Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  From pale, she had coloured. Nerves showed in the tremulous flare of her jewels. Still, she had fibre. She had not interrupted his brutal account of the relapse fated to hound Lysaer’s sanity since the Master of Shadow’s freed status renewed Desh-thiere’s curse.

  Quiet, the Sorcerer sat back and allowed her to weigh her decision: whether or not to stand forward as her ancestor had, as a tormented ruler’s clear voice of conscience. He would not pressure, or rush, or cajole. Asandir’s lean hands stayed busy, and his strong teeth tucked into the tavern’s plate of hot food with an appetite shamelessly ravenous.

  As the weighty silence dragged out, he laid down the chunk of cheese wrapped in bread, poured a goblet of wine, and pushed the stem crystal between Daliana’s delicate fingers. ‘You would not, of course, rely on force of arms. Quickness, yes, and a glib turn of phrase, and also the most artful advantage of all. Your illustrious predecessor fought as a male. Never discount the fact you won’t have to.’

  Daliana stared back, arrow-straight, while the candle-flame rubbed cinnamon highlights into the walnut braid styled in a pinned circlet above her pert face. ‘Lord Lysaer can’t stand the sight of me,’ she stated, stripped frank. ‘That’s been evident since the first day my mother presented me to his court.’

  Asandir stared back, a bold glint in grey eyes that never stopped measuring. ‘You remind him of someone,’ he said. ‘As you choose, you might press that advantage. Lysaer has never healed that deep weakness. You threaten him, truly, in places he prefers to deny that he’s nakedly vulnerable.’

  Daliana met the Sorcerer’s cool regard, rapacious with innuendo. ‘Would you care to elaborate?’

  ‘I would not.’ Without further rebuke for her indecent prying, Asandir attacked his meal. If he seemed pleased that she was not afraid of him, his words rang beyond chill, as he added, ‘Sweet lady, you realize the boon I beg of you cannot be repaid with the promise of triumph or happiness. I am asking you, of your bravery, to shoulder a peril beyond reprieve. The charge would risk your life! Before, Sulfin Evend treated with me to bind himself for the love of a friend. Caught in the breach of a peace that could torch the known world into flames, he followed through because he was desperate. I come before you as the supplicant, this time. The need that commands me to appeal for your help could lead you to a bitter defeat, and a destiny cruel beyond imagining.’

  ‘Sulfin Evend succeeded!’ Daliana reminded with a whiplash snap.

  Then she spilled her wine and broke into tears, while the Fellowship Sorcerer arose and bowed to her.

  He knew! Ahead of speech, Asandir already sensed the heart that framed her commitment. Before he left the room, she would swear his great oath, and take on the spirit mark of his arcane protection: to defend Lord Lysaer from the recurrent threat of the madness raised by Desh-thiere’s curse.

  Winter 5922

  Extrications

  Solstice eve in the town of Whitehold in winter still saw paper moons and stars cut by children tacked up in the candle-lit windows. But since tokens that honoured the night implied suspect association with Shadow, the wealthier mansions also burned Sunwheel lamps to acknowledge the supremacy of the Light. Bakers’ girls sold caramel-nut pies in the square, while the jingle of harness bells, coming and going, wafted the fragrance of cut evergreen and spiced chocolate through the cold twilight streets. Birch fires warmed out the chill within doors, though no such cheerful flame burned in the icy gloom of the chamber where the Koriani Prime Matriarch retired under a mandate of seclusion.

  Her mood was as veiled as the glint in her jewels, reduced to a fitful flicker in darkness as two burdened servants hovered at the threshold of the open doorway.

  The Prime beckoned them forward. Not imposing today, she sat in a plain chair, dressed in a loose-fitted linen shift with a purple wool robe belted overtop. Her lofty station was not left in doubt: the red-ribboned cuffs displayed nine bands of rank, and the brooch that pinned her high collar was an intaglio amethyst, carved with the rampant crane seal of her office. No dimmed room or unassuming facade could blunt her predator’s temperament, or her mood, galled by fresh set-backs and doubly dangerous. She had steamed with impatience for over three centuries to redeem the order’s most compromised focus crystal. After a drawn-out, unbearable wait, the ripe moment arrived to redress the damage inflicted upon the Great Waystone by Prince Arithon’s past act of sabotage.

