Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  ‘The prisoner will stand for sentencing,’ the temple diviner intoned, his accent from upper-crust Erdani origins.

  Dangerous history had roots in that place, where the mayor’s council once had been corrupted by necromancers. Though the cult was defunct, the shady influence still tainted the town’s entrenched factions. Dakar peered through cracked lids and held his tongue. Jammed between two upright guards, unshaven and itching and irritable, he watched the snake in white vestments dispense with all semblance of judgement by trial.

  ‘For the charge of blasphemy, you will be stripped to suffer ten strokes of the lash, followed by execution without appeal for sorcerous works and dark practice,’ the diviner decreed. ‘May the divine Light cleanse the taint as your wicked heart is pierced by cold steel, and your flesh is consigned to the fire.’

  ‘Are you done?’ snapped Dakar, revolted to nausea. ‘Better tell your thugs to let me lie down or someone’s sure to regret it.’ Ahead of the officiously outraged recoil, he folded and spewed up his guts. Last night’s sour meal spattered onto the dais and fouled the velvet slippers of his accuser.

  Which lapse provoked an ear-splitting screech, and sealed his death at dawn, barely hours away.

  ‘Break wind and pray all you like!’ Dakar bared his teeth in a snarl. ‘Your lash will not bite. Your sword will not pierce. Worse, the Light you invoke is a shameless fraud! Fire itself should disdain the dry wood you stack to murder the innocent.’

  ‘Not so innocent.’ Divested of his sullied shoes, one foot raised while the obsequious clerk knelt to remove his splashed hose, the robed diviner pronounced, ‘I have not waived your right to a trial without reason. Before witnesses, you are confirmed as a seer. Not ignorant, but capable of prophetic fits and unimaginably dangerous! Lorn’s warden and two guards overheard quite enough to confirm your damnation. By your own words you named yourself in league with the Spinner of Darkness!’

  Dakar sucked a sharp breath, abruptly unnerved. Not by the dire incrimin­ation, but from the nasty surprise that his upset stemmed from no head blow, but in fact arose from the queasy aftermath caused by a bout of tranced prescience.

  Worse, the forevisions arisen through a black-out trance became fated. Althain’s Warden himself never found an exception: such events were predestined to happen.

  ‘This case is sealed!’ The magistrate banged down his gavel and dismissed the guard. ‘See the prisoner secured!’

  Too facetious to detail the spurious vision foretold by Dakar’s errant gift, his priestly accusers rushed ahead with their plans for a public roast. Lorn’s dearth of a scaffold meant rousting the hands to nail up a makeshift platform. Lackeys dunned the fish-market smoke-shacks for wood, while the dedicates set the condemned into shackles and flung him back into the dungeon to languish.

  There, the novelty packed a collection of gawkers against the cell door with craned necks. But the only Dark minion to face death in Lorn failed to satisfy their curiosity. He moaned on his back in the putrid straw, pathetic as anyone else who suffered the gripe from a crock of spoiled chowder. Eyes shut, he slept and snored like a walrus, which finally drove his nervous wardens to saunter away in disgust.

  Dakar continued the racket, the rude noise needful to scare off the rats while he engaged his mage training and spiritwalked.

  Immersed in deep trance, he projected his sensitized awareness into his outward surroundings: first into the straw, with its resident scavengers, until he could have identified every noisome rodent, cockroach, and louse maggot by Name. Farther, he expanded, through the forged essence of the steel grille, then the dank masonry that imprisoned him. Lightly as breath, he brushed past the two guards and the warden on duty. Dakar eased his boundaries wider still. Soon, he knew which clerks were diligent and which slouched at their desks as their quills scratched out copies of the summary judgement against him. No written account included the words he had babbled in prophetic trance.

  Since a more active scrying could snag the attention of the Light’s pesky diviner, Dakar abandoned the fruitless thrust to recoup the content of his blind prophecy.

  Softly, he extended his probe past the ivied walls of the magistrate’s hall. Beyond the cramped wing that housed Lorn’s guild ministry, harbour office, and ramshackle customs shack, he paused where the gulls roosted with heads under wings, beneath the roof peaks and carved cornices. The dark streets below were deserted, except for a drunk who staggered homeward between two companions.

