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

by Janny Wurts

  The gaunt father, who mended a broken tin lamp by the fire, kept whistling, long since deafened by their youthful exuberance. But his generous, black-eyed matron never missed anything. Her next oldest daughter stirred the forsaken supper pot while she attended the peaked distress of her female passenger. ‘Has our noise caused a headache? Might want to lie down. I’ll brew a tisane to ease you.’

  Elaira patched together her shredded poise. ‘No, thank you kindly. I’ll take care of myself.’ Before the good woman shouted to restrain her exuberant brood, the enchantress pushed off the wagon and stood. ‘Let the little ones play. A brisk walk ought to set me to rights.’

  The matron’s searching glance remained dubious. ‘I’ve marked your bouts of pallor for days. Might not be caused by the heat. You’re not bearing, dearie, are you?’

  Elaira laughed. ‘No. Beyond question.’ But a truthful note of aggrieved regret spiked through her casual humour.

  ‘Ah, well, you’re young yet,’ the matron sympathized. ‘You’ve got plenty of time in the world. There’s a little stream a short hop through the wood with a peaceful spot on the bank. Take my small copper kettle from the family chest. I’ll send one of my brats with a striker and kindling.’

  ‘My own pannikin will boil tea well enough.’ Elaira shouldered her satchel, anxious to duck the matron’s nosy solicitude. ‘Please don’t put your child to the trouble.’ She forced her unsteady knees to bear weight, then threaded her way past the raucous ball game and lost herself into the gaudy sprawl of parked wagons and picketed draught animals.

  Need for quiet solitude pressured her urgency. She sensed every time when the Prime’s ugly use of her personal, crystal-sent signature goaded her beloved to fraught exposure. Always, Elaira cringed to imagine which of the order’s dark sigils ruled the vile construct created to spur The Hatchet’s search. Her innate female instinct raised strident foreboding that the late bid to force Arithon’s capture masked a manipulative strategy to advance Koriani ambition. Growing anxiety left her distraught, that Arithon had been driven near to the end of his resources.

  Elaira hurried, dead-ended again in the tight maze of wagons and tethered livestock. Her rush scattered a bleating flock of goats, to insults from the rattled herd-boy. The spring caravan out-bound from Atchaz crammed the grass verge, the stale scent of oxen mingled with the seared fat dripped from spitted meat and the fragrance of crushed thyme and clover. Dogs yapped, while the mournful strains of a flute and two frenetic fiddles wove through the mingled, bickering folk settled down to their evening meal. Elaira forced her way through the clusters of drays, jammed with silk bales wrapped under tarpaulin. She could not distance herself fast enough from the crowded tents and raised dust. This encampment already held more than a hundred mixed wagons. By equinox, more would grind their sedate way by road towards the eastshore harbours, while galley trade slackened in the southern seaports before the onset of summer. Heat bred the pestilent fevers, with increased concern that sickness could run rampant as the Light’s hysterical, back-lash cleanses stamped out heretical talent. True healers and herb-women with Elaira’s knowledge stayed secretively scarce since the violent flux shift incited the fervent wave of mass conversions.

  More than ever before, her arcane practice demanded circumspect caution. Masked in due course by the twilight wood, Elaira turned up-stream. When she found a remote pool undisturbed by the women and girls sent out to draw water, she settled herself on the mossy bank with her satchel unopened beside her. She never intended a fire or tea. Settled in privacy, surrounded by piping frogs and the scrape of night insects, she breathed in the heady tonic of tender greenery, forehead rested on her crossed arms. But on this fraught hour, even her iron discipline failed to restore any measure of calm.

  Worry shredded her effortful focus. ‘Beloved,’ she whispered, then bowed under the torrent and wept.

  Arithon’s plight wracked her spirit without surcease. She knew he snatched his hazed rest in catnaps. No music or language soothed his strained ears. Only the lilted chirps of wild birds, and the cough of the night-hunting bobcat. He ate wild roots and boiled milkweed sprouts. When game fell to his snares, the uncured pelts patched the clothing ripped ragged on the wild briar.

