Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Jalienne reached across her husband’s chapped hands and helped adjust his buckles and belts. She could arm her man, had done so many times, while too numbed and heartsick to think. ‘And you’ll set off after them?’

  ‘To guard their backs as far as our border,’ Cosach promised, his throat painfully tight. ‘I’ll take our six most talented scouts. The children won’t ever know that we’re there.’ He likely would miss the birth of their child, another regret he had no breath to voice as he fought his hard words to the finish. ‘Dakar’s prophecy must be kept to the letter for the weal of the kingdom. Though mercy on us! I’d rather have lost adult lives to a failure than see the day I must leave this harsh task in the untried hands of our offspring!’

  Early Spring 5693

  Shock Wave

  A split second ahead of the breaking event, the Warden of Althain bolts to his feet with snap-focused alertness; while far off in Kathtairr, a great dragon dreams, and the Sorcerer bound to her service shapes the fiery interface between inchoate inspiration and solidified form: and in barren soil where nothing has grown since the dawn of the Age of Dragons, a seed materializes and germin­ates, and throws out a pale green shoot…

  A spreading, simultaneous ripple of movement shocks through the fabric of the world: which impact throws the High Priest of the Light at Erdane’s True Sect temple onto his knees; five diviners drop, comatose; while the Koriani Prime Matriarch shouts aloud as every crystal in the order’s possession rings like a bell in resounded sympathy…

  In flight through Halwythwood, hidden to avoid the scouts likely sent on their trail, three clan children sense the vast shift shear across the subtle web that sustains the mysteries; deluged by an ephemeral flicker of light, then gripped by the note struck in resonance from a sheathed black sword, two gasp dumbstruck, while the other exclaims, ‘Fire and frost! What in Ath’s Creation just changed…?’

  Early Spring 5923

  IX. Throes

  The dragon’s dreaming on the continent of Kathtairr unleashed a vast shock wave that crossed the face of Athera. Disruptive, the ripple of raised resonance shifted the harmonic balance that underpinned everything in the world. No place and no living being escaped the surge of causation untouched. Change coursed outward, a sudden, momentous recalibration of energy that struck without a second’s warning. The unwary inhabitants caught in the web had no chance to brace for the onslaught. Every lane that channelled the planet’s electromagnetics pulsed in reverberation, excited to tones never sounded before, in the registers past human hearing.

  Through sites where the mysteries flourished, and across the free wilds where the flux ran untrammelled, the urgent burst passed as a lifting tonic, sped through the land’s natural conduits. The mighty surge unreeled through Caithwood, its fierce glory heightened where sensitized ground resounded yet from the Masterbard’s song of reawakening. There, no longer nameless, the musician who also bore title as Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn collapsed to his knees, overset. As the grand chord that founded all earthly existence flowered into an elevated intonation, the bell tone struck his mage-trained sensitivity and ignited a fragment of memory. He felt the haunting strains that anchored Kathtairr’s scarred ruin drop out, revitalized by the etheric flare of a massive, spontaneous renewal.

  The majestic scope of that healing riffled his skin, and ran, quivering, through his viscera. Hurled into the throes of a flash-point gestalt, Arithon glimpsed the distant, sun-baked barrens where a seedling plant took wondrous root. He recognized that terrain; knew that once, he had sailed across distant seas and explored its strange, blighted shore-line. But the chance to pursue his fragmented impression became trampled under the back-lash of refined stimulation.

  Morning wind struck his exposed flesh like a knife thrust. His ears rang. The echoes thrown off by his forest surroundings struck a flourish of ephemeral notes, until the responses of rocks and bare trees made the winter air quiver with harmonic overtones. Rocked breathless while all of Athera’s life matrix became reforged on the flare of the moment, Arithon expertly damped down the preternatural reach of his talent. Yet as he grounded himself out of mage-sight, a nearby thread of dissonance in the weave prickled his nape in sharp warning. The tingle fore-ran an auric imbalance: not his own, but a threat to the unconscious friend, nestled within the horse-drawn litter beside him. The spike of overload caused by the peak onslaught battered into a spirit already frayed under crisis.

