cloak, then belatedly fumbled the flask from his belt and yanked the cork with his teeth. ‘I don’t have enough water to douse a hemp slow match.’

  But just ahead of that desperate remedy, Siantra wrenched out of trance. She jerked erect with a grunt, swore, and rammed her singed palms flat against the moist earth. As the uncanny phosphor charge in her aura streamed down her wrists and quenched into the soil, she hauled in a chattering, shaken breath, then leaned with a whimper into Esfand’s arms.

  ‘Greater powers protect us, we’re too close to Athili!’ Khadrien cried. ‘Is she hurt?’

  ‘Shhh. I don’t know.’ Esfand stroked a tic from Siantra’s damp cheek, not wet with tears but streaming with feverish sweat. Afraid to find her soaked to the skin and clammy from head to foot, he pleaded. ‘Are you with us, s’Idir? Can you speak?’

  ‘Give me a moment.’ Siantra huddled against him and trembled. After a moment of tensioned distress, she admitted, ‘My hands have blistered. That’s not a huge problem. But unless the residual flash-blindness clears, I can’t see a thing.’

  The moment was cruel, for the invasive hurtle of movement that catapulted out of the undergrowth at the north edge of the wood. Cut to run silent, the trackers’ pack of mastiffs barreled across the glen. Khadrien whirled, knife drawn in time to impale the lead male in mid-spring. Its slavering fangs clashed just shy of his throat. Terrified, he shouted, ‘Get Siantra into a hollow tree!’ Another dog fastened blunt jaws on his calf. More yet surged behind, a concerted assault of juggernaut muscle, mottled hides, lambent eyes, and bared teeth.

  Khadrien stabbed the tussling hound in the kidney. Harried by the rest, too swiftly surrounded, he elbowed off animals as they leaped in a desperate fight to keep balance. Another brute clamped onto his wrist. The bloody knife dropped from his paralyzed grip. He tasted the coppery taint of blind fear as his horrible strait became hopeless. Cruel death stared him down, while somewhere behind, he sensed Esfand haul Siantra upright. Stumbling, sightless, hampered by her wrenched ankle, she could not take flight without help. Cosach’s heir wrestled the ghastly hesitation, torn by the need to guard a friend’s back or stay burdened by the lethal disadvantage of a helpless woman’s defense.

  ‘Leave me!’ Khadrien screamed. ‘Get her safely away. If you don’t, none of us will escape with our lives!’

  But any such sacrifice came much too late. A pack bred and trained to mangle armed men closed in and pursued its grim purpose.

  Esfand kicked off the hound that snarled and snapped at Siantra’s leathers. A second one fell to the thrust of his long knife. Another rammed into its place. The protective arm tucked around Siantra became viciously worried as another dog clawed up her chest and bored in to slash at her neck.

  Worse, very likely frantic with fear, she struggled to break away from his embrace.

  Alone and still upright, Khadrien staggered, dogs latched to both ankles. He shouted them down to the pits of Sithaer and cursed the vile trackers who trained them.

  Esfand punched and stabbed, yelling also in a vain effort to beat back the marauding pack. Then Siantra ripped her pinioned arm free and reached for the last choice available.

  Weeping and sightless, she fumbled by touch and seized the black hilt of the sword strapped at Esfand’s shoulder.

  ‘Siantra, no!’ he cried in panic. ‘We are too near Athili.’

  A dog snapped at her nape. Teeth worried her braid. She screamed in bleak rage. ‘If I don’t, we are lost, or delivered alive to the hands of a True Sect examiner.’ She kept her fierce grip despite her blistered palm. The fierce wrench as the mastiff tussled her backwards pulled Alithiel clear of the scabbard.

  Light woke like a paean. The rune inlays in the dark steel shimmered and roused to an opalescent whirlwind that roared upwards and unleashed a chord of pure harmony. Ringing sound impacted flesh and bone like a hammer. The ravening hounds broke off their attack. What became of the beasts, no one knew. The clanborn companions buckled at the knees. Dazzled and unstrung, they sank to the ground, riven by speechless ecstasy. Through the splendour of brilliance and the adamant song, the upright sword clenched in Siantra’s fist lit the glade in silver far brighter than midday. The trees on all sides wore emerald ivy and leaves, and the grass soaked the air with the fragrance of summer, potent enough to ravage the senses.

  Then from the east, like a bloom of live fire, light scribed on the searing essence of light, a gold shower of illumination etched the trees into razor-edged silhouette. Then their sharpened form shimmered, first broken to shards, which dissolved into beams of ephemeral energy. The permeable border of Athili moved. The surge rampaged in, relentless as tide, as if Alithiel’s pealed cry itself charged and lifted the resonant frequency of the glade’s solid existence. The confluent speed of event was extreme, far too radical to assimilate. Overwhelmed by the burgeoning crest of the mysteries, the three stricken companions pitched into that whirlwind of change. Imperative urgency insisted that they must rise and ru
n or become consumed, lost into unknowable oblivion.

