Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Then, the reiving cohort of lancers had worn black-and-gold surcoats blazoned with entwined snakes and lions. The innocent’s cottage just put to the torch crackled in red conflagration, whipped under a white-out blizzard. In that day’s frigid air, amid drifts trampled pink, sprawled the large, honest man their knives had tortured to find him. Heart-sore, he strove with his healer’s skills to stem bleeding and bind riven flesh. The damage lay beyond any remedy. Even so, he rejected the dying man’s plea for abandonment: ‘For your gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath, Dharkaron witness.’

  He finished the dressing for honour alone. ‘You didn’t betray me,’ he told that wounded man, whose agony, suffered in his behalf, came to refuge in the comfortless chill of a root-cellar.

  Amid winter’s freeze, sheltered in earth-bound quiet, the reliving carried the same fetid smells: of breathed air and wrapped wounds, congealed blood, and the hounding dread of uncertainty.

  That man’s fatal anguish had wrung him to voice the bitter extent of his sorrow: ‘You failed nothing and no one. I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown that will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’

  ‘Long life, and my blessing,’ said the ghost in his nightmare. ‘The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’

  Arin wrenched awake with a gasp, shuddered by the throes of after-shock. Somebody’s callused hand gripped his arm, and another muffled his screaming.

  ‘Arin?’ The concern was Tarens’s, not some long-dead trapper. ‘You shouted in your sleep.’

  Carefully tactful, the crofter released him. Respect did not rush to ask probing questions. Yet the fabric of pretence had shredded. As fugitives roped together by destiny, one man understood that he was the sole cause of his fellow’s hapless endangerment.

  Worse, the relentless peril that stalked them trafficked in blood-letting stakes. Arin sat up. Arms wrapped over tucked knees, he rested his forehead against his crossed wrists.

  Tonight’s outbreak of recall suggested a history his spirit cried out to disown: chased as quarry before, he had survived because a strong man with great heart had died for him. More, his own peal of sorrow restated the lines of a prince’s oath to a feal liegeman. Incontrovertibly, he had a past and a name: dangerous facts all but certain to drive the committed factions that hunted him. Though to the last fibre, he viewed such a royal legacy as abhorrent, for the worse, Tarens was already ensnared in the weave of that intractable heritage.

  Scalded, Arin reaffirmed the past vow hurled into the teeth of his enemies. ‘I don’t leave them my wounded.’

  If the selfless kindness that brought Tarens to shelter a destitute stranger was not to share a dog’s end, the misery of their cooped quarters must be sustained throughout days to come. Just as before, the diligent searchers would leave no stone unturned, and no weedy field untrampled in their manic furor. Therefore, no quarry’s tracks must be found in the pristine drifts. With luck, under snow, the temple dedicates would overlook the buried depression at the root-cellar’s entrance. For safety, the fugitives holed up inside must stay immured until the next thaw. The bare ground would have to be frosted iron-hard before they dared emerge, first to forage, then to move on.

  As wretchedly plagued by the capricious onset of an early winter, only one person alive stayed at liberty to illuminate Arin’s veiled past. Dakar the Mad Prophet sulked in shadow beneath the bleak spire of Althain Tower, buffeted by the cruel north wind. He needed no seer’s gift to forecast the squeeze of the crisis: beyond doubt, his accursed role in Prince Arithon’s past would run him afoul of the Koriathain.

  Dakar had crossed their filthy agenda before, even quashed the wily gamut of their probes in his time as a crown heir’s appointed protector. Under Fellowship auspices, in lawful standing as Asandir’s agent, he had been the target of their baneful plots often enough to wring him to cold sweats. The fresh prospect woke the spectre of nightmare, since the thankless quittance of his apprenticeship stripped him of the Sorcerers’ backing.

  At loose ends, three days later, Dakar reeled yet. From outraged denial, to obstinate dragged heels, to packing his tinker’s haul of possessions, he loitered outside the tower’s shut gates, abandoned to his own devices. The warded locks were fastened, behind him. Ahead, the worn spur of the north trade-road seamed the barren wilds of Atainia; daunting, inhospitable terrain for a traveller stranded afoot.

  Southward, the ancient track flanked the iced current of the Isaer, passed the massive node that harnessed the lane force at the Great Circle, then met the cross-roads at the crumbled Second Age ruin, where the river’s head-waters welled from an underground cavern. Asandir’s journey lay that way, en route to the mountain outpost that sheltered a persecuted clan enclave.

