Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Nothing monstrous threatened him. Only a rough-coated brown pony stood hip-shot, rooting its whiskered muzzle through the unlaced canvas of a supply pack to rifle the grain cakes.

  ‘You little fiend!’ Tarens exclaimed, his voice hoarse from disuse. Beside the thrifty need to rescue the rations, such rich forage risked the foolish creature to colic.

  But his instinctive thrust to sit upright whirled Tarens to violent dizziness. He lapsed back, distressed. Cradled within an invalid’s litter, he raged to find himself weak as a newborn kitten. The clamorous flow of the lane’s flux continued to flood him with urgent alarm. He could not shake the unpleasant conviction his surrounds would shortly be crawling with enemies. Already branded as a red-handed murderer, Tarens acknowledged the perilous turn, that he could no longer be overlooked as an innocent under the Light’s charge of dark sorcery. Initiate, wakened, now immersed in communion with faculties shared by the mageborn, he carried the auric stamp as a talent, irrevocably, and for life.

  In fact, Shadow’s minion had invoked the rogue gift, though not as the instrument of corruption: the signature writ in the flux could not lie. Light and song spoke instead with a shining clarity to shred the deception of the True Sect doctrine. Shown a working arisen from selfless love, Tarens wept for sorrow, ever to have fallen prey to misguided distrust.

  The motive behind his forced flight into Caithwood had not been a cruel betrayal.

  Small use to regret the harsh words exchanged then, or lament over misunderstanding. Tarens ached for the venomous irony, that neither would the Light’s entrenched faithful take pause to seek after the truth. Placed at trial before the Sunwheel examiners, he and Arithon would burn, condemned by the temple canon.

  Worse, Efflin and Kerelie might suffer fresh scrutiny, even be put to the question again with lethal stakes set on the outcome.

  ‘Not while I breathe,’ Tarens swore through clenched teeth.

  Since he could not stand up, the loose pony posed his last chance for salvation.

  Tarens rolled off the litter and landed, sprawled atop the supply sack. The startled equine shied off with a snort. It stood with wary, pricked ears ten yards off, while Tarens curled, helplessly retching. Flashes of spurious light marred his vision. Whirled adrift, he had no certain anchor beyond the phrased song left embedded into the lane’s flux. The pattern retained the cohesion to ground him, though latent surges of vision continued to upset his rational thoughts. Doggedly, Tarens clung to the present.

  Despite his turned senses and parching thirst, he wormed himself off the pack and pawed through the rifled contents. The reek of food hit his sensitized faculties and wrenched cramps in his hollow gut. He persisted, frantic. If the unsettled pony lost interest and wandered to browse, his last prospect was finished. Small use, to think upon Arithon’s plight, too likely already foredoomed.

  The scout’s fare Tarens salvaged consisted of honeyed hard-tack, forest nuts, and pounded raisins, mixed with salted strips of deer jerky. The ripe smell distressed him. Miserable, all but gagging with dry heaves, he broke a dense biscuit and offered the crumbs on a trembling palm.

  The pony peered through its tumbled forelock. A nicker whuffled its nostrils. Enticed, it pawed once, then ventured forward, its neck extended to nibble.

  A round-braided head-stall lay inside arm’s reach. Tarens snagged the heaped leather. He placed another hard cake on the ground and coaxed the pony another stride closer. When it lowered its nose and lipped up the treat, the crofter flipped a loop over its crest and held on. Luck stayed in his favour. The beast did not yank free but crunched on the treat and butted for more.

  While the clan pony lipped at his leathers and chased the strayed crumbs, Tarens eased its greedy muzzle through the cord nose-band and slipped the crown strap over its ears. Then he knotted the lead and muscled the supply sack over the short-legged animal’s withers. A harder struggle saw his flaccid weight hoisted upright to lean, wobbling, against the pony’s slab shoulder. Tarens flopped forward, heaved a leg over its rump, and clumsily dragged himself astride.

  He gasped and clung, dizzied by terrible cramps. His furred tongue tasted like unwashed socks. Awkwardly perched and too drained to sit upright, he let his dangled toes drag on the ground while the pony meandered, snatching willow sprigs off the thickets. Clawed by branches and vines, Tarens lay in a draped heap, with the pack clinched under his belly. He tugged on the head-stall until the bedeviled animal shambled downhill.

