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

by Janny Wurts

  Someone else walked upright through the burnished glare, haloed in the floss sheen of fluffed seeds scythed off by a cut switch of pussywillow.

  Dakar took pause and halted the lumbering dray. While the horses he towed behind the flat wagon jibbed and jostled the stance of the harness team, he reined them back to a jingle of bits and snubbed their nervousness with a firm grip. Then he studied the figure’s limping approach and identified the carrot head of the lanky clan brat, for some flit-brained scam parted from his companions and jaunted off on his own. The knave appeared plagued by the ache of thumped joints. Closer at hand, Dakar noted the grazed cheek; then the bent forearms which gingerly cradled brush-burned palms, both skinned raw. The lad’s fox braid was stuck with gorse shreds, and the leathers that sported a tear in the seat wore a green, foamy splatter of horse slobber.

  Rather than laugh, Dakar eased the skeined spells woven for invisibility. As his presence leaped stark to the heedless boy’s eye, he challenged, ‘Just what are you doing here, Khadrien s’Valerient?’

  The miscreant startled half out of his skin. Stopped in his tracks, hand slapped to the antler haft at his belt sheath, he almost threw his knife for the jugular.

  ‘Don’t,’ admonished the spellbinder. ‘Bared steel at this pass would be most unwise.’

  Nailed under authority’s jaundiced eye, Khadrien swore under his breath. He shrugged and relinquished his gripped blade with an insolence that knew when not to beg for a remount. Dared not, despite the evident fact that Dakar’s purloined string seemed excessive.

  The spellbinder addressed the lad with the smug calm of a mage who read guilty minds. ‘Lost your horse, did you? And got bitten to boot?’

  ‘The damned black devil ducked a shoulder and tossed me off,’ the rogue snarled with injured affront.

  Dakar raised his eyebrows with ironic amusement. ‘A dark stallion, no markings? With a ghost eye?’ Fixed by Khadrien’s resentful glower, the spellbinder slapped the rein ends across his knees and laughed. ‘Dharkaron’s own Vengeance! What did you expect? That animal was bred as a Sorcerer’s mount and dreamed back to life by a dragon! Of course it rejected your foolhardy bidding.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve bit the dirt, riding him, too,’ the sprat fired back in rejoinder.

  Dakar snatched the aplomb not to rise to that bait, no matter the hard grain of truth at the core. Brown eyes sharpened enough to raise sweat, he measured the stripling from tousled head, to scuffed palms, to the stains and dust smutched into his crumpled shirt. ‘Tell me what’s become of the heirloom sword you clan bravos smuggled out of the Halwythwood armoury?’

  Khadrien’s mouth opened. Then shut fast with a click. He scraped his stubbled chin with the back of his wrist to prevaricate, his nonchalance spoiled by the violent flush that pinked his freckled fair skin to the forehead. Words failed to frame the inadmissible truth: his fault entirely that the great blade, Alithiel, had been tossed to perdition attached to a feckless, loose horse. ‘The stallion—’ he mumbled, terrified to outface the punitive presence lodged on the wagon seat.

  ‘Oh, quite!’ Dakar rolled his eyes in forbearance. ‘Dharkaron’s almighty bollocks, don’t admit that a horse has more brains than you on a good day. Since you’re grossly incompetent at everything else, you will kindly scavenge the belts off some corpses, then follow and lend me a hand.’

  The spellbinder clucked the draught geldings forward without a glance back to see whether Khadrien honoured his peremptory instructions. He let the wagon tow his recalcitrant hoofed captives another half league into the shadow cast by the brass sun, tipped past noon, and now angled westward.

  Nothing spoke for an interval. Only the rumbled grind of the wheels and the whisper of breeze flicked through the wild gorse. Freshened wind brought the high, ranging flocks of spring swallows, and also, at distance, the outraged bicker of a disturbed murder of crows.

  Dakar steered his stolen vehicle that way. Disrupted from gorging, the birds flapped and cawed, settled again like judges at an assize on the dead limbs of a snag. Beneath, spilled like mannequins dressed out in mail, sprawled the slack bodies of The Hatchet’s finest company of dedicate horsemen.

  Surprised again, Dakar found he was not the first two-legged figure abroad on the scene. Alone, upright, and grunting, a slender young fellow wrestled to haul an inert body into the brush. The drag of spurred boots had ploughed a parallel furrow of broken stems and trailed bracken, determinedly aimed for the sweated horse left hobbled in the skeletal shade of the barkless tree.