  Fed to the teeth with the hazardous affairs of his former master, and festered to a grudge like a canker, Dakar turned his back and set off for the nearest town habitation. Weeds snagged at his boots. Too short-strided for the rough ground, he stumbled across stony gullies washed through the wheel-ruts. Few wagons ventured this desolate land, laid waste since the tumult of a First Age battle, with bleak, scoured hill-tops whipped to thin dust, and vales that whispered of keening ghosts, slagged yet by the glassine pits of past drakefire.

  Solitude gave Dakar too much time to brood. Independence did not leave him care-free. His tuned awareness picked up the warped flow of the lane flux, unbalanced still by the echo of ruin a wrathful dragon had unleashed at Avenor. Disharmony and disease still choked the realm of Tysan, a condition unlikely to find a reprieve under the True Sect’s doctrine. If such weighty matters correctly belonged under Fellowship oversight, Dakar had suffered the Sorcerers’ company too long to stay blinded by ignorance. Aggravated, each step, he vented and kicked a loose pebble.

  The spiteful impulse injured only his toe. While the missile cracked off a boulder and bounced, the Mad Prophet hopped on one foot and let fly. ‘May Dharkaron Avenger’s immortal black horses drop steaming dung over Asandir’s field boots!’

  The Sorcerer’s footwear, likely as not, would walk scatheless through the encounter. Worse, the maligned gravel would imprint the curse, since the Athlien singers had vanished. The Mad Prophet yanked his flapping cloak tight and sullenly shut down his mage-sense.

  If he must blister his tender soles and spend brutal nights in the open, he would endure the unpleasantness without the bother of a refined connection. More, if the crux of Fellowship need pressured him to volunteer to safeguard Rathain’s hunted prince, he was older, and finally wise to the fact the position was star-crossed! Riddled with pernicious pitfalls and foes, with the man himself given to powers and strengths unimaginably dangerous.

  ‘Damn all to Sethvir’s manipulative maundering!’ Dakar swore. The Warden’s almighty earth-sense knew how keeping that post had wrecked the last footing for a friend’s trust. Dakar could not weep. Not anymore. His recriminations were long since spent for an anguish that could not, in life, be erased. His unsavoury duty in Halwythwood, and again, after warning, at Athir, had unequivocally served Fellowship interests through the betrayal of Arithon’s personal integrity.

  If the royal victim ever discovered the secret price paid then to win his survival, Dakar understood what his hide would be worth! In his shoes, the guilty party would run, never to shoulder the lash of reprisal from the infamous s’Ffalenn temper.

  ‘Murder would be kinder,’ Dakar muttered, and pumped on short legs to hike faster.

  He reached Lorn three days later, puffing and tired, with chafed heels and both ankles blistered. The town was no place to cheer dismal spirits: little more than a barnacle cluster of dwellings attached to the rocky northcoast, sandwiched between a clouded, pearl sky and the pewter shine of the winter breakers. Dusk had fall
en. Under the smeared smoke from the chimney-stacks, the rimed cobbles in the narrow streets sheltered the slink of ­scavenging cats, and the briny miasma of fish guts. The years since the revival of navigation had shrunk the port back to an isolate haven for mackerel boats.

  The market lay deserted, where by day the garrulous matrons diced and salted down the dawn catch. The risen, raw wind already had chased their benighted gossip indoors. As eager for comfort, Dakar steered between the bleak, wharf-side warehouses and the netted thatch roof of the chandler’s. The hot glow of lamp-light steamed the roundels of the sole clapboard tavern when he shoved his bulk through the squeaky plank door.

  Conversation quieted before him, replaced with the owlish stares by which grizzled, backwater salts measured an outsider. Even the urchin stopped begging for scraps and turned round eyes towards the cloaked stranger.

  Dakar surveyed the coarse company, daubed in the thick shadows from the tallow lamps slung from the ceiling beams. Unattached men sprawled at the trestles, flushed with drink as they elbowed to cuddle the barmaids. Others with wives and young children at home downed their pints and hob-nobbed with friends. The widows with black scarves tied over their hair, and the ham-fisted matrons crammed into the corner nooks, while the wizened elderly snoozed by the hearth, too arthritic to haul twine on the luggers.

