by Janny Wurts
Uproar swept the audience. The magistrate banged his gavel repeatedly, while the examiner’s officious, jerked nod was compelled to acknowledge due process.
Trey beckoned towards the cluster of latecomers packed against the rear wall. A mantled figure answered his summons and strode down the central aisle. While heads turned, and seated folk craned their necks in curiosity, expensive silk rustled to each dainty stride, distinctively trimmed with fine burgundy ribbon. The diaphanous hood laced and beaded with pearls raised murmurs of shocked recognition. Hats were swept off with astonished respect. Appalled murmurs of ‘milady,’ pocked the silence that settled over the chamber.
Except for the magistrate on the justiciar’s bench, who shot erect, and blurted, ‘What are you doing here?’ Crimson with embarrassment, he cried, ‘Who has coerced my wife to stand for a crass charge and appear in a common assembly?’
‘She hasn’t!’ Trey gestured for the demure arrival to lower the jewelled hood.
Revealed beneath, shamefaced and shy, was the drudge who mopped floors at the Red Cockerel Tavern.
Through the explosion of talk and rough laughter, the magistrate shouted, more outraged, ‘Then who stole that mantle from my lady’s wardrobe? I will not bear the insult! Or see my wife made the butt of vulgarity, or have my court turned into a charlatan’s puppet show!’
Trey added nothing, but waited, while another fashionably attired figure arose from the public seating. Also unveiled, and quite unabashed, the magistrate’s pretty wife came forward and retrieved her aristocrat’s mantle from the tavernmaid’s awkward grasp. ‘I lent the clothes,’ she announced, crisp enough to pierce through the bedlam. ‘Since the advocate asked, lest an innocent burn, I agreed to assist the defense.’
The official beside the deflated magistrate snatched the gavel and pounded for quiet while a dutiful clerk on his opposite side grasped the upset husband’s sleeve and urged him back into his seat.
Trey held the floor as the uproar subsided. His sweet-natured courtesy dismissed the tavern girl, then thanked the magistrate’s admirable lady. To the gathering at large, and the bench, he pronounced, ‘Have I not demonstrated the difference between informed truth and impressionable opinion? All testimony must be weighed to the end to eliminate prejudice.’
The Light’s Examiner fielded the unforeseen set-back with narrowed eyes. Masked displeasure soured his suave refutation. ‘You are wasting our time and for what, if not sleight of hand presented for dishonest subterfuge? The woman accused was bare-faced through her crime! Daliana sen Evend wore her own raiment when she unleashed her act of dark sorcery against me!’
Not feinting now, Trey was earnestly swift to agree. ‘Daliana sen Evend threw a knife in a public tap-room, which drew the blood of a temple ambassador. A subsequent eruption of wildfire ignited some clothing and, afterward, blistered a few patches of skin. But whether such bodily harm was intended, or if you, as Erdane’s delegate, were the intended target, we are not here today to dispute your claim for a personal injury! Rather, this court must determine the party responsible for the unwholesome craft discharged in the course of the incident. Guilt on that count has yet to be proven! Though I do concur: to seal the writ for an execution, culpability or innocence must be established beyond question.’
The Lord Examiner smiled, all teeth. ‘You confirm, as the advocate of the accused, that the testimony of each single witness must rest, or be clearly refuted?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Trey inclined his hatted head, grave. ‘All accounts must concur. To eliminate the least shade of doubt, do resume straightaway.’
That promise the bait to silence contention, the temple’s examiner accepted the challenge, convinced of his inevitable victory.
Trey reclaimed his seat, diminished again to a scholarly stoop. More witnesses came. The inexhaustible stream droned through the same repetitive story. Before the advocate’s rapt neutrality, and the examiner’s stifled impatience, every testimony insisted the minion should burn for liaison with Shadow. Noon’s glare waxed and faded, replaced by the cerulean light of late day. From outside, the increasingly rambunctious mob protested the undue delay. An officer’s horn-call raised shouted retorts. Tension mounted as the dedicate lancers outside re-formed ranks to curb the crowd’s shiftless ferocity. Tempers shortened on both sides as True Sect faith clashed headlong with the restless dissent of Etarra’s populace. Denied the blood thrill of their promised spectacle, the volatile multitude boiled towards riot.
And still, the onerous trial ground on without a crisp end or conviction.