  Dakar girded himself in transparent calm, then traced the by-lanes and shut houses, with their slate roofs and dormers smudged in smoke from banked fires. Patience showed him the warded calyx of sigils that shadowed his greater enemy. The Koriathain regrouped, poised to help the Light’s priests fulfill their intent on the scaffold.

  Dakar lacked the innate power to thwart them. A second attempt at diversion would spring an attack past his resource to counter. Since the sisterhood’s amplified spells of coercion failed to recognize the Law of the Major Balance, he evoked his knowledge of natural order and melded at one with all things. As frosted air and chill stone, sleeping bird, and even the dark coil of enemy sigils, he slid his merged awareness into, then past their hostile boundaries without impediment. He widened his range: combed through the straggle of the fishermen’s shacks, where honest families slept in their beds. Among them, the particular captain he sought sat awake, puffing a late pipe beside a lit candle.

  Relief pushed Dakar’s scrying outward again. He encompassed the pier at the harbour-side: ran with the cold surge of the tide, and splashed as the wavelets that necklaced white foam against the slimed rocks of the breakwater. He became the breast of the salty sea, rocking luggers tied up at their moorings. If each boat had similar clinker-built planks and workaday piles of fish tackle, only one wore the seal of safe passage bestowed by a grateful Fellowship Sorcerer. There lay the spellbinder’s hope of release if he could contrive the means to make a rendezvous.

  Dakar stilled the expansion set into motion. Centred within the known sphere he encompassed, he gently loosened his ties to the manifest present.

  Adrift in the shadowy realm of on-coming futures, his seer’s talent sorted the overlapped images of what could be, and what might become. Trained focus breasted the ephemeral morass, and with consummate skill, traced the singular threads that concerned him.

  Dakar saw the dawn, hard-edged with certainty; then a bled corpse on a scaffold of fish barrels, torched into flame. The alternate view, superimposed and much fainter, showed the unoccupied post and piled billets abandoned. He chose that branch, and from thence, viewed the fisherman of his acquaintance arise and eat breakfast, kiss his wife and three children, and stroll to the docks. Soon after, his boat with the Fellowship’s blessing raised sail and scudded from the harbour. Dakar re-ran that sequence and noted which alley-ways held posted guards, and where the Light’s lancers were quartered. He forecast at what hour the streets would become impassibly jammed with fanatical spectators.

  Adept at his craft, he sifted the multiplied twists of event. As the probable thinned into the wisp of the possible, and the views of overlaid futures dispersed into fog, hazed over the glare of infinity, Dakar tested his choices. Through each posited frame of consequence, he selectively chose his best course. Then he woke to ground out his strained senses and reorient. Nerves steeled, he gathered his natural strength. Before the Light’s guardsmen arrived to collect him, the condemned paid his earnest respects to the rats, who had forborne to gnaw at his finger-tips.

  Then the hour drew nigh. The ephemeral shift that occurred before sunrise prickled through mage-sense as the flux reached the neap in the lane tide. Dakar slipped into trance once again. Not for an innocuous spiritwalk this time, but to garner the requisite permissions he needed to open his bid for escape. His arrangement began with such subtle stealth, just one aware mind on Athera took notice.

  Early Winter 5922

  Kingbreaker

  Winter travel and the fever-pitch te
nsion of crisis saw Asandir in his habitual element. En route to the defended clan enclave tucked high in the mountains near the Pass of Orlan, he had left Althain Tower by transit to Isaer’s Great Circle, then ridden fast and hard down the westward trade-road for seven days. He rented no post-horses when his mount tired. Bred to bear him as a cherished companion, the black stallion was a wonder among the world’s mystical graces, too devoted to be put aside. The Sorcerer snatched sleep while the animal rested. Starry nights bedded both of them down in dry leaves, Asandir wrapped up in his cloak and reclined against his mount’s side for shared warmth.

  But even a Sorcerer’s familiar could not travel at speed in the thin air of high altitude. The whipped drifts piled by the last blizzard bogged the pace where the old road narrowed down to a track folded into the buckled ramparts between the iced cliffs, and the high cornices swathed in white threatened the avalanches that broke away with a roar at the sound of a whip-crack. Experienced masters of caravans with their pack-trains of sure-footed mules never ventured the pass, facing winter.