  Exhausted, he fought to stay lucid, while spontaneous surges of flux-borne stimulus flared through him in tingling waves. He saw double, then gasped as his forest surrounds wrenched into split image, overlaid by the silvery veil of other terrain sited elsewhere in Mainmere. Each wheeling onset confounded his senses, already set under vivid barrage. The sea air clogged in his laboured lungs, thick with the marsh taint wafted off the exposed mud-flats. But such queer starts and flashes of arcane perception also steered Tarens’s course. Distinct as a fire’s heat on his skin, he detected the flux ripples stamped by a disagreement between Arithon’s captors.

  The rough men had little use for frivolity. Uneasy with handling a servant of Shadow, they clashed like bulls over whether to smash the lyranthe just forcefully pried from their prisoner’s arms. The pungent fear behind their clipped oaths whiplashed through the lane’s subtle currents. Tarens’s overreactive flinch flushed a squirrel, which pelted and startled the pony. He slid as it shied. Half-unseated, spun dizzy, the crofter clung like a tick and stayed astride through brute obstinacy. He was practised enough. Survivor of many a drunken ride homeward, he stung yet from the remembered jolts of rejection: hurt feelings seethed still from the courtships gone sour under his family’s indebtedness. Which virulent eruption of past resentment momentarily trampled his grasp on the present day.

  ‘Damn all to the greedy bitches, the lot!’ Tarens groused, his cheek crushed into rank strands of horsehair. ‘Fat Ennie, and Onion-breath Onya, and don’t forget Urmala, the farting cow! Broad in the arse as a hay-barn, and worse, a man would need to be pissed on jack cider to smooch that moustache on her upper lip!’

  Since fury helped to steady his focus, Tarens damned each jilting female, one after the next. Then he let fly at the ones who spurned Efflin, and joyfully added the louts who had humiliated Kerelie, with extra revilement heaped upon Grismard, whose ratted word to the temple authorities had caused his cruel straits in the first place.

  At least Taren’s rage trampled the outbreaks of fugue, which pushed his raced mind to seek futile meaning in the rustle of leafless branches. Each second, he battled the listless urge to take shelter in the profound silence of stones and chill earth.

  Tarens hugged the pony’s jostling warmth, whiplashed into poignant melancholy. He could never go home, or return to his straightforward lot as a crofter. The youthful, male itch to rut in the hay now seemed dwindled and strange as desire from another lifetime. He endured that displacement, while the uncanny pulse of the flux twined itself through the thundering pound of his heart-beat, and the clipped thud of the pony’s hooves topped the next rise and broke into the open.

  Distracted by the wind in his face, then jounced to the animal’s braked strides in descent, Tarens snatched the reeling impression of tide-flats, bare and glistening under the ebb. A fishing lugger with battered white strakes floated in mirror image upon the slack water, her snubbed bow rust-stained at the hawse from the sloppy trim of her anchor. A limp bundle of streamers hung from her mizzenmast. The entangled splash of bright colours contrasted the patched crumple of her downed sails, draped over worn spars without furling. Her empty deck showed no life. Only dipping gulls snatched scraps from the nets, gathered in like flounced scrim at her counter.

  As raucous as the cries of the flock, human voices carried on the inland breeze where tuned instinct drew Tarens’s attention. The desolate strand showed him stippled brown hummocks, wrapped about by dun stands of bog and the sheet-silver ripples where the stilled channels skeined thr
ough the jumble of brush-covered islets.

  Then the overlook view dropped behind the dense scrub as the pony ploughed downwards. If eyesight was obscured, the static swirl of the flux unreeled its raw stream of etheric deflections, unslackened. Tarens perceived those other layers underlaid, as the resonance of the unseen registers augmented his surface impressions. There, the musician’s erstwhile music had set down subtle roots. The shimmer of that stark beauty lingered, laced through the chaotic shock of brutality where subsequently, the bickering invaders dragged the captive bard off by the heels. Clear, as well, the precognate shadow of violence, distinct as a wave unfurled under pressure.

  Tarens gasped, his cohesive thoughts trampled. Again, consciousness wavered like water-drowned light. The sting to his stripped nerves rocked him dizzy. He sucked a fast breath, overwhelmed, while the pony skidded, still headed down-slope. He lacked the strength to force it to turn, far less face down six – perhaps eight? – brawny brutes, aggressively angry and toughened by their lifetime’s toil, hauling filled fish-nets.