  No mortal was fashioned to endure countless days, spent immersed in the etheric surge of the flux tides. Arithon had little choice. To evade The Hatchet’s relentless patrols, he tapped his deep mage-sight as compass and guidance, until his taut nerves flinched to each flash-point flare that rippled the lane current. Wrenched by the blaze of his animal needs, Elaira knew when he fled the search parties beating the brush. She startled to his sped pulse when the pheasants flushed in squawking alarm, and reflexive empathy whipped him to a sprint on the burst of their avian terror.

  Such extended bouts of overtaxed focus distorted the balance of human senses. As Arithon’s sounding-board, heart and mind, Elaira shared the intimate shock of assault as the war host’s relentless advance inflamed his overwrought flesh. Shuddered under the throes throughout his bouts of rogue vision, she tasted the martial tang of the on-coming war: bitter as oiled steel and old blood, barbed in pain that howled for requital. Other times, she caught Arithon’s panicked glimpse of the marching ranks of the vanguard: a distant shimmer that mowed like a whetted scythe across the mottled landscape of thicket and furze. She felt Arithon flinch to the pounding gallop of The Hatchet’s mounted couriers. His recoil sawed into her quietude, while the thunderous mill of iron-rimmed wheels and yoked ox trains conveyed the invasion’s supply to a chopped welter of mangled turf.

  Always, Arithon threaded the needle’s-eye gaps between the encroaching trackers. Only profound trust in his wily inventiveness sustained hope throughout the repeated, surprise thrusts aimed to snare him. But if the browbeaten Sunwheel dedicates failed to capture him, living or dead, the insidious pressure behind tonight’s assault catastrophically altered the stakes.

  Burned dry of tears, centred at last, Elaira assembled her limited assets to fathom the Matriarch’s secretive game plan. If the stone knife the Biedar left in her charge could tip the odds in Prince Arithon’s favour, she would hang the consequences, break her life-term oath, and act without hesitation.

  Never mind the stark folly that her resolve to pry into the order’s Senior affairs posed a suicidal risk. The mere prospect prickled Elaira’s nape and broke her into a cold sweat. The Fellowship themselves seldom dared to cross a Prime’s will or meddled into the order’s warded business. Since in a straight contest, the Sorcerers’ power quite likely outmatched Koriani enchantments, the Seven might venture such perilous ground through cagy wisdom, if not dauntless force. But the contest outfaced a third-level sister restricted to charitable service. Elaira risked the high charge of betrayal, disadvantaged without the trained knowledge carried by Seniors endowed with administrative rank.

  The tranquil night wood lent her no secure haven from her superiors’ long reach. Elaira would be crushed on the instant if her rash intrusion drew notice.

  ‘Powers of mercy forefend,’ she whispered, committed past reason, and terrified. She had only a trick bag of hedge witch’s skills, picked up from a crone during earliest childhood, added to the brief tutelage of Ath’s white adepts, who taught only the pure precepts of healing derived from the grace of the prime source. To that scrounged patchwork of skills, she owned a clean crystal, gifted to her by a seller of simples and outside the provenance of the Koriathain. Also the empathic connection to Arithon, ceded to her for safekeeping. Bare-bones invention alone must fashion the strength of her strategy.

  Elaira steadied her shredded nerves and immersed herself into the wider awareness of trance state. No untoward movement disturbed her surrounds. Only the wing-beats of night-flying moths and the rustles of four-footed predators. The velvet dark contained no hidden threat. Night breezes whispered of nothing else but the courtship of frogs and the liquid arias of a wakeful mockingbird.

  For the greatest endeavour of her working life, Elair
a enacted a cross of guard: a ward of concealment basic as dirt, whose rhymed cantrip charged the essence of four commonplace river stones with the virtues of the cardinal elements. Such a lowbrow technique once had raised the cross-grained surprise of Kharadmon, caught out in a stealthy act of intrusion. The protection might be as disdainfully missed by the order’s tight circle of watch-dogs. Poised within her rote-formed construct, Elaira invoked her natural affinity to water and tapped into the electromagnetic stream of the flux. Then she unwrapped the cleared shaft of her quartz and engaged the precepts espoused by Ath’s adepts. Granted a willing partnership with the mineral, she ran her awareness of Arithon through its enabled matrix.

