Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Asandir returned a humourless laugh; brittle mask for a grief past expression. ‘Ath forefend and woe to humanity’s fate if my effort tonight meets with failure.’

  But his statement dangled against a stark silence. If Sethvir’s earth-linked faculties grasped such foreknowledge, his tacit contact withdrew.

  Early Spring 5923

  Deadlock

  The jolt as Dakar’s toppled bulk struck cold mud sprawled him face-down in a melt puddle carved by a wheel-rut. Slush and gritty water splashed up his nose. Bludgeoned awake with a spluttering grunt, then savaged by the ache of chilled sinuses, he cursed the fall that had pitched him headlong from an inopportune catnap in the saddle. Clawed onto his knees to arise, he discovered he had not succumbed to exhausted sleep, after all. Suddenly overset, he doubled and hurled up the dregs of his dinner.

  The night’s drizzle clung like a drenched cocoon, punched through by the fading drum of shod hooves as his riderless horse bolted off in the darkness. Too wrecked to give chase, Dakar spat bile and oaths, flecked with the odd bit of gravel. He was wringing out his soaked gloves when Daliana circled back to redress his delay.

  ‘What happened?’ she snapped, sharpened by the awareness that Lord Lysaer spurred onwards, alone. No one’s wise argument salvaged the fact that his sensible retinue from Etarra had been abandoned to make better speed.

  She drew rein too close, her unskilled seat astride only kept by ferocious determination. Dakar cringed, showered by icy spray churned up by shod hooves. He was not seeing double: more than one sidling horse threatened to stomp him to mincemeat. Daliana had his skittish mount gripped in tow, eyes rolled white and resentfully snorting.

  ‘I did not fall asleep!’ Dakar said in stung injury before she attacked him for moronic clumsiness.

  ‘Well, we’ve fallen disastrously far behind. Had I not witnessed your meal at that post-house, I’d swear for a magistrate’s fine you were drunk.’ Daliana dismounted. Undaunted by her girlish frame and slight strength, she snagged his collar to haul him erect.

  The loud squelch of her boots, and her touch seared away another layer from his peeled nerves. Dakar’s finicky stomach revolted, again. Seized helpless with dry heaves, he gripped his cramped gut, distressed beyond coherent speech.

  Daliana braced him with sudden concern. ‘Was the mutton bad, truly?’

  The paroxysm eased. Before she bent down, or worse, tried to lay her palm against his flushed forehead, Dakar jerked free and forced a clamped breath. ‘No.’ He scrubbed his face with a handful of snow, then coughed to clear his sour throat. ‘This is only the damnable back-lash caused by a prophetic fit.’ He staggered erect and finished up, hopeful, ‘Maybe I shouted loudly enough? Did you catch the gist of my raving?’

  ‘I heard filthy swearing,’ Daliana allowed bravely.

  Dakar swayed, rocked afresh as her other fist seized his rucked jacket and steadied him.

  ‘You’re not in fit state,’ she ventured, fearful he might collapse like a drenched sack of rags in the ditch.

  Dakar shoved her off before his trembling melted her to obstructive sympathy. ‘Forget my dignity.’ He floundered ahead. Grasped his mount’s dangling stirrup for balance, instincts stung to foreboding by the muffled quiet. The Lord Mayor’s horse had passed far beyond earshot. ‘Just help me astride. If the post stable equipped your nag with a lead-rope, please use it. Tie me into the saddle. We’ve got to spur hard and overtake Lysaer! Stop for nothing unless I should pass out again. If that happens, take heed and recall what I say.’

  ‘And if you start spouting nonsense in tongues?’ Daliana sniped back, likely galled by the sores of a novice equestrian.

  Dakar stifled pity. ‘Should I speak in an older Paravian dialect, memorize what you can. Yes, the service is vital! Restored to my senses, I’ll take your best effort and try to translate.’

  ‘You should be tucked in bed!’ Daliana protested, strained as she shouldered his clambering effort to heave himself back astride.

  ‘Just do as I say!’ Dakar snarled, past tact. ‘More than the life of your liege may depend on this!’ Faint and wobbly atop the restive mare, he fretted over his bout of spurious prescience. No use to decry the loss of the prophecy just delivered, or to lament the damnable quirk that those forecasts he made amid a blind trance were destined to happen, regardless. On-coming trouble shadowed the flux lines. Overset by grim pressure, the spellbinder swore in steamed language under his breath. He need not consult with Sethvir to imagine the perilous wake of the recoil unfurled by the tumultuous lane shift.

