Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  The bay knew its own way. No hand on the rein was required to guide its return to feed and dry shelter.

  Tysan’s most guarded clan outpost lay tucked in the secluded recess of a hidden gorge, the access defended by fortified walls, and a double gateway whose massive blocks had been raised and sealed by the lore of the vanished centaur masons. Inside, the arches that vaulted the dry cavern rose three times the height of a man. When not hung with tapestries for guest custom and feasting, the hall rebounded with hollow echoes: on this hour, conversation with the ominous overtones predominated as the Sorcerer’s fresh news prolonged a precipitate session still in progress. The old man seated as Tysan’s reigning steward leaned over a trestle draped with parchment maps. The rapt company with him included his war-captain, two elderly women, and three harried selectmen from the clan council. All wore fur hats and oiled-wool cloaks since the desperate measures of tightened security risked no fire to vent tell-tale smoke from the central hearth.

  Asandir was no longer present at nightfall, when the young man who bore the fresh mark of heirship stepped in from his volunteer charge of the Sorcerer’s horse. The blizzard by then closed down with vengeful force. Despite the mauling wind and choking snowfall, word of Saroic’s changed status had blazed through the guarded settlement.

  The off-duty scouts crowded him at the entrance, exclaiming with incandescent excitement. No Fellowship Sorcerer had visited in recent memory, far less to serve them with an upset to their clan council’s choice of succession.

  ‘Did Asandir say we’d battle more True Sect purges?’ asked the puppy-dog boy, tagged at his heels since the stable.

  Saroic shrugged off the rough back-slaps and questions. Still clad in soaked leathers, worn breathless from the chest-high drifts breasted on his return, he subdued his inquisitive friends without words, then left them silenced in his wake. Across the darkened, cavernous chamber, while the snap of his footfalls reverberated a ghost’s legion of whispers around him, he stopped before the seated elders and clan chieftains gathered around the lone candle that lit the strewn charts.

  ‘I’m not celebrating,’ he informed the uncle the Sorcerer’s prerogative had seen fit to supplant.

  Older, broader, and mightily scarred from the fights that repulsed the relentless Sunwheel campaigns to rout out clan presence, the uncle rose for the traditional salute, his closed fist clapped over his heart. He wore the mantle of tested experience as war-captain, yet ambition did not stand between them. Elsewhere in seclusion, Saroic’s mother and sisters would be weeping, consoled in their grief by an aunt, who shared in equal measure the tears of joyful relief for a husband’s lot, unexpectedly granted reprieve. The caithdein’s post was an iron-hard charge bestowed on the best and the bravest. The call to that service could, and had, tried the stoutest hearts in their family’s long history. Times when the succession was Fellowship claimed, a grim threat to the realm demanded the cruel sacrifice of necessity. That the inheritance had skipped generations foreshadowed a hard plight ahead for Saroic s’Gannley.

  He would not break under the sudden shock, any more than the uncle who gave up his titled seat resented fate’s blessing, which lifted the burden.

  Saroic took the heir designate’s chair too suddenly made his by right. The seal on his forehead a star in the gloom, he saluted the erect old man, who yet carried the mantle of lifetime authority. ‘Grandsire, I hope years will pass before I’m invested. Surely the Sorcerer will answer my questions after he’s fed and settled?’

  Tysan’s caithdein measured his young nephew’s transparent uncertainty and sighed. ‘Asandir’s already gone. He left for the mountains on foot, with the promise his errand would upend every hair on the heads of the temple’s diviners.’

  Outside, the gale shrieked fit to knock the man down who ventured the exposed rock on the heights. Snow fell thick enough to blind and bury a traveller, then freeze his bones fast until spring. Yet no fury born of the world’s wild elements might gainsay a Fellowship Sorcerer. The caithdein appointed to speak for the King’s Justice in Tysan would rather have shouted against the raw might of that storm than venture one word of dissuasion. ‘Asandir will be back before dawn to collect his black horse from the stable. He’s said not to follow or upbraid the sentries if nobody sees him away upon his departure.’

  Saroic met the set-back, wavered, then bore up. ‘Did the Sorcerer mention why I was called forward, or what threat to the realm we’ll be facing?’

