Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Dakar attended the noisy ones first, if only to give himself peace. After the infant, two shrill screamers were silenced by sleeping-draughts, then the most desolate of the moaners. Several wretches beat their heads with their fists, a thin teen and a tear-stained toddler among them. Again and again, Daliana climbed upstairs to the pantry to fetch the spellbinder’s sundry requests, which ranged from buckets of well-water, to clean glass flasks and cheap gin, to blankets and linen for compresses.

  The nerve-wracked spellbinder had not paused to eat, against his hedonist’s nature. He kept Lysaer pinned beneath his watchful eye, and rejected the helpful offer of lending him illumination. As much as the man’s gifted touch with the elements might brighten his work, Dakar refused to encourage the misguided awe of the Sunwheel fanatics.

  ‘Clear space and find something to bed these folks down,’ he ordered instead, too aware that the chafe of Desh-thiere’s curse tended to feed upon idleness.

  His survey to assay the blockages that disrupted the victims’ auras commenced by mage-sight in the dark. Soon enough, the brutal demand on his faculties overtaxed his tight concentration. Dizziness sucked at him in black waves, atop travel-sore weariness already sufficient to flatten him. He slouched like a lump, while the two beefy fellows who bounced the inn’s drunks rolled the supine bulk of his latest case onto the pallet that Lysaer fashioned from flour-sacks. They hovered in wait after that with glazed boredom, while the spellbinder knuckled his gritted eyes and pushed back his leaden exhaustion.

  ‘I’ll take the girl with the bitten nails, next.’

  ‘Litter’s upstairs, have to fetch it back,’ the more talkative brute admitted, then stumped after his clamp-jawed, liverish companion and mounted the rickety stairway.

  Dakar scrubbed the soaked hair off his temples and started the meticulous task of spell-charging a measure of water to ease the distress of the woman his subtle skills had just sounded. Each chosen cipher infused the neat energy required, an exacting match that must counteract her imbalances, precisely. A misjudgement begged failure by coma, or death. While Dakar gripped the filled flask in slick hands, attuned to the delicate flow of ephemeral frequencies, the stricken folk who were yet to be treated whispered restively as stirred leaves. The musk of their stale clothing winnowed with the draughts, thickened by the scent of hot wax, as Lysaer opened the pane of the lamp and softened the seal for the flask to bottle the completed antidote.

  Since paper for written instructions ran short, Daliana tramped upstairs again to plead for supplies from the landlord’s clerk.

  Dakar stabilized his effort with the rune of ending, and blotted his forehead against his rolled sleeve cuff. He was not Asandir, to ease the traumas of fifteen deranged spirits at an instant’s notice. He passed the tin cup with a trembling hand, rescued from a spill by Lysaer, whose grasp was just as unsteady. Dakar noticed, and argued again for sound sense. ‘At least permit me to lay basic wards of protection over your person.’

  Jewels glinted against the rich sheen of silk, a show of state splendour that jarred amid squalor as Lysaer tipped the infused water into the flask, plugged the neck, then pinched off the flickering wick of the wax stick. Princely features plunged into ominous shadow, he said, ‘You might as well bay at the moon, I suggest. If you’ll notice? Your deft touch is failing.’

  Truth bit with a vengeance, more since an enspelled boundary could scarcely defang an interference that sprang from within. Dakar dried his aching, wet palms on a towel filched from the tap-room, and argued, ‘No game plan is fool-proof, given your plight. But I might stall the speed of reaction, a bit. Perhaps shield your person from a manipulative interference. Outside interests have ever provoked your affliction as a ready spring-board for their private agendas.’

  More to the point, Dakar itched for a circle of guard to alert him in time to field a defensive response. But to voice the need behind his suggestion might spur a counter-reaction. The curse defended against outside meddling. If a crafted line of suppression risked piling tinder atop smouldering embers, no safe-guards at all left Lysaer’s weakness wide open to usage by enemies.

  Caught nodding again, Dakar feared he must ask Daliana to transcribe the caregiver’s instructions for the sick woman’s family. He cradled his forehead. Plagued by the pangs of a searing headache, he hoped he was not too foredone to dictate.

  ‘Why are you sure I’m predestined to fail?’ Lysaer pushed, as yet dauntlessly nettled.