  Spurred by concern, Arithon examined Tarens’s wrapped form. Stressed energies met his anxious touch. Like a cold bath on his nerves, ragged fissures torn through the crofter’s aura raised currents that lifted his hackles. Worse, through the man’s panicked onslaught of fear, subtle hearing detected the dissonance of fatal despair. Years spent mending the afflictions of stranded wraiths drove Arithon to frantic worry. The explosion of inchoate confusion assumed the torment of an unconscious nightmare. Tarens’s frame arched. Seared from within as though set aflame, he had no reference point to grapple what must seem a horrific state of separation.

  ‘Tarens!’ Arithon caught the big man’s convulsed shoulder. ‘Tarens, be easy. You’re never alone. Someone who cares walks beside you.’

  Yet words of encouragement and his warm contact failed to bridge the morass.

  ‘I won’t let you go, Tarens!’ Opened to mage-sense, Arithon gently probed for the foothold to stem the rank flood of disorientation.

  But the sudden maelstrom that altered the flux had sped the cascade of cause to effect. Arithon’s urgent effort to stabilize Tarens plunged his empathic sensitivity too far. The overfaced healer encountered disaster: the torrential burst of raised resonance had stripped the boundary that defined his friend’s human identity.

  With every familiar marker erased, Arithon battled to anchor his embodied presence, too late. The storm upended his gifted faculties. He became swept headlong into harrowing chaos, drilled through by Tarens’s shrill panic. As the spiral bled his upended awareness into the mineral bones of the earth, Arithon might have seized his own recovery from there. Except the upheaval transmitted from Kathtairr also had stressed the strata of bed-rock itself. Instead of stone’s trusty stablility, Arithon reeled to the violent jolt as the earth’s pressured fault-lines juddered and quaked in release. After-shock rolled him, as ocean waves peaked to unnatural crests, and the crocheted whitecaps exploded to froth on the salty face of the deep. His bone marrow sang to the crackling snap! where the dormant channels of Athera’s slack flux lines became reamed by impetuous force. Freed, the dammed energies flushed through and loosed still more showers of primordial harmony.

  The life matrix of a man was never fashioned to withstand the naked fusion of the elements, far less an event evoked on a planetary scale. The reverberation shredded human vitality and scoured the fragments to spider-web wisps. Tarens’s self-awareness dissolved at a speed that spun Arithon’s equilibrium into the moil through the uncontrolled gateway of sympathy. His royal lineage alone spared him from flash-point immolation. Bred to withstand exposure to the mysteries upon quickened ground, and lent the reflex of experience, he had been immersed in the perilous seethe of Athera’s wild lane currents before.

  Once caught barehanded in a prior crisis alongside a Fellowship Sorcerer, Arithon had tamed the tumultuous tides of an explosive lane surge through the interface of his music. The instincts retained from that earlier breakthrough salvaged his unravelled poise. He recouped his flayed bearings, pulled back, and re­-centred himself on the innate strength of his greater Name. Distraught, left on his knees panting with vertigo, he breathed until his distress quieted. Then, tightly guarded, he sounded Tarens’s condition again and let the flood speak to his masterbard’s insight.

  Even so slight a delay had cost dearly. The unravelled knit that was Tarens rapidly lost cohesion. Worse, the thundering spate of the lane currents also resounded to countless other individuals, stricken elsewhere. Arithon’s tuned senses deafened under the blast, as the teeming mass of collective human
ity became caught aback by the world’s broad-scale shift. Beyond Caithwood, where the land’s reactive electromagnetics were not kept cleared by the rigorous oversight of clan guardians, the trammelled flux web recoiled in standing waves of reverberation.

  True Sect power in Tysan had disregarded the old boundaries laid down by Paravian wisdom, and worse, altered the great nexus at Erdane, where the ancient Second Age foundations transferred the lane current. The snarl there piled up into unforeseen havoc as the powerful surge to peak resonance whipped the jammed flow into kinks. Slammed against the heedless placements of temples, and bridges, and mill dams, the adamant backlash raised trauma. Thousands of ignorant, unwary townsfolk became buffeted in the wrack.

  And Tarens reeled with them, as a struck tuning-fork hammered by the discharge of reactive distress. The recurrent concussions of etheric forces whiplashed in shock-wave bursts. Each impact tormented his unshielded nerves and pitched him into convulsions.