  ‘He told us the Master of Shadow has escaped from Koriani captivity,’ the uncle admitted, moved down the trestle to accept his ranked place as the war band’s commander. ‘We must brace to expect widespread panic and purges such as our clan presence has not seen before.’ The swoop and dip of the candle-flame shadowed gruff features not given to seams of uncertainty as he added, ‘Already, Sethvir knows the temple at Erdane is calling up a fresh muster. The High Priest’s ambition is bound to renew the Light’s quest for the conquest of Havish. Your role is bespoken, Saroic. Asandir said you will come to uphold crown law as caithdein against forces beyond any precedent. Because if Lysaer s’Ilessid should fall to the binding influence of Desh-thiere’s curse, he could try again to impose his false claim and seize sovereign rule over Tysan.’

  ‘I’m expected to defend in this breach?’ Saroic reeled, hands better suited to penmanship clenched on the boards to stay upright. Who possessed the main strength to sustain the onslaught? Aside from the zealot troops ruled by the temple canon, none but a sorcerer’s power might curb a self-made avatar, birth-gifted to wield the direct power of elemental light. ‘I am no fighter!’ he gasped, honest in the wretchedness of his misery.

  His grandfather’s hand braced his unsteady shoulder, but not for false re­assurance. ‘You were picked as my heir for your clever intelligence! Force of arms cannot hope to win our salvation. The man who knows when to run can be wise, and for that, take your place at this council.’

  The clans’ beleaguered efforts would not stand unsupported: sprung from blood lineages, each endowed with a talent to safeguard the land, everyone present sensed the sudden change that unfolded as Asandir’s remote work reached completion.

  A sharp shimmer rippled the air, unbidden and fierce as a shower of light splashed over their perceived surroundings. The odd rush of sensation bloomed into sound, a clear note that chimed beyond hearing and sweetened the yearning spirit. All things that glittered seemed painfully heightened. The candle-flame suddenly brightened and stretched. The gleam of dulled steel on hard-used weapons and belt rings pulsed to blue stars of reflection. The clean scent of snow wafted in on the draughts gained a scalpel’s edged clarity, while the shadows that veiled the hall’s deepest corners softened to textured velvet.

  Living flesh became flushed with heady well-being, as though lifted from dross by a tonic.

  ‘Ath’s grace, the Sorcerer’s clearing the flux lines!’ the clan’s seeress gasped with astonished elation. ‘The blessing we witness this night is beyond two hundred years overdue!’

  No others found words. Within Orlan’s clan outpost, no clanbred inhabitant withstood the rip tide surge that flushed out the stagnation of long-standing obstruction. Even the most sturdily grounded among them became whirled into rhapsodic, forgetful oblivion.

  Outside, the storm winds keened and boxed the high peaks, then veered to a cyclonic frenzy of joy. As Asandir’s power bored through the blocked channels, the released torrent crested to a flood that shook ancient rock and unravelled avalanches like trampling thunder. Lightning shattered the night silence as lane currents held trammelled for centuries exploded with frenetic force and burned clean.

  Next morning dawned clear. The blizzard blew out to the pristine shimmer of ice and a lucent sky cloudless as aquamarine. Packed snow should have drifted the notch, with the way through the mountains impassable. Yet Asandir’s horse was gone from the stable. When the outpost’s mazed sentries regained their senses, and the recovered parties of scouts ventured abroad to q
uarter the high country, they found that Fellowship urgency had not been inconvenienced.

  A track cleaved like an axe cut where the road ran. Unerring, paced at a gallop, the black stallion’s hoof-prints carved down the centre, headed due east for the lowlands.

  As the day’s shadows lengthened, Asandir returned to the nexus at Isaer’s Great Circle, forty leagues distant. The black horse grazed, stripped of tack by the verge, on green grass coaxed to grow out of season. No rime of sweat marred the gloss on the animal’s raven coat. The rider sat on a fallen stone, back braced against a cracked archway. Absorbed with a meal of raisins and tough cheese bartered from a passing courier, Asandir did not appear as he was: powerful beyond mortal measure. The chill that settled as evening approached sliced through his travel-stained leathers. He felt the nip as keenly as any commonplace traveller unsheltered after a hard journey made in the open.

  But unlike other wayfarers, a Sorcerer versed in the high arts could tap the land’s flux currents and down-step the frequency to replenish himself. Collected and alert, Asandir licked the last crumbs from his fingers when the Warden of Althain’s light contact addressed him.