The examiner clenched his jewelled mace, well aware he must finish debate. If the straightforward verdict dangled much longer, he risked being made the advocate’s puppet-strung fool.
Meantime, a smith’s boy stumbled through his painfully earnest statement, while questions from Trey prompted what seemed a useless review of detail. ‘You say this temple official received a wrapped packet brought to the Red Cockerel by a female courier? And that the thrown knife sliced open the wrapped object which changed hands? That instant, you swear, the flash of released spellcraft ignited the ambassador’s sleeve. Tell us about the item itself. Can you recall its appearance?’
The smith’s boy screwed up his florid face. ‘’Twere cloth scraps, mister. Covered in silk, and twisted with copper wire and hair. The thing reeked when it caught. Know this much from working the forge, hair stinks like that when it burns.’
‘Good,’ Trey encouraged. ‘What of the courier? Was she unusual in any way?’
‘I didn’t see,’ the smith’s boy apologized. ‘She was cloaked. But the street child who blacks boots for the merchants noticed she had a strange scent about her, not like anything natural.’
The prisoner’s advocate pounced with asperity. ‘I insist on a statement from that same street child. More, another witness at hand observed the questionable packet. The boy who cleans ash from the tavern’s hearth stated the item was silk-wrapped, and still tied when Daliana’s knife sliced open the covering. When the noisome contents became exposed,’ Trey added, and smiled at the fidgety smith’s boy, ‘that was the moment when you saw the flash?’
‘Enough!’ The Light’s examiner swept erect with a rap of his ceremonial stave. ‘This sham ends! By the sacred Light, I demand solid evidence.’
‘One attested item, wrought of cloth scraps and hair, wrapped in silk, and brought to the scene by a woman disguised as a courier? We have a significant break in this case,’ Trey contradicted. ‘The boy here has just described a fetch wrought by craft, which your defendant’s knife disarmed prematurely within public view. I insist the conclusion has been misinterpreted! Daliana sen Evend in fact thwarted a vile plot, and much more. The guilty party who engaged that rogue practice would be the anonymous messenger.’
The examiner snapped. ‘Your spurious tale is designed to thwart justice!’
Trey scraped back his chair and stood also. Above the unsettled growl of disturbance, and more muffled noise from the outside corridor, he pealed, ‘If you think this young lady has not suffered the worse for delay, you are pitiless. Look at her!’
Pale and trembling, Daliana clung to the rail at the strained edge of collapse. Before the picture of her mortal frailty swayed the crowd into sympathy, the Lord Examiner leveled his mace towards the advocate.
‘This is a meddling effrontery!’ Well aware whom he faced, secure in his power, he lashed back in formal accusation, ‘Who is this man, bent to obfuscate truth with pathos and trivia? I’ll not have the Light’s sanctified cause swerved and twisted! Only a collaborate servant of Darkness or a sorcerer would hinder this clear-cut case!’
However Trey might have pleaded, the dedicates poised by the dais moved to order, unsheathed weapons, and surrounded him. He made no resistance. Pinned under arrest by a dozen bared swords, he seemed doomed beyond all reprieve.
Daliana buckled, wrung faint under pressure and barely aware of the second commotion, erupted at the back of the hall. One l
eaf of the double doors barreled open. The report as the panel banged the far wall shattered echoes through the assembly. Inbound, determined, someone’s irreverent bass slurred a drunken verse of snide doggerel.
While the dedicates seethed in a steely pack to quash the abrasive intrusion, the stout intruder bashed through their midst, caroling loudly off key:
‘We don’t kiss the hind cheeks of the hog on the seat, sucking up to his pig-turd religion!
Roust up, bust his bollocks, kick arse with a wallop, and pluck the Light’s game-cocks like pigeons.’
Incensed to bulged eyes, the temple examiner lost his decorum. ‘Arrest that sot! Now!’
The two Sunwheel dedicates in closest pursuit snagged the singer’s stout wrists and planted their feet. Their manhandled quarry checked short in midstagger, folded abruptly, and sat.
His rump hit the floor with a smack. The almighty yank transferred to the braced guardsmen, whose hobnailed boots found no purchase on the slick marble. Before sliding, they bowed, cracked helms with a clangour, and dropped in a heap overtop the roisterer.
