by Janny Wurts
Then the view jerked away, as vindictive fists caught the prisoners’ ankles and hauled them like gaffed meat onto the open dock. Bundled upright again to a rattle of chain, they were pushed headlong towards the tail-gate of a cart. The bolted, plank sides designed to pen livestock had been topped by a cage of wrought iron. Tarens glimpsed Arithon’s face in the shuffle as the temple’s escort closed ranks. Beneath tousled hair, his pinched expression and shut eyelids displayed the pulped agony of a man seemingly stabbed through the vitals.
‘You have to fight back!’ Tarens yanked the men clutching his arms off their feet. Others grabbed hold. Someone’s back-handed blow knocked him dizzy. The shackle cuffs bit and drew blood as he struggled. Dragged like a maddened bull towards his doom, he barged into Arithon’s shoulder.
To the bowed head crushed against his split lips, Tarens threatened, ‘Come what may, coward, don’t you dare falter now!’
The green eyes flicked open. ‘I can’t!’ The plea came silent, mouthed through the gasp as Arithon recouped the breath knocked from his lungs. ‘Not again!’ Recovered enough to speak, he pealed, ‘Tarens! These are, every one of them, innocents!’
But the adamant iron in the crofter’s glare met that humane protest with censure. Another vulnerable memory resurged: of a past, chilly daybreak at sea-side, when Jieret’s pitiless stance had forced through the finish of an intolerable strategy. Then, a fleet of ships chartered to transport a war host had been torched into flame in a northern harbour.
Horror drained Arithon’s skin to milk glass. ‘Please! For mercy, don’t ask this!’
No reprieve came. Only the punch of insistent mailed gauntlets that clubbed helpless flesh until the captives reeled separate. While the howl ashore swelled to a crescendo, armoured fingers pried open their jaws and inserted the rough, twisted cloths of gags. No use, Tarens’s half-strangled shouts of indignity. The temple’s wardens battened both of their heads into coarse draw-string sacks, and sent them onward to meet their due fate, served up blind on the oil-soaked scaffold.
The onlookers screamed their atavistic frenzy as the condemned were shoved into the waiting, barred transport. Tarens crashed into urine-soaked straw, lately used to dispatch swine to the slaughter-house. He thrashed to sit upright, unlike Arithon, tumbled limp in the mouldered dung alongside. Rusty hinges squealed to a shudder of boards as the cage door clanged shut behind them.
Tarens wheezed through the gag, galvanized by stark fear, then seared by the unexpected assault that rattled his augmented awareness. His heightened instincts screamed warning that something was very far wrong. Ferocious chills shuddered over his skin. The discomfort built into an agonized sting, worse than salt rubbed into flayed nerves. He felt faint, half-smothered by the cloth sack. Masked eyesight dissolved into star-burst sparkles of pain. He gasped, while his gut-punched faculties spun, jangled in fiery waves. However he cowered, he found no escape. Teeth sunk in the gag could not stifle the agonized whimper wrung from him.
‘There’s a proper taste of unpleasantness, boys!’ A taunting clout raked the bars where he curled, cramped double with nausea. ‘May you suffer for every one of the sorry ills you’ve inflicted on others!’
Laughter followed, clipped by more obscene jeers. Collapsed on his side, Tarens dimly sensed that the quivering recoil also flattened his mage-wise companion. Trained talent afforded no measure of relief. The outside hope died, that a working of sorcery might ease the appalling onslaught.
‘Feelin’ the jab of yon sigils, my lads? The temple’s seen fit to bless your last journey under a string of grade talismans. Your muckle spells won’t do aught to save you. I’ll crow as you scream, denied any mercy throughout your overdue reckoning.’
A whip snapped nearby. The cart rumbled forward, bearing its wretched occupants towards their doom with all gifted access rendered incapable. Tarens’s hazed fury blossomed to panic. He had chased a fool’s dream. The compassionate empathy that had composed music to reel him back from the void never owned the aggressive, harsh core to rise to this moment’s necessity. Neither had the dutiful charge raised by Earl Jieret’s shade broken through Prince Arithon’s aversion to bloodshed.
Naught remained but endurance against the hounding dread, that the Light’s executioner might fumble his stroke; that frail courage would break before the end came, debased by animal terror. Tarens shivered, afraid, that his last aware moment might hold spineless tears and futile pleading.
The wagon lurched. The cage-bed suddenly tilted, then slewed sidewards to oaths from the discomposed escort. No one had seen the linch-pin work loose. Therefore, the commotion raised shouts of surprise as the right front wheel slid off the hub. The bare end of the axle banged into the dock to a shrieked grind of splintered wood. Someone’s apt handling halted the horse. But the leading ranks became socked from behind as the drunken wobble of the errant rim scythed through their neat files and splashed into the harbour. An unbalanced man fell. The comrade he jostled as he crashed flat rocked into a stagger and tumbled headlong off the wharf.