  Rife panic flared next. The towed corpus was blond, the tipped-back, noble features unmistakably Lysaer’s. Mage-sight captured the imprint of his abductor’s subtle aura: a female. Recognition exploded to blinding relief. The Sunwheel surcoat and mail coif disguised none other than Daliana.

  Fat and beyond tired, the spellbinder secured the reins of the team. He called out her name and jumped down. The tell-tale crows dispersed as he stumped down the rise, gushing in awed incredulity. ‘How in the name of Ath did you get here? And what device under sky kept you standing through Gestry’s defense?’

  Daliana glanced over her shoulder and grinned. ‘Possibly the protection of Asandir’s spirit mark?’ Spun back to her interrupted travail, she growled in frustration and released her grimed hands. Her salvaged male burden thumped into the dust and lay still, a magnificent, loose-limbed heap of insensate majesty. Lysaer would have been furious were he aware, and not dealt the excoriating insult of helpless unconsciousness.

  The intrepid woman stood guard for him still, ferocious with love’s dedication. ‘I swiped a dedicate’s trappings and rode as a squire behind the lancers. But truly, I dared not approach my liege to attempt human contact before this.’

  Her face lifted. Dakar noticed the tears striped in shining tracks down her hollowed cheeks.

  For some time, she had been quite as busy as he: Lysaer s’Ilessid already lay bound, wrists and ankles lashed tight in the strap leather cut from a strayed horse’s bridle.

  Daliana squinted against the harsh sun, prompted to a gruff defense by the spellbinder’s pensive silence. ‘You plan to object to the indignity, surely? But as I know my liege, he is better off held in duress.’

  Dakar broke in quickly. ‘If he wakens to memory and finds his hands free, the despair of personal dishonour will quite likely drive him to harm himself.’ Weary beyond care, the spellbinder nudged her aside, then bent and hefted the slack weight of Lysaer’s shoulders. ‘Take his feet. And don’t worry. If you had not addressed the necessity yourself, I intended to do the same thing.’

  A wry nod to his left acknowledged Khadrien, just arrived with his pillaged collection of belts.

  ‘Let’s be going.’ Dakar ceded his place to the clan youngster’s muscle, then with resigned gallantry, assumed one booted half of the load that weighed down Daliana. ‘Minutes count. We cannot take chances. Those belts can be used for added restraint once we’ve loaded your liege in the wagon-bed. Lysaer must be taken far from this place before his stupor wears off.’

  ‘What of The Hatchet’s war host?’ Daliana inquired. ‘They’re not muzzled. Won’t they press the invasion?’

  Teeth flashed through the Mad Prophet’s beard as he swore. ‘Dharkaron’s Black Vengeance! They can slaughter themselves off, or starve themselves to stripped bones for the sake of their godless delusion.’ Paused sharply to crush near-hysterical grief for the fact the young King of Havish had fallen, Dakar blinked, then resumed his breathless course. ‘Asandir will be called here. He must attend the crown princess’s coronation at speed. Trust his hand will clear out the True Sect’s presence on the instant that Arithon crosses over the border.’

  Daliana’s sucked breath pocked the effortful pause while the three of them hefted Lysaer and rolled his limp weight onto the bed of the dray. She admitted, as her hands moved on to make nooses of belts, ‘I fear there could be complications.’

  Before Dakar spoke, and while Khadrien tracked every movement
and phrase with agog fascination, Daliana paused and wiped damp palms on her filched surcoat. Then she cracked under her anxious dread, and confessed what Kharadmon had sorrowfully told her concerning dark practice and the Koriathain’s vile use of a fetch.

  Before she faltered through the last line, Dakar’s lowered frown rivaled a thunderbolt. ‘That won’t happen again,’ he promised. ‘On my life, by Dharkaron’s witness, I shall take steps and make certain that Lysaer does not wake up to encounter that horror.’

  No sweet thanks met his pledge, but instead a crazed lunge in assault. That fast, Dakar swallowed against the chill prick of Daliana’s drawn blade at his throat.

  ‘Move and you die,’ she warned, quite possessed by the fury of the cornered lioness. ‘You’ll not murder my liege! Even under such threat, I will not let you kill him!’