The squashed fellow heaved off their dazed bulk, his tuneless meter broken to insults. ‘Tin-plate pansies! Learn to walk, can’t you? I resent the damnfool whack on the head. As if my soused brain wasn’t already sore from the lies spouted off by your tinsel-sham priest!’
Provoked to a roar, every Sunwheel dedicate charged to defend the temple’s maligned honour. They converged. The drunk scrambled. The concerted lunge to capture him missed, as the entangled ranks tripped over the dazed sprawl of their own fallen. The tangle threshed in an oath-riddled effort to sort itself out. While men hampered like turtles with plate steel whacked elbows to free their hooked gear from their fellows, the miscreant squirted out of the heap. Panting in a frantic hands-and-knees scuttle, he shot down the centre aisle.
Someone’s yell alerted the soldiers still upright. Their quarry dived left and wriggled between the packed seats, progress marked down the rows by the flustered spectators, who raised startled feet to avoid him. Others shrieked in outrage for yanked buckles and crushed toes, while the furious soldiers in hot pursuit funnelled into a jam with a din like a smithy attacked by a fiend storm.
‘Don’t trash the parade-ground shine on your gear,’ the victim mocked through his alcohol fumes and choked laughter.
Hornet mad, the hazed dedicates unsheathed their swords. They shoved in with points brandished to skewer the rat, who rolled sidewards and eeled underneath the low benches occupied by the commoners. Commotion erupted, tracked by feminine squeals as his burrowing progress snagged skirts. Heaved furniture upset, topsy-turvy, with several citizens dumped into the laps of the disgruntled spectators behind them. Annoyed bellows changed pitch to snarled oaths as order unravelled like snags in jerked knit, and more armoured dedicates sallied down the aisles to flank the juggernaut course of the fugitive.
But their chased prey doubled back like a mole and headed for the front rows. The Light’s defenders waded in after him, bashing the hapless bystanders aside in the course of their red-faced pursuit.
Hysterical raps of the magistrate’s gavel failed to mend the court-room’s fractured decorum. The onslaught of pandemonium crested, with more alarmed shouts from the rear of the hall, where a disproportionate number of dedicates were still down, and a captain’s dismayed expletives swore by the Light that stray iyats kept the stricken from rising. Worse, the fierce chase in progress amid the packed chairs lost its cohesive forward momentum. The balked pack of dedicates circled and split, confused when the path of their quarry erupted in several directions at once.
‘Sorcery!’ shrieked the distraught examiner. ‘This is an invasion, provoked by rogue magecraft allied with Shadow!’
The rumpled head of the perpetrator emerged at floor level, bracketed by two chair struts and bonneted over forehead and ears with the ruffles of a woman’s petticoat. ‘Sorcery? No. That would be the pearls,’ he confessed. ‘Big as marbles,’ he added, ‘broken loose from a rich lady’s necklace. A dastardly mess, beyond question.’
Which sabotage explained why several braw guardsmen sharply windmilled their arms and crashed flat. More were obstructed, shoved aside, even tripped by the greed-driven scrimmage to salvage the glittering contraband.
The insurgent drunk became pummelled, as well, since the female whose skirt indecently sheltered him screamed and clipped him on the ear with a patten.
The hen-pecked fugitive wormed backwards and vanished before her jealous husband booted him senseless.
Abetted by a weasel’s agility, the offender’s inventive course of sown havoc threatened to stall the proceedings indefinitely. While the elite cordon who safeguarded His Radiance deployed at their captain’s crisp order, the suspicious temple examiner turned his thwarted fury upon the advocate held at his mercy.
‘Have that man searched for a sorcerer’s evidence,’ he snapped to the dedicates who seized Trey. ‘Disarm him if he carries even a penknife.’
Pinned down by unsheathed steel, Trey was brutally searched, his clothes rifled, then torn, until beyond question his person was proven to be weaponless.
That semblance of harmlessness galled the examiner’s patience. ‘Shackle him, now! We can’t risk an escape. No, don’t wait for the warden. Instead, share out the woman’s restraints. Take the cuffs from her ankles and bind up his wrists.’