  No mortal broached Athili’s rim and survived.

  But stunned human sinew failed to respond. Will and reason unravelled. Vertigo ripped through and upended the world. All coherent thought and sensation sheared off, blasted out by the naked glory of forces past reach of earthly experience.

  . . . darkness gripped the first breath of emergent awareness amid a quiet as dense as jet velvet.

  Khadrien’s scatter-brained insolence as always leaped fastest to dare the unknown. ‘Where are we?’

  The unbroken black surrounds yielded a pin-point red spark, from which a spurt of yellow flame blossomed. Quite ordinary, the spill lit a man’s sturdy fingers, tough with callus as any stonemason’s. The face glimpsed above conveyed no such assurance. Beaten to leather by time-worn exposure to wind and rain and strong sun, features fierce as a raptor’s emerged out of shadow, nose and eyes defined by the cragged jut of bone, then frosted-steel eyes, keen enough to strip spirit from flesh.

  ‘Are you Daelion Fatemaster, come to list our debts?’ Khadrien challenged, frightened spitless and sure he had died, despite the sting of mauled limbs and the gore-sticky grip clenched on his knife.

  A deep, careful voice bestowed an amused reprimand, ‘You are alive still, and lucky to be so.’

  The illumination steadied, a plain wax light in fact, spent to a stub and grimed with rough usage. Its jonquil halo unveiled the speaker, imposingly tall and clean-shaven, with straight silver hair clipped to collar length. For a presence that shouted initiate power with such disconcerting intensity, his scuffed leathers could have belonged to a clan scout. His dark wool cloak showed snags from hard use, redolent of wood smoke and horse sweat.

  Siantra matched that patent restraint with better courtesy. ‘Since your help pulled us clear before we trespassed into forbidden country, might I know your name?’

  ‘That wasn’t the question you most wanted to ask of me.’ The hint of a curve flexed the mage’s taut mouth. ‘You did not escape Athili, Siantra s’Idir. The blade you drew sings the chord of creation that ignited the winter stars. Such a mighty cry of pure light and sound would ignite the flux, while the lane tides ripple the boundaries. The living current of joy here responded, surely as a magnet attracts iron. You are within Athili, and held without harm, since my warding shields the frailty of your being from immolation. The bright torrent of Ath’s touch has hallowed this place and unsealed a dimensional rift. Even the most celebrated Paravians cannot tread this gateway incarnate.’

  ‘Has the heirloom weapon been lost through my ignorance, or did I drop the hilt when I fell unconscious?’ The distressed question tremulous, Siantra begged, ‘Tell me, please, whoever you are. If I should know you, my eyesight is darkened.’

  Wool and leather rustled. The capable hand that did not hold the candle produced the Paravian sword, gripped point downwards, its black steel a polished gleam against darkness and its exquisite rune inlay quiescent. ‘Alithiel’s call led me to you, a perilous grace whose purpose has been kindly met. Esfand s’Valerient, Teir’s’Caithdein to Rathain, will you come forward?’

  Cosach’s son rallied the wits to respond to the formal address. Aware whom he faced through his father’s heritage, he knelt at the booted feet of the being whose summons commanded him. ‘Asandir of the Fellowship?’ Aghast, and mauled bloody from the tracker’s dog pack, he surmounted his awe and returned the traditional greeting. ‘How may we serve the land?’

  The Sorcerer extended the sword towards the youthful heir designate, bent with bowed head before him. ‘Stand upright, young man. My Fellowship never imposes the loss of your dignity. Nor do we accept even symbolic obeisance from anyone! Take charge of this blade. Sheltered under my auspices or not, in this place she is safest kept sheathed.’

  Esfand’s awkward embarrassment received short shrift as the cold weight of Alithiel was restored to him. Asandir’s attentive perception promptly moved on to reassure Siantra. ‘My dear, your sight was disrupted by a nervous back-lash. You suffered an overexposure to the high range flux without tight protection, too close to Athili. Time and rest will right the imbalance. Blisters mend. Your senses will stabilize without damage as well, though I warn, your innate sensitivity must resurge, strengthened by the contact.’

  ‘Are you sending us home?’ Khadrien blurted, unable to douse the simmer of his apprehension.

  ‘For your insolence? No.’ The Sorcerer’s interest gained a whetted edge. ‘Do you wish for my direct help to return to the care of your parents?’

  Khadrien’s gasp of crest-fallen dismay tangled with Esfand’s snapped refusal and Siantra’s emphatic entreaty to stay with the task they had shouldered.

  ‘Free choice is yours, within limits.’ Asandir’s dead-pan regard yielded nothing, though his curt gesture fluttered the held candle-flame. ‘The question of what to do with the lot of you does, however, fall under my lawful discretion.’ Iron brows raised, he measured the abashed miscreants through a dreadful, nerve-wracked pause.