  ‘Set down the load. Yes, there! Where else but on top of my work-bench?’ The Prime gestured anxiously with the wrapped stump of one hand. ‘Carefully, mind! I will not forgive clumsiness.’

  The harried boy wards sweated with nerves under her eagle eye. Husky and muscled, almost grown enough for discharge to a craft-shop apprenticeship, they wished only to be quit of the Prime’s peremptory bidding. Her coveted treasure gave off a bitter chill that hackled their necks with inchoate fear and plumed their puffed breaths as they grunted under its ungainly burden. Jockeyed on shoulder poles like a catafalque, the shrouded cask they unloaded nestled in its crate, packed in a bed of shaved ice.

  ‘That will do.’ The Prime inclined her head to a muted sparkle of diamond hairpins. ‘Close the door, but remain outside at the ready until I have need of you.’

  The boys bobbed an obeisance, then thumped in their sheepskin boots towards the threshold in hasty retreat.

  No healthy male cared to be tasked with their post. Never, when the Matriarch engaged her advanced arts in secrecy. Selidie waited only until the shut panel pinched off the last gleam of light. Then she bared her teeth and tugged off the bindings from her crippled hands, aware she worked to an urgent deadline.

  ‘Come forward!’ Her curt order broke the stillness of what seemed an empty room.

  Movement stirred like the night rustle of bats’ wings behind the Matriarch’s chair. Few left in the order remembered the name of the creature who answered. Enslaved to the Prime’s most intimate service for two hundred and fifty-two years, the woman had once possessed stunning beauty, with glossy jet hair and tawny eyes, and high-bred, aristocrat’s features. Unlined with years, her pale profile was blank as a cameo cut from bleached bone. Voiceless as furniture, unkempt and unnamed, her mute presence seldom drew notice as her hands accomplished the tasks too delicate for her fire-scarred mistress. Yet she was alive, and no empty husk, who once had been titled First Senior to the Prime’s seat, before the disgrace that debased her.

  The balked hatred behind her porcelain mask blazed livid as pressurized magma.

  ‘Remove the top cloth. Then unlock the casket.’ Selidie pawed the chain slung from her neck and bestowed a silver key on her live automaton. ‘Take the knife from the table and slit the warded silk that swathes the crystal inside.’ The assignment was given without concern, that an ambitious rival sentenced to perpetual punishment should have access to a lethal instrument. Answerable only to the Prime’s will, the woman unveiled the melon-sized sphere couched inside the coffer with flawless subservience.

  An unnatural chill flooded over the chamber. Even in darkness, the faceted amethyst radiated a charge to unsettle the nerves. Perilous power slept at its core, even after the extreme measures that enforced its quiescence since the disaster. Sequestered in total darkness throughout, the jewel had lain embedded in the Skyshiel glaciers that stayed frozen year-round above the snow-line.

  Now covered by a calyx of ice, the crystal rested like a stopped heart-beat, yet embraced by the chamber’s unrelieved night.

  ‘Stand back,’ the Prime directed the expendable creature whose fingers had broached the protections. No subordinate sister yet possessed the initiate ­experience to master the Great Waystone’s attributes. Selidie must risk the treacherous trial herself, without help for her clumsy deformity. ‘Be ready to act at my command. The instruments are laid out on the trestle beside the candle and brazier. Strike no light unless you are told! If I call for a sigil or a string of chained ciphers, a quartz stylus is primed for your use.’

  No enchantress past
third rank required a flame to locate her tools in the dark; and this one, though leashed under absolute thrall, had achieved her eighth-level initiation. Her closest rival, at seventh, was the next-strongest talent within the order. No other had strength or training to match hers, except for the woman who ruled from the Prime seat in unchallenged supremacy.

  Since none but a matriarch worked the Great Waystone, Selidie thrust the clawed stubs of her hands into the opened coffer. Frigid water immersed her scarred nerves and drove a hissed breath through her teeth. She endured as she must, and laid her welted palms against the jewel’s slick facets. Even quiescent, the stone’s direct contact reamed needles of chill through her flesh. Selidie vised her mind into stillness. The least uncontrolled thought might waken peril. Above everything, she must do nothing to stimulate the stone’s dormant focus.

  She listened. Poised in rigid silence, she waited until the faint tingle of something stirred in the stilled depths of the stone. While the great sphere’s tuned faculties stayed passively blank, this questing wisp surfaced through the jewel’s matrix. Parasitically separate, it bumped against the Prime’s coiled awareness, starved for light, hungry for warmth, and drained into vacuous weakness.