The gate to the criminal’s stall was unfastened, with Trey bustled inside between four armoured stalwarts. While two bent to handle the short-fall of fetters, their vigilant comrades pressed Trey’s back at weapons’ point. Still, his underhand whisper reached Daliana, masked by the on-going, urgent commotion stirred by the errant drunk. ‘If this rescue goes wrong, your chains will be struck. Run for your life. Snatch a civilian’s mantle and hide. Should we fail, here, the peace will be broken past recourse. Your chance for escape will be narrow.’
‘What about you?’ Daliana gripped the rail, transparently frightened. If a Fellowship Sorcerer offered himself as a sacrifice in her behalf, the bitter stakes must lie beyond imagining. ‘What will become of your foolhardy henchman?’
‘He’s not what he seems.’ Traithe winced, pained by his infirmities as the mailed hands of the dedicates pinioned his shoulders. They laid bare his spider-web array of scars and locked his wrists into shackles.
By then, the stout clown under siege in the crowd lost his luck, cornered at last as the elite reinforcements bashed through the last barrier of vacated seats and collared him like a loose mongrel. Yanked up short by the scruff, then manhandled through the riveted onlookers to a salvo of howled epithets, he fought his captors tooth and nail down the aisle and up to the base of the dais. There, a gruff dedicate with a bloodied nose levered him with an arm-lock that flung him belly down at the feet of the temple examiner.
Expectancy quieted the moiled gathering, underscored by the ominous noise still boiling in the outside street. If that brew of roused fury sparked into a riot, no dedicate lancers’ stern prowess could stem the mob poised to storm the assembly.
The examiner stood. Pressured to appease the riled crowd’s discontent, he leveled his shining mace at the prostrate heckler. ‘Since your gross disruption of these proceedings has delayed an execution for dark sorcery, I declare your life forfeit for abetting the forces of Shadow! By sword and by fire, I will see you dead! Let your carcass share the scaffold and burn alongside your two confederates.’
The condemned miscreant lifted his chin from the floor, brown eyes widened with mirthful astonishment. ‘You’d see a man damned for a lark’s binge on beer?’
While half the disgruntled audience laughed, and the flushed magistrate pounded his gavel, the Light’s examiner towered full height and glared until the righteous force of his office choked the unruly guffaws into a scorched silence. ‘Drunken or sober, the charge is rogue practice! Or how else did this scapegrace side-step the Light’s guard and crash through the closed doors of this chamber?’
A befuddle
d blink, a loud belch, and a pinched frown filled the pause as the accused buffoon twisted his head, eyes slewed upwards to rake the high dais. Through his disordered mop of grey-streaked chestnut hair, his pouched features showed jilted surprise ‘Ath!’ he blasphemed with heretical nerve. ‘You accuse me of corrupting your Sunwheel dedicates? This through some dab trick of spellcraft on my part?’ Abashed to a squirm that sketched a sheepish shrug, the sot added, ‘Here’s a ripe True Sect fallacy, spoken in cast-iron form! Surely you never meant to admit that your lily-white troops might be hoodwinked? Why not confess they’ve bowed to a godhead who, frankly, spat in the eyes of your priesthood at Erdane two centuries ago and walked out!’
The goaded examiner smothered his fury. Resplendent in his gemmed dazzle of vestments, he contrived to sit down with aplomb, his haughty regard flat with boredom. ‘No one’s deceived by your pathetic diversions. Mockery is the sure mark of the cynic, unredeemed and cut off from salvation. But then, Dakar, your name’s already blackened as the affiliate prophet of Sorcerers. Hand in glove with Fellowship interests, and in cahoots with this false advocate, Trey, accept that your effort to free a practitioner in league with Shadow has failed.’
‘Your canon’s outdated,’ Dakar retorted. ‘You haven’t heard?’ He broke off and smiled, all teeth, then let fly. ‘I was booted from the Fellowship’s good graces for upstart behaviour. Correct your holy records on that point, at least! As for the spurious charges just cited, what hard proof do you have to condemn any one of the three of us?’ Still distastefully pinned by two muscular guards, Dakar waggled his hips with obscene invitation. ‘Go on, you egg-sucking albino parasites! Strip me to the skin like you did the old man! You’ll find nothing interesting tucked in my rump cheeks. Not a splinter of bone, or a plucked wisp of hair tied in cloth and infused as a fetch to bend anyone to my purpose.’
The examiner sniffed. ‘The dangerous fact that you mock such rare knowledge refutes your pat claim of innocence.’