  The sensory reach of human senses had been elevated within the span of a moment, with all the known boundaries shattered. Anywhere initiate wisdom was absent, error and ignorance must rule in the breach. The True Sect’s priests would be quick to inflame their mass following amid the windfall storm of chaos. Past question, fanatical turmoil already festered the dangerous crux, with Lysaer s’Ilessid poised on the razor’s edge, at gravest risk of entanglement with Desh-thiere’s curse. Dakar dared not discount the insidious web spun in secret by the Koriathain. Too easily, Lysaer’s flawed character might be twisted to front the ideological blood-bath, prosecuted by a ruthless war.

  Which unpleasant snare in the thickets of consequence rammed anxiety against the flood-gates of panic. Dakar adjusted his reins, streaming clammy sweat. The latent tug of his precocious talent suggested his worst fear, already tipped into cascade towards ruin.

  ‘Just ride!’ he shouted, while Daliana fumbled her way back into the saddle. ‘Rest on my word, we are racing to stem a disaster.’

  In earnest, the Mad Prophet stabbed in his heels. His flighty horse surged away with flat ears, Daliana in precarious pursuit without a breath of complaint. Like a burr, she clung to her mount with locked teeth. She managed well enough to keep pace, while the pall of night fog wrapped dank as grave-cloths about them.

  The going stayed miserable. Cold off the high Mathorn summits threatened fresh sleet, dense with a damp that bit to the bone and muffled the thud and splash of rushed hooves on the puddled roadway. Quick passage demanded a jolting, fast trot, interspersed with brief walks that wore sinew to a leaden ache. When the spurred pace failed to overtake Lysaer, the riders’ tired spirits sank too low for shared conversation.

  At grim length, the fuzzed glow of lanterns pricked the scrim of the grey fog. The peaked gables of the next post-house loomed in silhouette. Rest became a necessity. The horses were spent. Daliana bounced awkwardly in her irons, reins loose as she clutched double handfuls of mane to stay mounted. Dakar nursed his raw calves, rubbed to blisters that watered his eyesight to sparkles of pain.

  Yet where a snug roof promised haven, and thoughts of roasted meat off the spit should have comforted the beaten travellers, the wafted smoke from the inn tap-room’s chimney also brought the clash of hysterical voices.

  ‘I thought so!’ snapped Dakar. At wit’s end, annoyed, he rousted a final burst from his lathered horse. Sharply reined in at the stable-yard gate, with Daliana straggling behind, he slithered gracelessly to the ground. The dazed groom, a step late to receive his blown mount, was forced to snatch the freed horse’s trailed reins while Dakar charged on ahead. Short-tempered and broad, he hammered his way into the packed mass of bystanders clustered under the bull’s-eye lanterns that brightened the carriage yard.

  A wraith in his wake in a travel-stained cloak, her drawn features hooded, Daliana broached softly, ‘You expected what?’

  Dakar turned his head, his jutted beard stiff as a badger’s ruff. ‘Stay well clear!’

  Warned off, but not daunted, Daliana took stock. She would not have missed the piled kindling stacked in readiness for the fresh load of logs: pitch pine, cut still green, and hastily hauled to the yard in the bed of a brewer’s dray. Past the volatile mob that besieged the inn-door, her eye snag next on the glitter of jewels, worn with casual ease on a too-familiar male frame. The hatless, bright hair, agleam like found gold, outshone the flicker of flame-light:
Lysaer was backed against the tavern wall.

  At first glance, his hag-ridden tension stayed masked. But to any who knew him, the adamant set of trim shoulders raised a red flag of alarm.

  Stripped of his armed retinue, the True Sect’s fallen avatar faced a rough crowd, accosted by catcalls. Bristling drivers brandished coach-whips and cudgels, while the irate tradesmen and travellers in town dress cornered him, shaking raised fists.

  ‘The unwitting fools!’ Dakar gasped. Blind to the pressures of Lysaer’s cursed nature, this backwater crowd had no way to measure their consummate danger. A half breath from horror, they stood in the path of wanton annihilation: no one crossed a man compromised by Desh-thiere! To try was to pose an impediment. Resistance against the drive of the curse sparked off an attack reflex past sane volition.

  A ribbon of sweat streamed down Lysaer’s temple. The pounding, fast pulse in the vein at his neck bespoke naked will set under explosive strain.