  The acquaintance Dakar sought was not present.

  Aware if he ventured abroad that the doors would be closed to late lodgers, he waded inside over mud-brick floors tracked gritty with sand. The taint of wet wool and sweat was ingrained, and the attitude jaundiced as the offal dumped out for the sharks. Lest such contempt be mistaken for welcome, the muscular landlord propped against the bar priced his beer to fleece strangers.

  His brew would be sour as pig swill, besides. Dakar might have matched the extortion with coppers spell-burnished to gleam like silver, but the clam stew with hard bread he wanted sold for only three pence. He seated himself on an empty bench, ordered supper, and ate. Talk of nets, sails, and weather resumed, pointedly directed around him.

  He was not left to mind his anonymous business. Another woman tucked into one corner was equally shunned by the locals. Although she wore the same smock blouse and wool over-dress, her lily-white fingers had never flensed a wet cod. The sigil she pitched against Dakar’s aura flicked his nerves like a scuttling spider.

  The Mad Prophet choked. He blotted the chowder broth sprayed through his beard and slurped onwards. Apparently innocuous, stupid, and fat, he measured the execrable nuisance: Prime Selidie’s rapacity wasted no time. Already, he was pinched in a trap laid by the Koriathain. More, the power that hounded him was no trifle. The witch had more sisters stationed nearby, equipped with the force to shred his defenses.

  Cornered, alone, he was tacitly warned to accede in quiet surrender.

  Dakar spat out a mauled clot of gristle and sopped up the last driblets of gravy. Bedamned if he meant to move before he settled his dinner. The enchantress could fume herself purple meanwhile. Tysan’s dogmatic aversion to sorcery meant a sister reliant upon a quartz focus dared not wield her blatant craft in the open.

  Inspired, Dakar belched, clutched his middle, and yowled. ‘This vile soup is tainted! Does the house poison guests? I’ve been gouged before for the price of a bed when bad stew laid me low with a belly-ache!’

  A smatter of laughter arose, cut by the inn matron’s roar from the kitchen. ‘Going to spew, are you? The gutter’s outside! No refunds here for a whiner’s gut, nor warm milk for a griped constitution!’

  Dakar doubled over and moaned.

  Nobody else who consumed the same fare took pity on his distress. The bar-keeper ignored him. While his enemy watched, Dakar ripped off his belt. He tossed the strap onto the trestle hard enough to make the looped coin pouch clash loudly against the brass buckle. Cloak shrugged off to puddle around his ankles, he unlaced and peeled his twill jerkin, then groaned and crumpled arse down on the floor.

  Heads turned, hatted and bearded and weathered, amused by his histrionics.

  Dakar shuddered and held his breath. When his pouched cheeks flushed to vermilion, he rolled up his eyes and flopped into a faint.

  Evidently out cold, he lay like a log. Where a dishonest bumpkin anyplace else would snap up his obvious bait, Lorn’s slack-witted brutes showed no interest. Instead, the burliest onlooker grabbed the suds pail from the tap. While he doused the felled landlubber back to spluttering consciousness, the beggar child finally dived after the abandoned purse. The predictable happened: his disreputable, grimed hand blistered on the spellbinder’s wards as he tried to pilfer the contents.

  The treble scream as the boy singed his fingers sheared over the rumbled laughs and snide comments. He was quite unharmed, beyond a few moments of painful sensory illusion.

  But where conjury was anathema, the lad’s cry raised a furor of panic.

  While the timid backed into the corners and prayed, the brave brandished raised benches and bottles and closed in to trounce the unholy practitioner. The door banged as someone left at a run to fetch the town’s armed authority.

  ‘That’s your sorry response for a lad caught out, thieving?’ Dakar yelled through the commotion. Soaked to dripping, hunched over with belly-ache, he shoved erect in the jostle. Backed to the wall by a breastwork of benches, he pealed on through the bar-keeper’s bellows and the child’s roaring tantrum. ‘Your snotty brat looks fit for work. Let him earn honest pay washing pots in your scullery and thank me for the sting of a timely correction!’

  But instead, the harpy from the inn’s kitchen barreled out with her meat skewer angled for blood. ‘We don’t take interference from upstart sorcerers!’