  ‘Confusion to the enemy!’ Sethvir sent, amused. ‘As ever, your timing’s impeccable.’

  Select images followed, lent a gilt-edged flicker by the crackle of the heightened flux currents blasted clear by Asandir’s labour the night before: Koriani scryers who searched for their escaped captive were dazzled near blindness by flares amplified by their engaged quartz sphere, while their aghast Senior frantically scrambled to cover the crystal before the excess charge cracked its matrix. Across Camris, the True Sect’s vested diviners were seared by heretical dreams. The priest on duty at Erdane’s high temple fled screaming when a shrine collapsed during the nightfall devotions and doused the perpetual flame sanctified to the Light. At Cainford, the ranking examiner died, his weak heart stopped by a surfeit of ecstasy. While the lane flux lit Tysan from end to end, the seals laid by the temple canon exploded, leaving armed camps at the border wide open to infestations of iyats. The ruin of fallen Avenor chimed aloud as the slagged remnant of the stone foundations rang like a bell. Game quickened in the wilds. Clansfolk rejoiced for the change, aware the blight and the fevers that ravaged the unsanctioned country-side would be lifted; while far off, immersed in a state of awareness too distant for mortal hearing, a dragon whose will tangled a Sorcerer’s destiny lifted her head and turned opened gold eyes towards the far side of the world…

  ‘Seshkrozchiel heard!’ Asandir exclaimed, pleased. ‘Any chance that Davien’s made aware of our quandaries?’

  ‘He knows,’ Sethvir answered. ‘Beyond what I’d hoped, though the knowledge does not leave him free to declare himself.’

  Asandir raised a glare like snap-frozen ice. ‘Is that everything?’ he demanded, alert for sly subterfuge since Sethvir’s caginess often masked set-backs.

  Althain’s Warden capped his summary with more cryptic news. ‘Your lost prince goes by Arin. He’s cut past the abandoned farm-steads above Cainford, across country-side rife with pursuit. The river hems his course to the south. The shallows by the road where he might try to ford are much too heavily guarded.’

  Asandir arose. Sundown approached. Time he moved to achieve his planned transit. He whistled to his dark horse, and the animal came, head lowered to receive the bridle that hung braided reins, but no bit. The Light’s priesthood feared the beast’s single ghost eye, eerily offset by the irregular star and stripe, which slewed an oblate course through the left nostril. Asandir scratched the black ears, afraid to ask outright the last burning question before he broke off Sethvir’s contact.

  Althain’s Warden rebuked the unspoken, naked hope gently, that the resonant surge as the flux current balanced might have wakened Arithon to recoup something beyond an intuitive grasp of his trained mastery. ‘Whatever his Grace doesn’t know cannot matter. Ath speed your course to Etarra.’

  Win or lose, the outside risk lay behind. The Fellowship’s future course was committed beyond all regret. The back-lash stirred through Tysan’s upset factions could allow their hunted fugitive to slip clear, or else come to hasten his helpless downfall.

  Asandir resaddled the stallion. Alone in dusk’s shadow, he mounted and wended his way through the scrub forest rooted over the ancient, concave pattern of Isaer’s Great Circle. When the eventide lane forces crested, he would be bound on to Rathain by way of the beacon array that channelled the planet’s electromagnetic currents through the ancient marker stones on the Plain of Araithe.

  Dawn three mornings later brought the Sorcerer’s unobtrusive arrival in the trade town of Etarra, his first return since the ill-starred coronation day that had failed to restore crown rule under the auspices of old charter law. A sad irony, that today the last true royal heir was pursued as a renegade in Tysan, and Etarra was governed by a lord mayor descended from Halduin s’Ilessid. Lysaer did not know of the Sorcerer’s presence. The palace staff remained uninformed, and the townsfolk’s absorbed complacency kept them in ignorance.

  A rangy, silver-haired figure unrecognized in his wayfarer’s mantle, Asandir paid in coin to stable his stallion at a quality inn with first-rate care. He rented a cheap room at the Goose Quill for himself, slept briefly, then spent the afternoon hours abroad in the grey, cobbled streets.