  Asandir went where Fellowship business took him, bold beyond care for the season. Yet this time, his iron strength and determined purpose laboured under the sorrowful heart-ache: that Arithon’s plight had compelled the terms of Dakar’s brutal dismissal. As a bone tossed into the shark’s teeth of fate, the initiate prophet could stand with heroic grace, or else fall, wasted utterly, to the murderous wiles of the Fellowship’s bitterest enemies.

  Which painfully overdue word from Sethvir reached Asandir swift and straight as the flight of an arrow: ‘Our wild-card cast-off is safely away from the ambush set for him at Lorn. He’s escaped execution by the Light’s doctrine and eluded pursuit by eight Koriathain.’

  The black horse stopped four-square in the road, though the rider’s hand had not moved to rein in. The Fellowship’s field Sorcerer bent his bare head. Stiff breeze tangled his silver hair through a moment of poignant humility. ‘Show me.’

  As he wished, images relayed from Sethvir’s earth-sense unveiled the particu­lars from the morning’s hair-raising triumph: several dozy Lorn guardsmen had roused from a snooze to find they no longer warded the Light’s condemned minion. Worse, the fell creature’s evasion left every bit of forged steel in their dungeon, from locks and shackles to the grille on the cell, reverted back into crystallized carbon and raw clumps of unsmelted ore.

  Asandir might have laughed, had the True Sect’s officious audacity not galled him to redoubled rage.

  The next view showed the plump fugitive abroad in the dock-side streets in the icy darkness before dawn. By no coincidence, the spellbinder slunk down empty alleys and crossed by-ways while the town’s watchmen found their eyes turned elsewhere. Like a hot knife through butter, Dakar reached the wharf by the simplest artifice: a neat scrying told him where to be and when, down to which of the tied dories to filch from the cluster tied at the stone jetty. Black-cloaked and unseen amid blacker air, he rowed out to the sole lugger in port whose fisherman would grant him free passage.

  Day broke under clouds, with no staged execution to requite the Light’s thwarted diviner. The vessel with her furtive passenger already had cast off her mooring and sailed. She clove through the bay’s open water, while more quietly, the covert circle of Koriathain cursed the salt waves that eroded their quartz-wrought enchantments…

  Rinsed in fleeting gilt sunlight as a veil of cloud shredded against the obsidian spires of the Thaldein peaks, Asandir drew a cold breath of relief.

  Sethvir’s laconic summary confirmed an outcome not fallen too disastrously wide of the mark. ‘Since Dakar chose not to restore his defense of Arithon’s person, at least he’s arranged a spectacular diversion to confound the hunt pressed by Erdane’s high temple.’

  Asandir coughed behind his wool sleeve. ‘The priesthood is wall-eyed, suddenly saddled with two escaped minions to trace?’

  Sethvir’s pleased snort all but ruffled the world’s wind. ‘The Koriathain will have a tough time puppeteering their preferred agenda, since Lorn’s diviner was given hard evidence. Dakar’s confirmed sorceries must overshadow the spurious case that tags Arithon’s heels in the south. More, our seasick prophet bargained with the fisherman for an urgent passage to Halywythwood.’

  Now, Asandir’s craggy face broke and smiled. ‘Ah!’ Manfully dignified, he restrained a loud crow. ‘Which of the owed debts to crown honour does the Mad Prophet intend to invoke?’

  A tight pause ensued.

  Asandir’s smothered laughter did escape then, fierce and ineffably joyful. ‘Oh, better!’ Fur would fly with a vengeance in the clan chieftain’s tent when the inherited burden of shame was called due for the plot that had brokered a crown prince’s betrayal and capture.

  ‘Quite,’ Sethvir affirmed. ‘Your master initiate appears to have handled himself on his own rather well.’

  Asandir’s thoughtful quiet allowed as much. Dakar could side-step the Fellowship’s constraint just by spreading the recent news. For the cogent fact Rathain’s royal heir had been liberated must summon the realm’s caithdein back into royal service.

  When the Warden’s contact continued, unbroken, the Sorcerer exposed to the cruel chill in the Thaldeins nudged with gentle heels to prompt his horse onwards. ‘What else?’