  Dakar shut his pouched eyes. Somehow through the sick pangs of tienelle withdrawal, he clung to the rags of his patience. ‘Put up your rash steel. Bloodshed won’t be required! A spelled potion will knock your liege out well enough. Since I suffer from a bad stomach, and the dreams after wars wreck my sleep, I’ve stashed an adequate store of valerian with the supplies.’

  Eventide melted into a moonless, cloud-lidded vista of lonely darkness. Alone once more on the Lanshire heath, Dakar sat cross-legged before a small fire, tucked into a secluded hollow beside the gurgle of a freshwater streamlet. The wagon bearing Lysaer was gone, driven north through the night by Daliana. She was charged to keep her distance for safety, until the ugly business attached to the spellbinder’s promise found closure.

  Distressed to be on his own to shoulder a binding of such delicate gravity, Dakar scraped at the welts left by swarming gnats. He flicked off something hard-shelled and six-legged that burrowed under his frayed sleeve, and cursed the fact the straight conjury to foil pests taxed his resource too dearly to waste. The Mad Prophet flexed his bare toes. Relieved of his hose and caked boots, his feet ached. Too much to tramp in search of the sweet fern whose pungent oil repelled biting insects.

  The clan brat might have been tasked with the chore. Except that Khadrien had scarpered again. Who cared where the feckless young scamp fared, now? The lad had conveniently vanished when he was dispatched to fetch kindling at sundown.

  Which perfectly suited Dakar’s intent. In truth, he wanted no witnesses. Dug in like a tick to risk the fell wrath of the Koriani Prime Matriarch, a disgraced master spellbinder must swallow pride and accept the demeaning sop of cold comfort: only Sethvir would know if tonight’s effort failed. The Warden of Althain likely sat poised with dipped pen, prepared to inscribe the embarrassing record of fool’s luck in victory, or finish a lonely epitaph.

  Hardened to bitterest patience, Dakar braced for the ebb in the flux that occurred past the nadir at midnight. The Prime would strike then, when vitality paused, and life’s boundaries thinned through the hours before daybreak. She would waken her spider’s mesh of spelled snares and engage the fetch imbued with Arithon’s imprint. The vicious work of one fatal second, and a twisted sigil’s wrought influence could ascertain that Lysaer’s shocked spirit stayed bound to the madness of Desh-thiere’s curse.

  ‘Dharkaron Avenge, and against my last breath!’ Dakar vowed with dangerous anger. But the quaver that marred his resolute oath exposed the naked fear in him. One tiny slip, the least whiff of suspicion that he meddled inside the Prime’s close affairs, and he would be dead, struck down in an instant, with Lysaer left broken past salvage.

  Best not to dwell on the unpleasant stakes as the final minutes streamed by. Dakar steadied his nerve and pronounced a clipped cantrip. Cast across distance, he invoked precise skills and retested the strength of the ward rings left sealed around Lysaer’s drugged person. Should those stringent protections give way, his best effort here would spark off the whirlwind and reap the sure course to disaster.

  The last, tensioned seconds spun past, inexorable. Dakar broke into sweat, chilled by the fickle spring air on his skin, and too well aware of the crickets whose songs hushed into an ominous silence. He checked his own guard spells. Poised, he prepared to unveil the meticulous construct cradled in his unsteady palms: a tattered bit of cloth, torn from Lysaer’s shirt, stained with a let drop of s’Ilessid blood, then rolled up and knotted with a plucked strand of gold hair.

  A second filament of Lysaer’s hair, braided into a ring, wound his left, little finger. When the looped strands tingled with sudden roused power against the spellbinder’s damp skin, the sensation forewarned him that Selidie Prime invoked her raised fetch.

  Dakar released his pent breath and engaged the rune for an, one, left scribed by permission in air. The figure glowed blue, then crackled active, and wakened the tailored artifact he had already framed in retort. Its signature pattern pealed through the flux as a shout, wrought to mirror the Named essence of Lysaer s’Ilessid.

  Selidie’s diabolical sent trap locked into that amplified, unguarded target. For a heart-beat, Dakar held the malevolent thrust of her warped energies captive within his bare hands. He locked his grip. Sealed the noose with the rune of ending, alt, spoken in frantic exhilaration. Which decisive obstruction conjoined the duel, beyond revocable.

  His bold move threw the Prime’s Seniors off stride. Surprised, never powerless, they had a split-second chance to react. But a tranced circle thralled into subservience through crystal required a half beat more effort to shift course in pursuit of the Matriarch’s will.