  Etarra nestled within a doubled set of walls, defended by a private, armed garrison and a roster of crack sentries. The square buildings of brick, with their peaked tile roofs and ceramic chimney-pots, here and there through the years had acquired still more pretentious detail and ornate facings. The deep, vaulted cellar beneath the state palace that once housed the dread rites of Grey Kralovir held no more entrapped, tormented ghosts: only the dusty racks of rare wines, hoarded to appease the ambassadors who wheedled and aired their sullen complaints at the mayor’s lush table. The crabbed trees of the region’s famed apple-orchards were lost to memory, cut down since past campaigns against Shadow required a tourney field, a rambling barracks, and larger stables for courier’s mounts and trained destriers. Crows wheeled, screaming over the middens. The flags that snapped in the gusts at the gate arches streamed the scarlet-and-gold governor’s cartouche, once flown at the forefront of war in Deshir, and adopted ever since the Great Schism as Lysaer’s personal standard.

  In other ways, Etarra had not changed at all. Where the snarl of back-alley tanneries and knacker’s yards reeked under the lour of smoke from the glue-pots, and in the clogged side streets where the craft quarter’s industry loaded finished wares bound for Market Square, the metallic tang of the smelter’s fires in the forges sometimes cleared, refreshed in changed breeze by the waft of perfumes from the High Street’s fashionable dress shops. The old wineries flourished, packed with the languid dissipation of the pedigree dandies. Minstrel’s song mingled with the staccato whip-cracks, where the ox-drawn drays of the overland caravans still cankered the subtle flow of the lane flux.

  Yet Asandir had not come to temper the stew of Etarran politics. Not directly; he strode down prosperous streets with great mansions owned by merchants and guildsmen engaged in honest prosperity, pleased at least that Lysaer’s fair rule had hazed out the old nests of corrupted practice. Clan captives were no longer sold for child labour, and brisk justice had banished the ugly business of rival feuding through hired assassins.

  The Sorcerer paused in a winter-cold lane. Seamed face upturned, his luminous eyes blank with thought, he appeared as innocuous as a maundering grandfather. But in fact, his honed senses were tightly entrained: to sound out every spirit sprung from the outbred, matrilineal branch of s’Gannley. He needed the blood heritage of Sulfin Evend, a name still reviled by the temple archives as the Light’s most nefarious heretic.

  The spirit Asandir selected stood out, hot as flame, from the pack of siblings and cousins. She was a pert creature, incorrigible, rebellious, and wild as a sparrow-hawk among pecking doves where she stood, surrounded by swank admirers and Etarran
rakes. Asandir cornered her in the Red Cockerel’s packed tap-room, just as she finished the knife throw that demolished five noisy contenders and won the purse their male prowess had wagered. Flushed with laughter, stylishly dressed in a laced-velvet bodice, full skirts, and ribbon-tied slippers, she crowed like a hoyden and twirled face about in the scintillant sparkle of her flushed victory.

  The pirouette fetched her, pink nose to chest, against the tall Sorcerer’s presence.

  Daliana possessed her forefather’s keen instincts. Tawny eyes widened, stopped short in her tracks, she tipped her chin upwards and gasped. Even in the dim setting, her truth-seer’s vision grasped the implacable power leashed behind the seamed face that confronted her. Fearless, without artifice, she dared to speak first. ‘Who are you and what do you want of me?’

  ‘Do you not know?’ Asandir’s smile was lightning against thunder-head, alive with the force of upheaval and change. ‘I’ve come to request a service befitting your ancestry. Though I daresay the matter should be broached in depth, under raised wards and in privacy.’

  The quiet room let to patrons for close business was intimately furnished with a polished deal table and two comfortable, stuffed chairs. A tray of bread, cheese, and wine was provided, along with wax candles for the paned lamps that hung from bronze hooks in the ceiling beams. Under that refined light, Daliana’s straight, dark brows looked severe, drawn into a frown as forbidding as any displayed by her distrustful forebear. ‘Sulfin Evend was a captain at arms, skilled at weaponry, and, history says also, a master strategist.’

  ‘You are his equal for tactics, I think.’ Folded into a chair too squat for his stork’s frame, the Sorcerer opposite looked more rumpled but not less imposing. Deep shadow accentuated a face time and weather had ruthlessly chiselled. His leathers were worn, but his pewter hair gleamed, spilled over immaculate, squared shoulders. ‘You have the s’Gannley talent in full measure. Also an enviously quick set of reflexes. And courage to blister any man scarlet.’