  ‘Because the Koriathain were jerking your strings!’ Dakar lowered his hands, swore over their shaking, and flared to annoyance. ‘One foul trap with a fetch nearly drove you insane. Prime Selidie won’t give up her chance to seize further leverage through your warped straits. While you cling to pride, she will plot again.’

  Sudden gooseflesh riffled over the Mad Prophet’s moist skin, perhaps the nascent prelude to a fit of prescience. He stifled the surge, obliged to stay watchful. Upstairs, plied with drink, folk were actively hostile. Any more arcane portents would fan the chaotic fears sown in the wake of the lane shift. Untoward delay also hurt the critical cases that languished, untreated. Someone’s mindful care must stay the course, with no other initiate-trained healer at hand to ease their fraught torment.

  Another worrisome snag in the maelstrom, Lysaer toyed with ideas that might easily slide into another evasion. Dakar gave the man’s vulnerable morals short shrift. ‘Don’t let Desh-thiere’s pernicious influence lure you into false confidence!’

  A ringed hand reached across, snatched the near-empty bucket from the spent spellbinder’s fumbling grasp. Lysaer took over, poured the dregs into the next readied flask without spills, then admitted, reluctant, ‘Of course, you are right. But if I don’t fight, the geas reacts as though I’ve relinquished my choice and surrendered.’

  Which might be truth, or another barbed coil. The Mistwraith’s vile working applied its directive with relentless ingenuity. While Dakar groped for the wits to respond, Lysaer slammed down the bucket, and added, ‘If you cannot trust in my flawed integrity, address the bald fact: does this True Sect crusade launched in Tysan stand any chance of being disarmed? How many will die on the borders of Havish if I hang back and cower and never venture the ethical effort? Should Prime Selidie trigger the curse with a fetch, I’m no safer holed up in Etarra, past question!’

  Dakar lost his breath. He could not gainsay the blistering courage behind that bold cry for justice. Nor could he outmatch an honesty backed by the punch of ingenuous humility. The brave claim was not new. When Desh-thiere once held sway, Arithon, too, had tried the same line: an insidious plea surely tainted beneath the false colours of human entreaty.

  Dakar picked his weapon, then smashed the pretty glass-sculpture dream like a criminal. ‘Will you recognize the moment you must ask for help?’ Braced to deal the crude blow to keep a torn spirit on the harsh path of redemption, he followed that knife thrust and twisted. ‘By the grace of Sulfin Evend’s supreme dedication, Asandir has given you hope, through Daliana. Do you shrink to ask her to stand by your side and share the grave risk of your short-falls?’

  A shocked silence ensued. Lysaer went still.

  ‘Or will you turn your back? Disdain the fallible shield granted by her human love in trade for the arrogant deception that your ego ought to protect her?’ Dakar could not watch. He knew well his barb struck where a man’s private wounds remained all too nakedly vulnerable.

  The tormented moans of the wretch in the corner did not mask the sawed rip of Lysaer’s next breath. Whether he suppressed rage, or tears of regret for his most irremediable losses, none knew.

  The taut moment snapped as Daliana’s thumped steps traipsed downstairs and wrecked privacy. ‘They’re chanting up there, do you hear?’ Her brim-full pail sloshed, plonked down by the litter. She flipped her jaunty braid over her shoulder, then freed the dog-eared sheaves of paper clamped beneath her left elbow. Her glance at Dakar softened to apology. ‘The noise drowned me out when I asked for quiet for the s
ake of your convalescents.’

  By now, rhythmic stamping against the floor-boards sifted loose dust through the lamp-light. Dakar guessed the rallying cry extolled the merits of true faith in the Light. His healing labours would be declared divine miracles, no doubt dispensed by the beneficence of the temple’s recanted avatar.

  Which unvoiced exasperation did not escape Lysaer, who pointedly dipped the dried pen and took up a blank sheet.

  Dakar recited. Through the misguided salvo above, he listed the dosage aimed to restore the oblivious matron to her right mind. The rolled paper, tied to the flask with a string, would be handed off to the woman’s hysterical kinsfolk once the inn’s borrowed muscle reappeared for duty. The spellbinder also tasked them to haul the next wailing fellow from his wedged nook between the slat shelving.

  While the heavies restrained the man’s witless terror, Dakar steeled fraught nerves, then invoked his trained faculties. Immersed into deep trance, he heard and saw nothing beyond the etheric eddies his overtaxed talent laboured to map. He resurfaced at length, ears ringing with strain. Through vision marred by pin-wheel flashes and the syrupy haze of stretched cognizance, he sensed the haggard, close-quarters flame of someone else’s anxiety beside him.