  Dakar acted first. He doused the sealed construct into the streamlet. Natural current stripped away charge and dissolved the layers of fine energies.

  Protections and stays came unravelled at speed, hastened along by Dakar’s aligned partnership, worked through permission with the four elements. His core of laid runes embedded in wait unleashed and flared, by reactive design activated through running water. Four of the six primal runes of unbinding arced and countered the eightfold sigils the Koriathain enacted to halter free will.

  Far off at Whitehold, the fetch made to maim Lysaer unravelled into an explosive gout of white flame. Selidie’s riposte raised only screams as the sisters she managed recoiled and broke contact with the quartz matrix that focused their power. Scalded to blisters, then deafened and blinded, they lost their tranced poise and reeled in disarray from the violated connection.

  Dakar sealed the finish. His shout in actualized Paravian split the night and called on the living flame of the cardinal element: ‘Fiadliel! Ei lysien cuen sheduanient i’an!’

  He was no crown prince; not any longer a Fellowship agent to command the mysteries for Athera’s need. Nonetheless, the response echoed through him. He felt the summoned forces rush into release with a roar down the tenuous spelled line, fast fading, but anchored yet to the sisterhood’s doings in Whitehold. His intent stayed adamant, final and swift as the cut of the surgeon’s knife: anything anywhere in the Prime’s possession that resonated to Prince Arithon or Lysaer hit flash-point and went up in smoke. The effusive burst of wild ecstasy wrought as his act of grand conjury reached completion stung bone and flesh with fierce joy in swift passage. Dakar panted, slumped, his face masked in soaked hands. Droplets spilled down his wrists. The salty scald of his tears mingled with the icier runnels of wet splashed back into the streamlet.

  In afterthought, diminished to distanced faint ripples cast through flux, he caught the howl of Selidie’s curse to inflict her balked vengeance upon the mind and person of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn.

  Spent to lassitude, Dakar ground out a weak laugh. Then he steadied his reeling wits and erased his spelled lines of protection. One by one, with reverent gratitude, he freed and dispersed his borrowed ties to the might of the elements.

  Morning waited but hours away. By then, the Prime’s promise of retaliation would be too late to enact.

  The vision of seer’s talent already flowered, exuberant with the forecast proof: Dakar sensed the black stallion’s disgruntled annoyance. Pro
mpted to fury, at last driven mad by the itch of chafed skin, the horse stopped trying to scrape off the baldric and sword left noosed to its neck by Khadrien’s impetuous presumption.

  Straight as the shot arrow, Asandir’s stallion made for the nearest trusted, friendly hand to ease its rankled discomfort. The horse would find the Master of Shadow stretched prone in light sleep, tucked in a dry gulch for concealment. It would nose his clothes and lip at his hair until he honoured the need to awake.

  For once, errant talent bestowed the requital: Dakar viewed the stallion beneath the late-risen moon, one ear cocked back for the singer’s voice that addressed its true spirit in musical tones of endearment. Tender fingers eased the caught burrs from its mane. Gentle, they moved and scratched the satin hair whorled with dried sweat at its crest. Pleasure sang in twined partnership, man’s and beast’s, as the black leaned into the caress and shuddered with bliss. The horse heaved a bottomless sigh of content at the last, when Arithon’s touch unbuckled the baldric slung from its neck and restored it to freedom. His Grace did not know yet that his small act of kindness had reclaimed a vital piece of his forgotten birthright.

  Once more, the Teir’s’Falenn bore up the heirloom sword, Alithiel, bestowed on his royal lineage as a past gift of gratitude.

  Soon enough, his curiosity would prompt him to unwind the wrapped leather and unmask the blade’s emerald-set hilt. Rathain’s prince would recognize the unearthly grace wrought into the sweep of dark quillons. The talent in him could not do other than recapture the whispered secrets instilled in the runes on the blade. As Athera’s Masterbard, he was fit to recognize the latent presence of the grand chord once spoken by the Paravians to Name the winter stars. Which promise offered him potent defense for the hour he needed protection . . .

  Roused back to himself from the depths of tranced prescience, Dakar arose stiff and tired, but oddly calm. He would let sleeping dogs lie, for tonight. Rathain’s prince could be left undisturbed to complete his escape on his own. The lonely, fat spellbinder’s cowardice chose not to address the raw wound of betrayal that had broken a difficult, long term of service and reduced a cherished friendship to ashes.