  Instead, Tarens targeted the unguarded dory, left beached at the verge of the bay. Since the pony plunged in that direction already, he planned to row out to the anchored lugger. If he boarded, unseen, before the disgruntled shore party returned, he might contrive to release their trussed prize.

  Yet thought of the future unveiled a freshened riffle of urgency embroiled into the flux currents. Tarens fretted, aware that unknown forces elsewhere gouged up a redoubled blast of raw charge. Which change swept down like an inbound storm front: and pending ripples of on-coming death loomed into convergence, motivated without thought of mercy, blood and steel to determine the outcome.

  The pony’s pace felt disastrously slow.

  ‘Git up!’ Tarens kicked the beast’s ribs with his heels, made it stop snatching mouthfuls of fodder. Shouldered ahead at a choppy trot, slapped upon face and shoulders by low-slung branches, he broke through the scrub to an overgrown game trail, and winced to the panic of flushed birds and rabbits. Briars raked his bare hands. Tarens hung on, overwhelmed by the reek of the marsh and stabbed by the piped cries of plovers. Sounds pierced his magnified hearing like knives, and each movement wrung him to nausea. The pony balked. He forced it ahead, wrestling the slide of the unsecured pack as the land leveled off, and his mount’s unshod hooves chopped through the soggy silt of last season’s shed leaves. The rumpled row of punched tracks flagged his presence, all the worse when he ploughed into the reed flats, and left a furrow of bent stems in his wake.

  Soon, his hardy mount sank knee deep in the muck, propped its front legs, and refused to move. Tarens bullied another brave stride, forestalled as the animal mired. Dumped off as it rebelled and floundered to safety, he landed in a stranded heap atop the supply pack. Too fevered and weak to give chase, he wormed onwards. The salt-wet ground soaked his elbows and knees, and the cut of the wind set him shivering. He arrived at the dory, panting and spent to the verge of black-out unconsciousness. Rested prone with his cheek pillowed on his squashed rations, he weathered the spasms that raked his huge frame and chattered his teeth.

  When he moved, as he must, his effort to launch the small craft met with failure. The grip of the mud glued the dory’s keel fast. A stout vessel fitted with doubled benches and rowlocks, she required a hale man to shove her afloat. Outfaced, Tarens collapsed across the bow, heaped with damp fish-nets and a jumbled stack of slat crab-traps. He heaved his sack of provisions inside, then flopped awkwardly over the thwart and burrowed under the forward seat. There, he pulled the stinking, weed-coated mesh with its clinking glass floats overtop, and chanced to fate that his stowaway presence might stay overlooked.

  Since hunger fed weakness, he made himself choke down the crumbled remains of the honey-cakes. The piled nets broke the wind, which meager respite let him dry out and get warm. But without the purpose of active exertion, Tarens drifted into a half-world of waking dreams. The heightened perception of overset senses bled unchecked through the interface, with chisel-punched fragments of vision sprung from a masterbard’s song to redeem him…

  The veil thinned, and the past saturated the present. Again, Tarens was a child with skinned knees, howling in a fit of furious tears. Only his mother’s iron grip stopped him from hurling himself at the white soldiers. They burst in with drawn swords in sparkling gold surcoats, and boots that shook the floor-boards like thunder. The small boy hated the bearded one whose helmet was hackled with plumes. That man gave gruff orders, while the rest seized Tarens’s father’s arms and dragged him out of the kitchen, still shouting. They claimed he went for glory and salvation to grace the temple’s divine service. That did not explain why his mother was weeping. Or why Efflin had snuck out the back window and run off to warn Uncle Fiath to hide in the haystack.

  ‘Tarens!’ The plea sounded as the last soldiers clomped out, and the company formed up into columns to leave. ‘Tarens! Be strong! Look after your sister and mother!’

  ‘Father…?’ Aggrieved still by cruel abandonment, the child’s forlorn whisper resounded, unanswered.