  Sethvir’s sigh could almost be felt over distance from Althain Tower. ‘There has been one set-back. Dakar blundered into a seer’s fit that forecast the death date of Havish’s queen.’ The loss to old age was nothing the Fellowship Sorcerers had not expected. But premature word sent to Erdane’s high temple would sever the terms of a treaty and reopen the arena to renew a stalemated war.

  ‘How long do I have to sanction her successor?’ Asandir asked, resigned that his time for a hard winter journey had to be brutally shortened.

  ‘Prince Gestry must be crowned and invested ahead of the winter solstice.’ Sethvir added a poor consolation in parting, ‘The outpost at Orlan expects your arrival. That should speed your errand a bit.’

  Thankful for any small favour amid a relentless rip tide of trouble, Asandir forged ahead. The clansfolk in wait for him would not be glad: never in their forefathers’ memories had Fellowship Sorcerers brought them good tidings. Today’s call could not spare them in that regard. Asandir stroked his stallion’s neck with apology, then pushed the pace to outrace the blizzard that threatened to smother his passage.

  The storm roared in, a dark maelstrom chased on by a gale that battened the peaks under snowfall as thick as a winding sheet. A welcoming party of two horsemen poised in wait, buffeted by the wind at the rise to the notch. Through the grey gloom, the formal gold trappings on their matched coursers shone beacon-bright, though the riders were not clad in the state dress that tradition would turn out to honor a prince. One wore undyed leathers, armed as a scout. The other, elderly, white-haired, and erect, bore the blue badge with Tysan’s crown-and-star blazon as the realm’s steward in royalty’s absence.

  Asandir drew rein before them. Despite the rugged hours just spent in urgent ascent, his stallion was not lathered or winded. By contrast, the Sorcerer looked beaten to rags, his horse’s endurance sustained by the profligate gift of his personal life-force. He spoke his mind quickly. ‘Caithdein, Teir’s’Gannley, crown service requests your third grandson, just come of age.’

  The old man saluted, closed fist to his chest. Beneath the soaked pelt of a wolfskin hat, his seamed expression returned no astonishment. ‘Our seer’s vision told us. Kingmaker, the lad sits as my right-hand escort, already presented before you.’

  Gold flashed, as the second horse tossed its blazed head, pressed forward by the ascetic young man, flushed with cold in his workaday leathers. Not brawny enough to excel at bearing arms, he showed the anxious edge of a restless intelligence. Flaxen hair overshadowed poetic brown eyes, while the rakish jut to his shaved jaw bespoke an unfinished maturity. ‘What does the land’s need demand of me?’

  Asandir skewered him with a level stare from grey e
yes that dissected him, body and spirit. Behind this youthful face, the Sorcerer saw others: predecessors with illustrious names, and histories that reached back to Iamine Teiren’s’Gannley, who had in fact declined Tysan’s crown for the choice to stand shadow at the first high king’s shoulder.

  How the Sorcerer read today’s gangling candidate, or what fate hung over his unwritten future, no man knew. Saroic s’Gannley endured in silenced dread, straight and pale as an ash spear. He held, as he must, through that scouring scrutiny, while the ghostly sting of every insult, each jeer, and all the derisive clouts from companions who branded him coward flamed his cheeks scarlet.

  Asandir pronounced with shattering brevity, ‘Saroic s’Gannley, you are called forward by Fellowship prerogative to replace the heir apparent named by the clan council. When the hour arises, you shall inherit your grandsire’s title as steward to the kingdom’s throne.’ The Sorcerer peeled off a black glove and extended his work-worn hand. His touch on the candidate’s forehead imparted a silver glyph upon living flesh, the Fellowship’s mark of surety that would fade within a moon’s cycle.

  Shock might have left anyone else disconcerted. Saroic vaulted out of his saddle, almost without turning a hair. Though helpless to banish his desperate fear, he keenly sensed the moment’s exigent priority. He offered his fresh horse for the Sorcerer’s use and volunteered to take the black’s reins. ‘I could lead your stud back to the outpost on foot and tend him myself, as you wish.’

  Asandir’s smile appeared like the sun through the whipped burst of snowfall between them. ‘By your grace, I accept.’ He managed to dismount without a stumble. Swung astride the handsome, loaned courser, he leaned forward and whispered into its back-turned ear. Then, with artless abandon, he curled up and slept on the horse’s neck.