  Dakar knew those dire signs. Too often, he had witnessed the dreadful descent when Arithon fell sway to the Mistwraith’s cruel influence. In this night’s cold dark, squeezed onto the fringes, he watched Lysaer fight and lose ground while the remorseless drive sapped his equilibrium. The geas degraded the stoutest intent. The least move might trigger a drastic response, before which no safe-guard existed. In the glow of the lamps, the liquid shimmer of Lysaer’s collar studs betrayed a sharp onset of trembling. Under hot provocation, a wrong breath might transform the inn-yard into an abattoir.

  ‘How can you behold evil’s work and do nothing?’ a country beldame shrilled from the forefront. Her indignant thrust forward swung the wool ties of her lappet hat as she accused, ‘There are children afflicted by malicious practice in there! Innocent people turned minion through witchcraft. Don’t claim that Shadow’s not risen to plague us! Or spout the bald lie, that Darkness itself’s not abroad, sowing mayhem!’

  Lysaer’s minute jerk in recoil screamed warning: he looked like a wretch pushed at bay with a murderer’s knife at his throat.

  Dakar elbowed ahead. Swearing fit to sting a drover’s ears pink, he plunged into the breach. Around him, the cries of shocked outrage swelled louder. Murderous glares swung his way, almost welcome: safer that the crowd’s hatred should fix on him to give Lysaer a measure of quarter. Dakar blistered insults back at all comers, inspired to bid for the prize as a public nuisance. If he earned the lynching, he would field that nuisance in step. Better the small crisis he could contain than see this mob fried alive as Lysaer’s besieged restraint came unravelled. Buffeted in the press of rank animosity, aware every second became borrowed time, Dakar broke through and launched into his s’Ilessid target, unblinking.

  ‘The upset at large is no act of Darkness but due to a sharp change in Athera’s electromagnetics. Despite groundless claims made against acts of Shadow, endorse the bare truth! Step back and move on. These problems rest outside of your sovereign charge. You can’t save every person afflicted.’

  Drowned out by the fire-brand storm of retorts, Dakar shrugged off someone’s aggressive grip. He shouted, frantic, ‘Return to your palace. As a seated town mayor, your duty lies there. If you’re justly moved, use your rightful authority to quiet the unsettled populace at home!’

  No one rebuked Etarra’s elected lord with such peremptory autocracy. While the agitators jostled at Dakar’s back and bellowed their disapproval, before him, more fearsome, Lysaer’s hauteur resharpened. Terrified to encounter the spark of stark madness as those blue eyes lifted to meet him, Dakar attacked first as the crowd’s living shield. ‘Don’t play the rank idiot. You can’t make your stand here or assume the false mantle of saviour.’

  Thus, the mouse taunted the teeth of the tiger. Dakar held the line as the lightning-rod, braced for the punishing strike. Or, save his hide, he might grant the space Lysaer needed to mend the last threads of frayed reason.

  As the split second dangled, no levin bolt razed an insolent buffoon for meddling.

  Lysaer’s famously arrogant, gemstone blue eyes kept their downcast glaze. Pushed to the brink of curse-borne compulsion, his expression appeared inexplicably ripped to naked pity. Staggered again by the restive crowd, Dakar caught his first glimpse of what Etarra’s Lord Mayor defended.

  The infant he cradled was scarcely a month old, a worn-out scrap of pallid flesh, folded into a tattered blanket. The mite gasped in the throes of extremity, its traumatized cries devolved to a broken wheeze.

  No matter the depth of a spellbinder’s experience, the awkward thrust of the foot in the mouth still sandbagged him to humiliation. Dakar wrestled to salvage his callous gaffe, barged sidewards by someone else’s untimely arrival.

  ‘Get back,’ he snapped. ‘For your life’s sake, let me handle this!’ Sight locked forward, breath stopped, he had no attention to spare.

  ‘Who is that child’s mother?’ The proprietary demand was Daliana’s, hurled into the volatile crux.

  Which interruption froze Dakar’s blood.

  Lysaer answered, false calm welded over a strain that could, if he slipped, destroy lives the breadth of two kingdoms. ‘She’s locked in the root-cellar, condemned to burn along with a dozen others. Folks here insist they’re corrupted by Shadow. Some have fallen to madness. Others are raving from fever. For days, they have suffered from violent purges brought on by an unknown affliction.’

  ‘I know why they’re ill.’ Dakar rammed in, persistent. He moved in time, stoutly blocked Daliana, whose rash desperation to swerve Lysaer’s focus invited an outright disaster. The Mad Prophet drove on: ‘Foul practice and misplaced beliefs have nothing to do with the onset.’