  Softly as a stalker, more silent than snowfall, she tuned her mind to receive. Then she touched the tip of the crystal to earth. She listened, stilled as the mirror flawlessly polished for passive reception, that her refined discernment might identify the tell-tale stamp of the sigils employed by the order. If the Prime shaped a malign thrust against Arithon, Elaira’s cross-linked awareness through him sought to uncover the pattern.

  An hour passed, uneventfully calm. Then another, disrupted by biting insects and a cramped leg, crushed bloodless from immobility. Elaira stretched, changed position and started again, while the night deepened and the overhead canopy stitched leaves like jet lace against the shimmered stars at the zenith. Owls hunted for mice. The frogs’ chorus swelled and waned to gapped pockets of silence. Before dawn, about to lose heart and give up, Elaira detected the elusive ripple of wrongness: a ring of chained sigils surrounded Scarpdale in a widespread net that extended clear to the shore of Lithmarin. Deftly woven by multiple Seniors, the noose strung in wait was tempered to spring on the instant the lone fugitive encountered its boundary.

  As the trap’s select design filtered through Elaira’s awareness, the unparalleled scope of the Prime Matriarch’s cruelty shocked her explosively out of deep trance.

  She wakened, crying with outrage and grief. For Arithon’s ruin, the sisterhood spurned every limit of moral restraint! Revolted to hatred, seared by a bitter revilement that snapped final faith in the order’s integrity, the enchantress who cherished the Prince of Rathain covered her face in despair.

  Far worse than death, the brutal spells entrained for her beloved were pitched to revive the old pattern of Desh-thiere’s geas. This, when the targeted man was alone and friendless, beset by a war host of zealots whipped onwards by Lysaer’s fetch-driven madness. The ugly snare had been sealed into place with Arithon already surrounded. When he succumbed, the Mistwraith’s rekindled design would torch off a massacre. Both Havish and Tysan would suffer the impact, thousands of lives destroyed at a stroke for the Prime’s cold-cast plot to abolish the compact.

  Elaira rocked in destitute horror. She could make no difference. In her hands, at long distance in Shand, the stone knife of the Biedar was useless. For all its potential to avert the holocaust, she could not reach Arithon’s side or turn his despair on the fateful hour he would trigger the diabolical bane set to break him.

  Spring weltered the wild steppes of north Havish in mud, transformed at a breath by floss shoots of pale green, which had burst beneath the sun’s blaze before equinox into a leafed scrim of briar and willow. The thawed bogs baked dry. Reduced to clay hardpan that no longer pulled horseshoes and mired the supply wagons up to the hubs, the march of the True Sect invasion lumbered out of its nerve-wracked crawl. Gadded in turn by the swarming flies that savaged the flesh of men and harnessed livestock, the rank and file tramped in lock-step, while the white-and-gold standards snapped at the fore, and the officers’ impatient outriders harried the dusty laggards in the rear-guard.

  As the Light’s hammer descended to strike its righteous blow against Havish’s anvil, The Hatchet angled the armed jaws of his east and west flanks with the finesse of the master tactician. For two fortnights, his crack trackers had flushed their exhausted prey into repeated flight. Select companies of dedicate lancers and a steel hedge of weapons hazed him ever to the south towards the shore of Lithmarin. Given the avatar’s power of light and sure means to ascertain the quarry’s position, the elusive Spinner of Darkness could be pinned at bay against the sheer, rampart cliffs, reared above the melt-swollen lake. The campaign’s high command jockeyed for the certain destruction of evil within three days.

  Until the succession of lathered scouts reined in with reports that a pitched battle might hamper the victory. Late off the mark by The Hatchet’s vexed estimate, Havish’s royal defenders marched to take the field. At numbers, in strength, they pushed to oppose the southbound thrust of the invasion.

  ‘It’s a gang-up nuisance!’ the True Sect commander summed up, his sweaty gauntlets flung at his cringing equerry. ‘If the king’s forces stand their hard ground, if they fight under punishment long enough, they might provide the Master of Shadow a narrow gap to slip through. Though by Light, they’ll take withering losses with no guarantee they can buy his escape!’