Immersed in full armour, he plunged straight down. Amid yelling dedicates who shucked off their gear in the scramble to shoulder a rescue, the temple officer ordered a hands-and-knees search for the lost bit of hardware. Failure coloured the frantic pitch of his oaths.
The cart’s mournful driver remarked with disgust, ‘Don’t matter anyhow. Not with the wheel lost in the drink!’
‘Keep looking!’ the officer snarled, regardless. ‘The water’s not deep. Once that clod-hopping wretch gets pulled out, I’ll strip down another and send him in with a salvager’s grapple and line.’
‘No use.’ The insolent driver heaved a resigned sigh. ‘The pin’s slid through a crack. She’ll be sunk in the silt, more’s the pity.’
‘Then contrive something else!’ The impasse sparked fury, that the True Sect priesthood’s exhaustive precautions had seen the talisman seals to block magecraft welded onto the cage, to thwart tampering. ‘We cannot move any sorcerer safely without the use of this secured cart!’
‘Aye, shout till you’re purple!’ the driver flared back. ‘Won’t be going anywhere, quick. Prayers won’t fetch a wheelwright here any faster. Go on, damn Shadow’s feckless ills all you like! There’s no fixing the problem. Best to unload your criminals now and march them to the pyre on foot.’
Through the raucous confusion caused by the drenched casualty, hauled onto the dock and vomiting sea-water, the stout lock on the cage door was unfastened. Two disgruntled, armoured brutes crawled inside and collared the prisoners. Tarens resisted, brutalized to whacked elbows, a banged head, and skinned knees. But the passive slide of Arithon’s body beside him suggested a limp state of unconsciousness. He had to be lifted onto the wharf, where he sprawled, while more shouting men endeavoured to prod him upright.
‘He’s out cold, you say?’ The exasperated officer swore. ‘Shadow’s Breath! No help, then. You’ll just have to carry him.’
Wagon abandoned, the armed company re-formed and marched out. Three steps, and their progress jerked short: the dragged slither of Arithon’s leg iron chains had caught fast in the crack between the gapped planks. The stout links stayed wedged, despite two stalwarts, who yanked with clenched teeth, then knelt with drawn steel and lathered themselves to fruitless frustration.
‘Keep at this with blades, someone’s sword’s going to snap,’ observed a disgusted subordinate. ‘The brute job calls for a pry bar.’
‘That, or those irons have to be struck,’ another suggested. ‘Anyway, the little wretch looks done in. Struck flat by those ward seals for sure. Since he’s not fit to stand, should I take half the company and march the blond brute on ahead?’
‘No!’ The officer sounded fit to tear hair. ‘I can’t split our forces, we’ll be spread too thin.’
‘Diabolical, these mishaps!’ a gruff dedicate said. ‘Not natural, one bit, but surely the evil set on us by Darkness!’ His spiteful punch knocked Tarens down. ‘Stay still, you! Don’t move!’ Through
the violent edge of his apprehension, another’s shrill shout laced into a by-standing dedicate. ‘You, there! Secure those chains while we wait. Don’t let that headstrong ox take a dive and drown himself to balk justice.’
While a man secured the slack links to a bollard, the abusive scorn of the frustrated spectators swelled to a vicious crescendo.
Tarens hunched, his breath short and his clouted ear ringing under the draw-string bag. The taste of run blood wicked through his gag and compounded his queasy sickness. But the ghastly distress imposed by the sigils lost its terrible force outside of the cart. His knifing cramps eased, which partial recovery did not restore his familiar frame of perception.
Instead, the back-lash recoil of jabbed nerves and adrenaline splintered him to a rarefied state of alertness. The arcane instincts endowed by Earl Jieret led him to recognize that the odd flares of disturbance he sensed nearby were caused by the men-at-arms. Distinctly as individual signatures, he could track their movements. This turn of skilled Sight was not his birthright, but the uncanny art left imprinted by a clan hunter’s legacy. Forest-bred liegemen used such refined talent to stalk prey, and to stand alert guard to patrol the free wilds.
More, Tarens detected other minute flows not seeded by human activity. Attentive to his subliminal faculties, he noted another curious tendril of energy. Purposeful, strange, the peculiar disturbance nipped through the ebb and swirl of activity like a little void pocked into the flux. The concept dawned, that Arithon’s distraught collapse might be feigned. His elemental ability to bid shadow and fiends may not have been fully suppressed. Perhaps those fractious eddies of otherness marked the evidence of an opening gambit.
Tarens braced himself in foreboding. With their suspicious escort already cranked to a state of jangled ferocity, another ill turn in the pile-up of set-backs might provoke a straight thrust of bare steel in the gut.
‘Have to strip off the leg shackles!’ the troop captain snapped. ‘Go on! Make it brisk.’