  The grown man shuddered behind the noisome screen of lead weights and moldering fish-net, then wept afresh as his wounded heart tore where embedded pain left him broken. As his desolation deflected the flux, the intimate linkage offered by the bard sparked off a spontaneous glimpse of shared vision. Wracked sobs mingled with a different sea-breeze, while the musician’s lost, dark-haired father spoke to lend healing comfort. ‘They say that Ath’s ocean holds all the tears in creation. Man need shed no more…’

  Soothed by that tender, paternal wisdom, Tarens accepted the balm, unresisting. Wide open, unmoored, and melded seamlessly into the weave of Arithon’s personal experience, he unwittingly wakened the parallel imprint, when the bard’s mastery had forged a similar, mystical linkage to recall a strayed spirit, once before. Then, as well, a bared blade at the throat had drawn blood under threat to the singer.

  In fiercest passion, adamant for the care of a different friend, the bard’s art re-echoed against itself. The consonant patterns of past and present collided and triggered a flash-point gestalt. Tarens’s dreaming slid into the seared memory of the crisis lived by Arithon, two hundred and forty-three years before…

  Night dimmed the striated-sandstone cavern carved out by the flood of a free-wilds river. There, a red-bearded clansman blood-pledged as a brother huddled against the seeped influx of winter draughts. He was a large man, sturdy as the upright oak, repeatedly battered by tempests. A scout’s leathers, scuffed with hard use, and the gleam on his weapons belonged to a fighting man. Tonight, run to earth and surrounded by the advance guard of three Sunwheel war hosts, he faced despair. The battle rage in him ran glass-edged with fear, for the challenge before him outmatched the skilled limit of his experience.

  The rite of initiation he faced was never the tactic of choice, but a bleak necessity forced by survival. Underlit by the ruddy gleam of a fire, the clansman lifted grey-hazel eyes and asked in tight trepidation, ‘Do you have any sureties to offer me?’

  Strained by unflinching truth, Arithon’s grave reply: ‘None at all.’ A fragmented echo, come later, the vision delivered his gentled assurance, ‘I’d give you my music to guide you…’

  For Tarens, the musician had sung again, his matchless art lifted into command by the bold course of this previous hour’s endeavour. An authority that twice transcended the veil fused time with a tingling jolt. Hurled past the pallid dimensions of dream, Tarens felt the pungent bite of the herb smoke drawn into another man’s lungs. In graphic sympathy, he became immersed in the plight of the free-wilds liegemen in Daon Ramon, two and a half centuries ago. Anxiety pounded his heart-beat, linked through him by the resonance forged, then, to salvage the doomed lives of the cornered war band.

  Without further warning, the dream’s fabric tore. Tarens separated and fell back into his present-day self-awareness.

  Nestled securely inside the beached dory, he breathed nothing more tha
n the taint of damp fish-nets. He knew the earth’s pull, and the tug of the moon that riffled the tide through the narrows. No burned herb, but the lane’s flux lashed him as raw catalyst, now that the bard’s strings were silenced. Scared, Tarens realized that the ruled lines of melody steering his course through the morass were fading away.

  But the initiate changes firmly laid down by the bard’s gifted influence remained entrenched in his being. Buffeted by the flux stream’s unfiltered cross chop, Tarens’s new-found awareness tumbled into the turbulence of random events…

  He scented honed steel where True Sect dedicates billeted at Barish broke camp and marched towards Tysan’s border. Their ranked columns tramped south for invasion of Havish…while the exhortations of a Sunwheel priest decried the outbreak of terror unleashed by the Spinner of Darkness…while townsfolk deranged by the lane shift cowered and shrieked in crazed fits, and temple diviners backed by armed troops forced a house-to-house search to purge those corrupted. The traumatized faithful left unafflicted gathered fire-wood to burn their condemned. Others unwilling to help earned the stigma of Shadow’s collaborators, and were put to the question for untoward influence…

  Nearer at hand, etched against the mercury eddies that roiled by salt water, the Light’s patrol fleet carved an inbound course down Mainmere’s deepwater estuary. Packs of determined head-hunters came also, bold or foolish enough to prowl the forbidden verges of Caithwood. Opportunists descended in crab skiffs and punts, eager to snatch a rich bounty. Ahead of them all, rife to seize the prize first, sailed the contraband runners in their narrow grey sloop, cleaving a swift course through the inlet.

  They were coming for Arithon…

  Shattered by the flicker of runaway Sight, Tarens reeled to the volatile burst of intent that lured every two-legged predator caught within range. From gifted diviners, to temple high priests, to the hapless fishermen beguiled from their nets and now holding their luckless captive – every mind tuned by greed or the stamp of blind faith descended like wolves on the marsh flats.