  Selidie suppressed her wild urge to smile. Her hour of triumph arrived at long last! The meddlesome iyat that Arithon’s malice had unleashed in the heart of the Waystone finally was bled helpless and denuded of charge. It had no reserve energy left to wreak havoc and no will beyond its overpowering, blind instinct to feed.

  The Waystone’s locked focus provided no fuel. Its lattice was bleak ice and fast darkness throughout, null except for the blood warmth that radiated from Selidie’s unshielded hands. Needy for an infusion of energy, the iyat bounced and banged like a frustrated gnat against the panes of a lamp. Only the human presence fixed its desperate attention. No sigil could be set to bind it in place. Not yet, and never in close proximity lest the Waystone itself should be provoked to resonate. Selidie held her breath in steeled tension, while the ravenous iyat inside the jewel yearned to absorb sustenance from her body heat. Though it craved renewal, its insatiable drive was gripped yet by a sigil of enthrallment imposed within the Great Waystone. Since the entrained working could not be released without waking the jewel itself, the moment to unhook the sigil’s engagement must be timed with utmost delicacy.

  ‘Quickly!’ the Prime commanded her servant. ‘Configure a binding sigil for iyats, and link the constraint to the candle. Then attach a cipher to expand the illusion of fire, tenfold, and surround that construct with a ward. Use the nine sigils of confinement, but leave the closure unsealed.’

  A bustle of silk in the dark bespoke the due diligence that readied the trap. The aligned spellcraft must be accomplished at speed, before the Prime’s naked hands transferred warmth into the iced face of the Waystone. Should the amethyst lose its chilled state of inertia, the energized matrix would refuel the invasive iyat and keep it entrenched.

  ‘Ready the striker,’ Prime Selidie said. As a puppeteer to her servant’s live flesh, she must prompt each critical step. ‘Do nothing but wait on my signal.’

  Gently, slowly, the Matriarch withdrew one ruined hand from the coffer. With the crabbed wrack of one finger and three welted stubs, she scrawled the counter-framed cipher of negation. Clumsy, but adequate, the glyph appeared, a shimmer that bordered upon ultraviolet in the stultified gloom of the chamber.

  Braced for the critical moment, Selidie shouted, ‘Now!’

  The configured spell for the iyat’s release activated, precisely timed to the shear of the striker as her servant ignited the doctored wick. Light blazed, followed by crisping heat as the spellcrafted illusion attached to the candle erupted the semblance of a bonfire on top of the trestle.

  The freed iyat shot out of the sphere and arrowed straight into the ferocious blaze.

  The jewel woke, also. Selidie yanked her other limb clear. She slammed the lid of the casket. With the Waystone’s malignant sparkle doused back into ice-ridden darkness, she instructed her servant, ‘Close the ward ring, immediately, and seal that benighted fiend in containment!’

  Power crackled. The unleashed charge lifted strands from Selidie’s coiffed hair and shivered her skin into gooseflesh. Yet her goal was accomplished. The Waystone stood cleansed of its riddling parasite. Weaned separate, the iyat gorged itself on the lit wick, pinned down beyond further harm.

  Selidie cradled her mauled hands, exultant and flushed with success. ‘Light the sconces,’ she ordered. ‘Build up the fire and open the curtains. Then properly banish that captive fiend, clear the table, and disperse the spent warding.’

  Unquestioned obedience attended each task. As her eighth-rank servant sparked the chamber’s matched candelabra and kindled the logs on the hearth, the Matriarch reopened the lid of the coffer. The Great Waystone gleamed, couched in ice and wet silk, visited by her detailed inspection for the first time since the compromise of its integrity.

  Selidie stroked her grotesquely wracked hands over the exposed facets, possessively eager to tally the damage inflicted by Arithon’s assault.

  Her anxious assessment encountered new superficial cracks, but no dreaded sign of fractures or chips. But if the stone’s surface symmetry stayed flawless, the amethyst had not survived unscathed. A flash-point flare of citrine blazed a clear yellow plume through the violet matrix in the sphere’s upper quadrant. Selidie measured that invasive inclusion with wary care.