  Not Lysaer: Daliana offered the filled flask, readied for him to imprint, a staunch support sweet as grounded iron against his head-splitting tension. Since his spent vision showed no other presence, Dakar broached the unspeakable subject.

  ‘Sleep across your liege’s threshold,’ he advised. ‘A caithdein’s oath gives you the obligation. First to stand guard as his voice of true conscience, then to act if he should breach integrity.’

  But that earnest entreaty crashed into silence.

  ‘Ath save us!’ gasped Dakar. ‘What’s already happened?’

  ‘Lord Lysaer’s gone,’ Daliana admitted, snapped terse. ‘He went upstairs to eat. Didn’t lie. He was hungry. When he failed to return, the innkeeper told me he left for the stables and made the grooms saddle him a fast horse.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to follow. Catch up with him, now!’ But Dakar’s distraught effort to rise floundered against wheeling dizziness. ‘Help me up.’

  ‘No use, we’re too late,’ Daliana confessed. ‘You were tranced for an hour! I’m sorry. You’re dead right. I should not have let Lysaer slip past me.’

  ‘No failure of yours!’ Dakar snapped. ‘He had help.’

  ‘Beyond question.’ Daliana’s accusation broke through, pitched with a fury to lacerate. ‘What did you say to him in my absence?’

  ‘No driven man hears unwanted counsel,’ Dakar dismissed with a shrug.

  ‘Oh?’ Daliana smiled with all of her teeth, tawny eyes wide in the flame-light. ‘Then explain to me: who is Talith?’

  Dakar clammed up. There were limits. The intimate grief from a man’s private past had the born right to stay sacrosanct. Forget the fact that his inept silence damned him: glib words and suave wisdom eluded him, still. He could cozen pleasure from the most jaded whore, while the tact to misdirect one honest woman slipped his grasp like a panicked trout. ‘You won’t hear from me,’ he stonewalled, then flinched, braced to field what his threadbare evasion deserved.

  Daliana struck, fit to trounce any male caught out in shrinking retreat. ‘Then you broached whatever Asandir implied, that lends me the unfair advantage? Of course, you wielded that ruthless leverage and stupidly challenged Lysaer’s masculine ethics.’

  Dakar clamped his jaws, guilty.

  ‘Ath forfend!’ Daliana cried, exasperated. ‘What madness possessed you? Don’t you see? You’ve driven my liege straight from the crucible into the enemy’s web!’

  Contrite as a kicked mongrel, Dakar smothered his bleakest suspicion. Just as likely, Selidie Prime had tipped the scales against Lysaer’s sound sense through some act of vile practice. Her order’s mission was ruthless: Desh-thiere’s curse run amok and a border war turned against Havish applied the strategic pressure to upset the Fellowship’s compact.

  ‘The stakes we confront are dreadful enough, without your punishment, added in hindsight.’ Dakar quailed to shoulder the urgent necessity of a deep scrying. Drained to the pith of his bones by exhaustion and rattled queasy with worry, he doubted his fitness to sound a safe course through the thicket of hostile interests. The cruel irony stung. After quashing repeated prescient surges, he dared not rely on his natural instincts. If he tapped into his precocious wild talent in such ragged state, he might pass out and spout raving nonsense for days.

  ‘We have to pursue,’ he insisted. ‘Support for Lysaer is far more important than the hung fate of these stricken townsfolk.’

  Daliana said nothing.

  She lent no kindly hand in support as Dakar reeled upright, swearing. He careened across the disorganized cellar, his course marked by hollow clunks as he ricocheted off the dry kegs and tapped-out wine tuns. First mired in heaps of used flour-sacks, then whacked on both shins to a ghastly clatter of tin pitchers, he tackled the narrow stair without mishap, only to bang head first against the shut wooden trap at the top.

  Some idiot outside had bolted the panel.

  Dakar’s yelp of pain raised gruff laughter from an alert vigilante, parked in the pantry. ‘No one gets out! Might as well stuff your noise. If you’re all that you claim and no minion of Shadow, we’ll have our proof! When the touched ones clapped down there along with you emerge, restored to their wits, you’ll go free. But not until then. That’s my orders.’