  Arithon wrestled to quiet the larger man’s thrashing, outmatched in strength, and beleaguered as well as his subtle awareness breasted the overload. Amid Tarens’s agony, he also suffered the turmoil sown far and wide through the compromised landscape. Distance damped nothing, as the cross chop elsewhere ignited spontaneous fires and caved roofs to cascades of spilled shingles. He jerked with the jolts, as cracked masonry walls crumbled in sudden collapse, with screaming bystanders crushed in the choked streets. Mankind’s fixed structures tumbled down into rubble wherever the banked pulse of the mysteries had lain muted or dormant. Change shuddered the firmament like a stung beast, with every imbalance caught in its path whipped into contortions and broken. Wind squalls kicked up apocalyptic towers of cloud, which spat lightning and hail out of season. Farm-steads suffered livestock stampedes, and shop-stalls became flattened, while the merchants’ mansions and poor-quarter tenements were winnowed like chaff, until the deranged pressure carved out a cleared channel.

  The toll exceded the horrors of cataclysm. Through the eyes of initiate mastery, Arithon viewed the grievous scope of causation as the ripples of unshed charge laced through an unguarded citizenry. The result would stop hearts, sow back-lash fevers, and inflict widespread outbreaks of madness, as townsfolk born to a mage-blind existence found their latent perceptions torn open at one brutal stroke. Some fell into fits of Sighted vision as the bore of the flux rushed over and through them. Others fainted, wracked senseless or killed by the heightened shock of a spontaneous healing. Still more gibbered, lost amid the shadowy quagmire of their unconscious fears. Some would find natural recovery in sleep. But many broke outright, snapped by rage-driven malice to undertake acts of ungoverned savagery.

  The loud crescendo of human anguish broke Arithon into a shivering sweat. Again overset by the painful barrage, he wrestled for poise and reined in his runaway faculties before he exhausted himself. Back in hand, grounded into his natural senses, he found the alarming, first flickers of overextension already shot heat lightning shimmers through his peripheral eyesight.

  Worse, Tarens lay slack, too fordone to surmount the rip currents that streamed through his uncontained aura. The big crofter’s heart labored, with each shuddered breath more erratic and thin. The disrupted vitality that sustained his body verged upon irreversible damage. Another convulsion might finish him.

  Tried at the brink of that fatal threshold, Arithon struggled to focus. Discipline warned him: further effort on his part surpassed folly. The grand event unleashed from Kathtairr spurred talent and frayed even his schooled awareness, until the brush of mere wind scalded his naked skin. The fecund life in the soil underfoot hammered his soles to distraction, while the forest above shuddered with ephemeral light, set ablaze by the sheen of the flux tide. Alive to the half-world inflamed into turbulence by the course of excited electromagnetics, Arithon struggled to slow his sped pulse and damp his rampant sensitivity.

  Since Tarens’s plight could not wait, Arithon shivered and crouched. He plunged his hands to the wrists into wet leaves, hopeful that the cold might wrench his overstrung senses back into alignment. But the quiver that wrung his shocked nerves failed to settle. The pressured clamour that wailed through the flux stream still threatened to drown his autonomy. To exert his sighted faculties again in this state would be unimaginably dangerous.

  Prudence that argued for self-preservation said Tarens was best off abandoned to die. The man’s abraded life-force had scattered too far. Left a body emptied as a beached shell, this near to final passage across the veil, the healer ought to entrust Daelion Fatemaster’s wisdom to recoup the lost threads of a friend’s deranged consciousness.

  Yet Arithon refused to abandon the fight. He had one last, untried avenue left to shoulder the improbable challenge. Doubt had no place. Pitched against failure that courted the abyss, and reliant on naked instinct, Arithon shoved erect and goaded the pack pony harnessed to Tarens’s litter.

  ‘Hup, fellow! Move.’ He urged the shaggy beast to a trot. Crossed the hill’s crest, and found a secluded hollow that cut the raw bite of the wind. There he unhitched the traces at speed, then removed the animal’s tack and rope head-stall, and freed it to find its own way.