  Grim death itself underwrote the attempt. Gestry’s advisors were not blind or sanguine. They knew a fixed stand to deflect the advance pitched Havish’s forces against crippling odds. Where the High King’s wards might back a defensive engagement on favourable terrain, this provocative rush to launch an assault placed the rocky ravine at the defenders’ heels. The thundering spume of the river-course allowed no safe ground for retreat. Yet the nettlesome temper of the king’s war chief held the sheer drop at the gorge as the least dreadful feature laid against his outfaced troops.

  Which vivid truth Tarens encountered at once in his hot pursuit of three flit-brained clan youngsters. Though their hapless course threatened to grind him, and them, in the maelstrom once the implacable war hosts collided, he faced the uncanny array of entanglements surely plotted to muddle his course: for the miscreants led his chase down the old track carved out by Athera’s Paravians.

  The ancient way followed the crest of the ridge on the Lithwater’s northern bank, its derelict presence an indented crease shadowed beneath the aged boughs of twisted, mossy oaks. Matted with leaves and wire-tough snarls of bramble, the great, fitted slabs of grained granite laid down by the centaur masons once connected a Second Age line of defense works. Its paved course bisected the continent, arisen at the buried focus circle beneath Jaelot, to wind through the southernmost pass in the Skyshiels, then plunged in reeling, stepped switchbacks to the shores of Daenfal Lake. At midpoint in the heart of Paravia, the route sliced between two massive, paired marker stones. The western leg threaded the volcanic gap in the Storlains, thence skirted the Lithwater’s downstream plunge towards the Westland Sea. Though the mighty blocks might have supported a wagon, no wheels rolled here, nor ever had: charter law disbarred all trade use beyond Backwater.

  Mankind rightly should fear to tread where even the Fellowship Sorcerers travelled lightly.

  But not Cosach’s young heir, selected for the caithdein’s seat after his father. Esoteric affinity for the free wilds was Esfand’s born provenance, an advantage he seized to abet his companions’ hair-raising intent to foil adult pursuit.

  To catch them, Tarens must match their brash lead or abandon his charge altogether.

  Thrust into rugged, uncanny territory, and truly alone, he began to encounter the profound changes wrought since the loss of his farm-steader’s roots. The instant he trod, quivering, onto unquiet ground, the alarmed instincts of Jieret’s bequest stabbed his nerves to a prickle of warning.

  Tarens refused panic. Against the haunted, urgent unease that suggested the flicker of uncanny movement, he saw nothing. Only the busy rustle of squirrels disturbed the shadowy canopy. Slant sunbeams latticed the mild spring air like sheer ribbon and etched the spring ferns to translucent, chipped jade. And yet the strange quiver of presence persisted. Even the gentlest riffle of breeze puckered his skin into gooseflesh. As if strains of music teased his awareness just beyond natural hearing, he shuddered, raked by an exquisite desire to lose himself into beguilement.

>   Caithwood’s experience taught him when not to listen too closely, where transcendent perceptions tickled the bounds of human awareness. ‘Forgive,’ Tarens murmured, awake to his peril. He roused himself enough to move on without fatal pause for reverie.

  Jieret’s clanbred imprint also cautioned him to avoid the glass-clear pools and to drink only water dipped from the swift race of the Lithwater. Tarens pressed forward with edgy care. He learned not to look each time something other flashed through his peripheral vision. The least intent to discern the disturbance invited the silver-point dance of a bygone era’s inhabitants, fast followed by a swell of grief that threatened to unravel his mortal peace. Often the surfeit of residual emotion broke him to tears. Some things that were lost to the world had been far too exquisitely joyful to bear. Each of his blundering steps on the earth spoke through the ancient track and wakened the echoes of forgotten song. Beauty and wisdom whispered in stark lament for the sorrow evoked by the old races’ passing.

  Jieret’s impressed background informed Tarens against the town-born’s ignorant mistakes. He did not cut living wood, or light fires, or trap game where the springs welled through the rocks and unreeled in silver-thread falls to the Lithwater’s thundering flood. When he needed to hunt, he turned north to forage, even as the clan youngsters he tailed must do also, too near where the lane forces rang with a spirited vibrancy that enthralled a man, body and mind.