  Esfand withstood that peeling regard, chin just barely in need of a shave raised for a heated rebellion. ‘You cannot fault us for our resolve to bear Alithiel to our royal liege’s defense.’

  Asandir brightened the tremulous flame. Rinsed by the light against stygian dark, his stark stance seemed ruthless as Dharkaron Avenger’s last judgement.

  ‘We were arrogant, maybe,’ Khadrien confessed. Scarlet with shame to his carroty hair, but with brass to back Esfand’s bravado, he dared the twitch of a sheepish grin, then pushed winsome luck and gushed onwards. ‘But someone had to step up and take action. The clan council wouldn’t stop dithering. You’ll help us along? We cannot have travelled this far for nothing, and we know that Prince Arithon’s in flight from the True Sect’s invasion of Lanshire.’

  Asandir’s severe glance remained chill enough to freeze rash effrontery at twenty paces.

  The only one spared by her impaired sight, Siantra broke the repressive silence. ‘Khadrien!’ she scoffed to quash mettlesome idiocy. ‘Our elders would stripe your backside for cheek!’ Unflinching, she groped to frame an apology to mollify a Fellowship Sorcerer’s stretched patience.

  Asandir spoke first, impervious to diplomacy. ‘Don’t give me a word that’s not drawn from the heart! If you find the way to the side of your prince, you will do so with no help from me.’ Fleeting sorrow deepened the map work of creases that bracketed his mouth and eyes, a nuance that failed to match his brusque tone. ‘No working of mine can dispatch you onwards to any direct course into Lanshire.’

  His raised finger forestalled unwise pleas as a caution that their decision would stay irreversible. While the three young companions fought shaking knees, justifiably rattled to dread for their theft of Alithiel, the Sorcerer made his disposition.

  ‘Your appeal can be honoured, not to return home. But under the compact, by your consent, you might be appointed to serve the land’s greater need at a time and place determined by my discretion. If you refuse my calling, then Prince Arithon’s sword cannot be left in trust under your immature stewardship.’

  Esfand frowned, disturbed. Siantra’s straight brows knit with furious thought. While both strove to plumb the weighty implications behind the Sorcerer’s state language, Khadrien announced, ‘I’ll take any road gladly before I tuck tail and slink back to Halwythwood.’

  Asandir’s smile emerged, bright with teeth. ‘Your word, as given.’ His piercing glance shifted and measured the others, volatile with expectancy.

  ‘All right. Count me in.’ Esfand added, contrite, ‘No way I’d face Cosach or the clan council without my cousin beside me.’

  Siantra’s pledge followed, rushed by honest discomfort but steadfast. No matter the stakes, she would not abandon her hare-brained companions.

  The Sorcerer acknowledged with a clipped nod. ‘Said is done, sealed by my auspices.’ His deft pinch snuffed the candle and let in the dark with a roar that swept the adventurous trio back t
hrough the throes of oblivion.

  That fast, without any gesture of ceremony, he released his three errant charges upon the rambunctious course of their fate. Straight-faced, his lower lip clamped in his teeth, Asandir stowed the candle stub in the saddle pack slung across his broad shoulder. He tipped his head back for an instant, bemused. Then all restraint burst. He laughed aloud with unbridled amusement.

  ‘There’s a devilish packet of courage!’ he mused after he recovered decorum. ‘That bunch will provide a rowdy match, even for High King Gestry. May the throne of Havish trump the pesky annoyance of unscheduled, back-handed gifts.’ Which, in cold-sober fact, could wreck natural order or salvage the evil day.

  For such wild-card gambits of tinder and flame became the tossed straws to upset the pernicious disaster painted by Sethvir’s late augury. Only once in Athera’s history had a strand casting unveiled such a desperate range of bleak futures. Under the nexus forged by Desh-thiere’s curse, the trend mapped the onset of a full-scale war with relentless ferocity.

  Too quickly, the True Sect’s massed troops in the west had surmounted the thaw and breasted the flood-waters swollen by snow-melt. The rear-guard and the heavily burdened supply wagons already crossed the white torrent of the River Darkshiel. With the southern bank occupied and the open heath between Torwent and Scarpdale arrayed with enemy encampments, nothing ahead might impede the Light’s determined sweep across Lanshire. The Hatchet drove the best of his dedicates to prosecute the attack. Within twoscore days, perhaps less, the fury of the Light’s armoured lance and foot would be unleashed to storm Carithwyr.

  Whether Arithon survived the flash-point carnage of the High King’s defense almost became a moot point. Let the Kingdom of Havish suffer defeat, and the old law that upheld the compact would be broken.

  ‘May this day’s work bring confusion to the enemy!’ Asandir muttered in hag-ridden aggravation.

  The last throw had been cast into play. Now, the friable choices made by five human ciphers must steer the dark course towards an inscrutable outcome. To the dragon’s spontaneous dispatch of Dakar and Daliana to their convergent hour of destiny, the array of unconstrained catalysts now included the intemperate loyalty of three clan children, rash with spirited inexperience.