  With his stricken friend settled upon sheltered ground, Arithon tucked in the blankets. Tarens’s extreme pallor tinged towards grey. His slack skin felt alarmingly clammy. The passing seconds lost more precious ground at a price too dreadful to contemplate. Yet caution demanded. Arithon unstrapped the supply packs. He cached some provisions, and took up the lyranthe gifted by the clan empath’s forethought. Aware that his effort must draw hostile notice, he slung the wrapped instrument over his back and sprinted down-slope to seek solitude.

  The forested cover thinned and gave way to tangles of salt-marsh, where tasseled reed-beds girdled the flat stretch of shore-line. Arithon waded across silted skeins of small streamlets and ploughed through shoals of muck like black glue. Ducks exploded ahead of him. Past their flurried wings, the gulls cried, startled upwards in raucous white flocks. When the scudded foam swirled ankle deep, he stripped off leathers, breeches, and boots, and forged through the hummocks. Deep inside the maze of inlets and tide-pools, he selected an isolate patch of dry ground, hidden amid last season’s straw thickets of sea oats and sedge. He replaced his shed clothing and trusted to luck, that the flood-tide would erase his footprints.

  With Tarens’s survival his only concern, nothing else mattered but time. Arithon unsheathed his belt knife. He slashed the ties on the lyranthe’s fleece covering and nestled the instrument into the cradle of hip and raised knee. His hands settled knowingly into position against the fretboard and strings. Yet the ease that confirmed his bard’s skill did nothing to lessen his danger. He would be taunting fate: a gamble made against desperate odds to salvage a friend, laid against an unknown array of ill consequence.

  ‘Dharkaron avert!’ Arithon swore to distance his hag-ridden dread. Tucked into his cloak, he attended the peg heads, where his accurate ear did not fail under pressure. He tuned fourteen silver-wound strings to true pitch, aware that Tarens had no chance at all unless he forsook every layer of protection and stripped his most guarded boundaries.

  Arithon tilted his head to one side. Recklessly brave, he engaged his rare gift. The first note speared through him, a sweet pang that woke joy and a longing akin to agony. He sounded another, then struck a full chord that declared the golden heat of high summer. His melody moved, deepened into black earth, enriched with the heady, blanketing fragrance of cut clover and sun-cured hay. There, amid boyish laughter, he found Tarens, immersed in bare-chested labour, pitchforking fodder into the oxcart.

  Inspired by trout pools mantled in shade, and by the night chirp of crickets beneath the silver-foil gleam of the moonlight, Arithon’s composition took soaring flight. He played Tarens, again, with the key changed to autumn, replete with the bounty of harvest, and brilliant as fire with the turned leaves that ripened in the wood-lots and hedgerows. He spun the comforts of winter’s snug kitchen, whil
e Kerelie sewed by the hearth, and Efflin’s patient strength mended rope-handled buckets and worn harness. The bard did not rest there, but stitched the descant themes of a beloved aunt and uncle into his weave. Deeper, he drew in the tender memories of parents, deftly recaptured against the wonders of spring buttercups and the chased flit of jewel-toned butterflies. From the care-free exuberance of earliest childhood, he built theme upon theme, with today’s loyal tenacity wrapped, warp through weft, through the honest heart that framed adult character. The bard played Tarens with masterful force. He shaped the primal chord that spoke Name, then built his call to an imperative shout of individual unity. Even still, the exquisite cry failed. The fragmented spirit stayed swept at a loss on the electromagnetic roil of Athera’s flux currents. Since Tarens lay scattered beyond all recognizable sense of himself, perforce, the music’s reach had to follow.

  Alone in the marsh, honed to singular purpose, Arithon tapped into his mage-tuned awareness. He thrust his song downwards, flung its clarion registers into the stream of the free wilds’ lane flow. Lent wings by his gift, he released the blast of his music for Tarens! to resound throughout the life pulse of the world…

  Far off at Althain Tower, Sethvir shot erect as the poured light of the Masterbard’s summons tingled through his earth-gifted awareness. Distinct as a stamped signature, the harmonic melody rang the full length of the second lane, exactingly phrased to shear through the planet-wide muddle of human affliction. The Warden’s dipped quill dropped from his stunned grasp. Ink splotched the meticulous lines just penned in his miniature script. The flung spatters splashed, ebon on obsidian black, across the library’s stone table. Which small spill passed unnoticed as the Sorcerer’s turquoise eyes lost his dreamer’s reverie and kindled to flame.