  As she feared, the frequency shift that bridged the interface changed the crystal’s structural resonance. A visual survey could not determine how many records of initiates’ vows might be compromised, or which of the order’s historical archives might have become fragmented, lost to posterity. Worse than any disrupted parcel of knowledge, the jewel’s core pattern stood altered beyond recognition.

  Selidie tapped the chill face of the crystal, her initial exhilaration dampened to a frown as she assayed the scope of the problem. While her side-lined servant looked on, forgotten, she weighed the pernicious hurdles left to overcome.

  Dispelling the troublesome fiend had been a brute matter of iron patience. But no other competent Senior enchantress could access or harness the Great Waystone’s channelled power without protective oversight from an initiate prime matriarch. To activate and wield the raised focus married the spirit into the lattice of crystalline energies, the act itself a knife-edged dance fraught with consummate peril. Experience offered no surety. The amethyst’s volatile properties ever had been a vicious trial to master.

  Selidie sensed the warning tingle of charge spun by the cold crystal’s aura. Traced barehanded, the flawed patch of citrine threw an imbalanced field through the energy web that wrung her to sweating dread. Always unpleasant, the stone’s ancient malice sapped her nerve as never before.

  Even inactive, the crystal’s roiled depths all but wailed, stamped by the raw rage of uncounted failed aspirants and layered with the sediment of uncleared spellcraft deposited over the centuries. The cumulative forces bridled to use by untold generations of enchantresses required an untried, solo effort to be charted anew and recalibrated. This, while the jewel’s fractious nature itself battled to establish dominance. Any fresh bid for the sphere’s subjugation bore the harrowing risk of becoming subsumed.

  Selidie sighed. Vexed beyond words, she lifted her crabbed hands and massaged her aching temples. None of her predecessors had faced such a trial: refounding the keys to access the Waystone posed her a potentially lethal endeavour.

  Yet to forgo the effort would place the order’s capital power forever past reach. No chance the Koriathain could break the Fellowship Sorcerers’ tyranny without that signal advantage.

  The seeped drip of ice melt puddled the floor and roused the Prime from disturbed contemplation. She straightened and noticed the searing regard of her neglected servant. Hatred smouldered in those tawny eyes. As with the great amethyst, the suppressed spirit within yearned to seize back its plundered autonomy.

>   ‘Ah, my dear!’ jabbed Selidie. ‘Who recalls your name, besides me? Most are dead, who remember your inadequate tenure as my potential successor. How pitiful for you, and convenient for me, that your gall has been turned as my tool.’

  No retort was possible. Leave would never be granted to unlock this subservient initiate’s tongue, or permit her the free speech to disclose the grim secrets behind the Matriarch’s unorthodox accession. Aware of unconscionable crimes, worse than scandal, the servant suffered her oppressor, blank-faced, except for the spark of undying rebellion a cruel term of punishment had never subdued.

  Selidie smiled with supercilious relish. ‘Fetch me a square of white silk. Once I have the Waystone immaculately secured, you will bind up my scars straightaway.’

  While the puppet touch of her diminished rival wrapped her fire-scarred limbs with soft gauze, the Prime taunted, ‘Be sure, Lirenda, you shall act as my hands through the restoration of the Great Waystone. Who else but you should I submit as my expendable proxy? Perhaps you’ll survive,’ the Prime mused, then laughed.

  Secure in the face of the fury that seethed through the abased creature before her, the Matriarch finished, ‘I will fling your balked vengeance a bone, Lirenda. For the greater good of the order, the capture and trial of a renegade initiate is my next item of business. You will fetch me the chest with the Skyron aquamarine, and also the locked jewel-box that safeguards the personal crystal attuned to Elaira.’

  The trade town of Redburn perched like an unkempt eyrie above the snagged crevice, where the River Issing jetted into the deepwater narrows that let ship-borne commerce from Rockbay pass southward through South Strait. On fair days in spring, snow-melt off the high peaks of the Storlains frothed the torrent that hammered and leaped rock to rock down the gorge as a seething maelstrom. The steep streets and roof-tops sparkled through veils of blown spray, and the misted air shimmered with rainbows. But when winter’s gales screamed through the teeth of the ranges, snow frosted the dormers and chimneys like icing and serrated the eaves with icicles blasted into fantastical shapes. The sun and the view lay quenched under blizzard, while the throaty roar of the Issing shook floor-boards and walls with its tireless thunder.