  Daliana plucked at Dakar’s sleeve. Still ignored, she urgently shook his forearm as the ugly atmosphere simmered towards riot. Hostile mutters became threats as the balked fanatics insisted the evils of Darkness should be purged straightaway by sword and fire.

  ‘You stand in the way of the Light’s Divine Grace!’ a whiskered drover accused.

  A stringy chap in a miller’s apron shoved to the centre, and shouted, ‘Truth will be served! Behold the false avatar who turned apostate to the faith! Should we let his strayed wisdom sway us? I say better to take a righteous stand and send for the judgement of a True Sect examiner!’

  Hedged on all sides by volatile hysteria, Daliana accosted Lysaer headlong. ‘Debate on the cause of distress doesn’t matter! My liege, you must act. Grant the families of the afflicted every power of mercy at hand. Promise them hope of deliverance before any innocents are put to the torch.’ Then, heedless of her own peril, she dodged Dakar’s bulk and barged past.

  Under the lamps, Lysaer’s fair-skinned features glistened with sweat. Hard up against the taut signs of his conflict, Daliana dared the unthinkable: she reached out at speed in direct intervention and snatched the suffering babe out of Lysaer’s defensive clasp.

  His hold upon human restraint snapped at once. While Dakar gasped, frozen, Daliana turned her back on the presence of certain death. Visibly terrified, she thrust the fevered, wailing mite and its blankets into the spellbinder’s stupefied grasp.

  ‘Inside!’ she snapped. ‘You have work to do, Dakar!’

  The rise of the whirlwind storm she defied was anything else but disarmed. Against the recoil of Lysaer’s cursed reaction, she stood her brave ground: a slender, cloaked form poised in saving distraction; or else the sacrificed target in line to be torched as a rank provocation.

  ‘She is not Talith!’ Dakar cried, appalled, into an atmosphere shocked like tapped glass.

  Lysaer shuddered. Tormented, he pulled in a searing, hissed breath. As though he stared down his final undoing, his heart seemed to stop through a dreadful, hung moment. Then he forced a smile. Eyes rinsed blank with an incomprehensible effort, he bent his head in a courtly, ironic salute.

  Someone’s movement responded. The packed crowd stirred as the innkeeper, or a patron preternaturally astute, seized authority and cleared the inn’s blockaded doorway. ‘My Lord,
step inside,’ he urged with a quaver. ‘Can you help, there are kin who’d be grateful.’

  The mob surged as the studded oak panel swung wide. Dakar and Daliana resisted the press. If Lysaer refused this chance to seek respite, all would go for naught: the inn-yard would stage the seed of a holocaust.

  ‘For the sake of the child,’ Daliana exhorted.

  Her plea moved him. Spurred by the humane need to shelter the infant, Lysaer escaped the jammed yard with its lynch-mob stew of charged rage and stepped into shelter.

  Dakar pushed Daliana over the threshold and reeled after her, jostled as the plump man with the keys slammed the door on the turmoil outside. Cut off, the unruly throng milled and shouted, unaware yet how narrowly close they had come to outright immolation. A stark, worried glance through the tap-room’s warm gloom showed the statesman’s steel poise, knit back over a spirit still set under siege. Dakar expelled a sharp breath in relief. Against terrible pressure, the hair-trigger reflex of Desh-thiere’s active geas appeared to be stalled, momentarily.

  There, Daliana’s insightful courage quite humbled the spellbinder’s greater experience. She had grasped immediately that Lysaer would seize on the child’s plight as his sheet-anchor.

  Thrown her fragile life-line to sanity, he sounded calm as he addressed the barmaid who cowered in the shadows. ‘Please show us where you’ve secured the condemned. Let me intercede for their case. No one burns for the Light! My coin will pay to feed them. If kinsfolk are present, invite them inside. If they’ll agree to sit down and wait quietly, we shall see what, if anything, can be done to restore the afflicted.’

  The tavern cellar was chilly and dank, the grimed beams overhead strung with cobwebs. Despite mortared walls of whitewashed fieldstone, the wan shaft of light cast by the innkeeper’s candle-lamp scarcely pierced the oppressive gloom. Jumbled stacks of dry casks and dusty junk cluttered the dirt floor between trestle shelving, with the fusty atmosphere loud with the haunting moans of the benighted. A young man chanted in sing-song riddles, huddled up with clasped knees in a corner. Two older children languished with fever. A grandfather sprawled on the floor as though comatose, and a woman with tangled hair rocked without sound, muffled in the rags of a shawl worried threadbare by her plucking fingers.