  Dakar dug in his heels. Safe, he hoped, from the underhand wiles of Koriathain, he measured the angry fishermen who crowded to carve him in strips. ‘Damn all to Dharkaron!’ he railed in their teeth. ‘And the same to the Light’s idiot doctrine.’ Only a suicide would blaspheme the True Sect’s Canon by the name of Ath’s Avenging Angel. Annoyed that Lorn’s inept constable was tar-slow to collect blatant malefactors, Dakar ducked a swung fist. ‘Why beat a sick man? Take that ne’er-do-well snip who shoved his sticky mitt in my coin-purse!’

  Buffered amid the pummelling scuffle, with both eyes alert for the Koriani meddler, a short man tussled by a pack of stout locals failed to see the town’s hastily summoned defender: one who gleamed, out of place, in the white-and-gold robes bestowed by the high temple at Erdane.

  With the vested Sunwheel diviner came the immaculate armed escort, dispatched for the annual headcount of the Light’s faithful. Dakar’s rude discovery of the surprise entourage met the mailed fist of the dedicate whose righteous clout dropped him unconscious.

  Dakar woke behind bars. A connoisseur of dark cells the length and breadth of five kingdoms, his nose broke the news that Lorn’s dungeon outstripped the most noisome. He languished in fishy straw used sometime ago to pack mackerel. The stink threatened to kill him. Worse, clutches of starved rats rustled to feast on the rotted bits of fins and glued fish-heads. The slide of hairless tails and scampering feet tickled over him, while beneath, the floor stirred to an army of questing roaches. His nape throbbed, his eyelids were crusted, and the slob incarcerated before him had mistaken the water pan for a chamber-pot.

  Nauseous, Dakar counted his blessings: he was not wracked by a hangover, or pulped by a bed-frolicking woman’s crazed husband, or worse, brothers outraged by a sister’s lost chastity. Expertly versed at survival in duress, the Mad Prophet knew how to upset a gaoler. Just by singing, he could make his presence unpleasant as nails pounded into the brain. Other wardens had thrown him out on his arse for drawing in plagues of iyats.

  Lorn’s square-jawed trusty escaped such grief, due to the predation of the Koriathain, and because temple authority left no heretic sorcerer to corrupt their horde of spiff rodents. Lancers in white surcoats collected Dakar by the scruff before his bashed head stopped spinning.

  He played uncoo
perative and weak at the knees. Despite centuries of civil­ized apprenticeship, the Fellowship’s cast-off spellbinder could belt out insults with dock-side flair. ‘I’m too sick to move,’ he finished off, douce, not faking the fact that the starch had run out of him.

  Lethargy forced the hand of his captors. They smutched their white livery, heaved Dakar’s bulk upright, and grunted his dragged heels upstairs, where the predictable jumped-up clerk surely waited to record the sentence.

  ‘Don’t promise me justice!’ groused Dakar, en route. ‘I’ve seen the facetious performance before. The magistrate’s chamber won’t be a turd-box for rats. No, their two-legged cousins like floors without muck. They’ll expect me to wet myself for a gaggle of buffoons perched on a dais. They’ll wear jewels and prettier robes than you lot, with chins brown as yours, because anyone jostling for a promotion always polishes backsides with puckered lips.’

  The warden roared and cocked his mailed fist. Dakar smirked and sagged into a curtsey. While the muscle that propped him upright bowed also, bent over by his unstrung weight, the chap’s armoured knuckles ploughed unimpeded into the stone wall. The screech of steel links made the most stalwart man cringe and caused Dakar to faint into a wad on the landing. The vengeful boots that kicked his larded ribs roused slurred mutters but failed to stiffen his backbone enough to stand up. There forward, he had to be towed by the wrists and ankles like a dead donkey. Onwards up the rough stair, then forcibly skated down a corridor floored with waxed wood, Dakar bemoaned the abuse until his sweated escort flopped him through the doubled doors into the chamber for judgement. Prostrate and panting, he exuded the reek of dead mackerel steeped in rat piss.

  The Light’s diviner scarcely blinked at the stench. A bald fellow with translucent skin, he sat enthroned beside candles that lit his livery to eye-stabbing brilliance. The town magistrate and justiciar flanked him like book ends, with a stool set aside for a bothered clerk, and a sparrow-thin orator who plucked up a list and wheezed through the verified accusations.