  ‘Upon whose authority?’ Dakar howled.

  ‘Light’s own glory, himself,’ word returned, adamant as stuck nails.

  Dakar damned the faith in blasphemous epithets, then plunked on his haunches in outfaced defeat. ‘May Dharkaron’s Five Horses trample the honey tongue of yon trumped-up s’Ilessid statesman!’

  For Lysaer’s sly subversion had foiled the devoted escort of friends he had wished to shed from the start. No protest might shift such fanatical obstinacy, fixated on a divine mission. A forceful escape would only deliver the cellar’s hapless souls to the sword and the pyre, forthwith.

  ‘Come down and get busy,’ Daliana admonished, backed by the stir-crazy rustle of loonies not yet reprieved from the lynch mob. ‘Unless you prefer to be put to the question by the Light’s Hope delegation you just ousted in shame from Etarra?’

  For inevitably, the temple’s ambassadorial train must pass this wayside inn on its plodding retreat to seek outbound passage from Narms.

  ‘Mercy on us,’ gasped Dakar. ‘Whose rash guarantee backed the groundless claim that I could salvage every case of derangement down here?’

  The failing wick in the candle-lamp flickered through Daliana’s disgusted reply. ‘Best pray for the time that we never had to waste on the road in the first place.’

  Dakar buried his face in his hands, crushed to dejected, bowed shoulders.

  Whichever case ruled a curse-based motivation, the gallant’s instinct to shield a young woman, or the more sinister ploys of the Koriathain, Lysaer s’Ilessid was hell-bound for Tysan. Dakar confronted his worst fear. He had failed to thwart fate. Nor had he ducked the cankered poison sown by his scapegrace past. The threatened spirit he most shrank to encounter already stood at lethal risk, with the life that carried the Fellowship’s destiny poised to go up in flames should Lysaer’s resolve come to falter.

  By the grey tinge of dawn, only hours away, Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn would arrive in Torwent, bound over in chains to the adder’s nest of his enemies.

  Early Spring 5923

  Three Questions

  Nowhere else on Athera did the deep-night stars burn with such splendour. Above the black sand of Sanpashir, the sky was an indigo bowl, mote-dusted in glory that flickered and danced with the glitter of chipped opal and diamond. After seven days’ travel on foot due north-eastward on the Innish trade-road, Elaira encountered the view from the deep desert, guided yet by the Reiyaj Seeress’s mystic escort. The dunes ranged before her in overlapped folds, a j
et velvet vista stabbed with the flash-caught sparkles thrown off by loose quartz grains and mica. The cold wind and stark beauty stole her very breath. Unlike most who sought an encounter with the country’s insular tribal inhabitants, she was not brought under hostile captivity, disarmed and blindfolded.

  Instead, she was guided in frightening solitude, where the old roadway sliced a transient groove, pocked by the tread of the silk caravans’ mules and kept aligned by the compass. Time and wind had buried the cap-stones of the ancient stelae that once marked the way. Others were broken or bowed to the fury of centuries of weather. People died here. Strays who wandered off the known route, or the foolish who witlessly trespassed where desert folk held their inscrutable rituals: all perished of darts, shot by unseen sentinels, or else vanished without a trace.

  Elaira arrived, no better informed. Written archives recorded nothing about the tribes’ history, or their secret practices. Such knowledge was old and most fiercely guarded, an oral tradition not shared with outsiders. Whatever their tie to the blinded oracle in the sealed tower at Reiyaj, the protector sent by the Seeress’s auspices answered none of the enchantress’s respectful questions. Their travel together had passed unremarkably until, without explanation, the accustomed camp had not been pitched amid the rose glow at sundown.

  The moonless night was three-quarters gone when the cloaked figure bearing his unadorned quarterstaff stopped short without any warning. He touched his crossed palms at his breast and formally bowed to her, then smiled too briefly to soften his abrupt farewell. ‘Elaira, the duty my mistress laid on me is finished. Your destination is nigh. Wait here until someone comes for you.’

  Elaira thanked him. Her shock strained the basic fabric of courtesy and left her with nothing to say. Distraught, she watched her enigmatic guardian turn face about and depart due westward towards Forthmark. As his cloaked figure vanished from sight, she stifled the urge to chase after his heels. The coward’s choice to give way and plead for the comfort of human company was not a safe option. Elaira hardened herself to surmount the clamour of her insecurity.