‘Shadow’s blight on us!’ a man groaned, at wit’s end. ‘We don’t have the confounded key to the irons.’
Which sent a runner back up the wharf to roust up the galley’s bosun. While the soldiers fidgeted, and the muscular tumult ashore surged against the Light’s dedicate cordon, the troop officer yelled in hot temper, ‘If we don’t get these miserable criminals moving, the delay will incite a riot!’
The Light’s Supreme Commander of Armies raked a cold glance over the unforeseen snarl on the wharf. ‘Damn all incompetents to the pit!’ His foot-to-foot stance rocked his armoured chariot to the blast of his irascible impatience. Dwarfishly broad-shouldered, his bull dog frame and his fidgeting at first sight made him seem childish.
But mature bristles of iron hair poked beneath the dazzling gold rim of his helm. The brace of poised spearmen beside him did not snigger in condescension. Nor did his charioteer’s leather mask ever crack, while the senior staff at the fore with the banner bearers showed their superior’s pinched nerves only strait-laced deference.
They had called him The Hatchet for so long, few remembered his birth name. If barracks rumour remarked that the brass in his wake bowed and scraped to nuzzle his backside, the man’s reputation was brilliant and the brutal justice behind his quick temper a quality no fool crossed twice.
He flicked out a mailed palm. ‘I’ll have my glass to see what’s befouled this ninny’s assignment.’
The telescope was slapped into his hand by an equerry drilled onto the hair-trigger tips of his toes. Such electric response was no sycophant’s currying of higher rank.
A genius strategist whose crackling respect had been earned by hard knocks rightfully should be smoked to displeasure. A buffoon’s jape brought him here: the temple’s prerogative yanked him off the battle-front to shepherd a damnfool execution. Insulted by turmoil that smacked of mismanagement, The Hatchet snugged the eyepiece under his furrowed brows.
‘Light blast!’ he swore. ‘That brainless escort’s abandoned the cart.’
Dried blood rimmed the nails on the fingers that fussed the lens into tight focus. Since he only donned his parade armour to bedazzle the crowd for religion, his white-and-gold surcoat and blazoned Sunwheel breastplate had been buckled on overtop of his befouled fleece hauberk.
The grim steel of his war armour, caked yet with gore, lay in a shucked heap underfoot. Since the advance thrust underway in the field could not stall for the sake of display, The Hatchet planned to shed his figure-head accoutrements and return to the fray once the sword’s thrust dispatched the condemned. Few things galled him more, that his staged invasion should be left in the hands of his inept rivals and underlings.
‘Might be worse trouble here,’ his ranked captain ventured, uneasy.
The Hatchet removed the glass for a brief, peeling stare, then turned his raking survey back to the wharf. The evils of sorcery did not merit a blink. Sunwheel believers and Shadows alike made him scoff, with the recent affray that raised shambles at Cainford waved aside as a gutless ineptitude. Excuses were cheap. Light help the whoresons who mis-stepped today, with the hand-wringing flap of True Sect hysteria tossed into The Hatchet’s lap. He planned to seize the dog’s bone from the mess: the louder the outcry whipped up against Shadow, the more gold he could wring to supply his ravenous troops. With funds drawn skin-tight since the past summer’s fevers cut into the temple’s tithes, at least a righteous scare of the Dark would replenish the bursar’s drained coffers.
The Hatchet drummed vexed fingers on the chariot rail, while the fumblers on the dock waited upon a runner dispatched to the ship. ‘They’re tail-circling over some damnfool errand!’ Annoyance curled his stiff upper lip as he cracked to his spearmen, ‘Find out what’s amiss!’
The men under orders vaulted from the chariot and sprinted away.
Against the snarling mob that pressured his triple-strength cordon, The Hatchet bellowed downhill to his acting captain, ‘Whatever the hitch, get those men on the march. Heads will roll if we’re faced with a riot.’
Fenced in by the chariot’s steel-clad sides, The Hatchet kicked his shed wrack of armour aside to allow his impatience more leg-room. He knew he looked like a fool ape in parade rig. He endured the ridiculous. Unlucky at wit, a puny laughing-stock at love, he held his command post in dedicate service to prosecute the arts of war. In that arena, his matchless ability raised his faults beyond all reproach. Daily, and never more than this moment, he bristled under the pious chokehold that owned the power to muzzle him.
‘Light forsake the blistering nuisance!’ For the entanglement on the wharf still struggled to sort itself out. ‘The cart’s a dead loss, either broken or stuck,’ he rapped in disgust. More, with his spearmen bogged in the press that challenged the overstrained cordon, The Hatchet seethed, ‘If those dimwits try marching those prisoners through here on foot, this mob will rip them to pieces before they ever get to the scaffold.’
The deferent captain of horse tipped his helm. ‘You’ll want us to wade in with lancers?’
‘No!’ Galled to a snap decision, The Hatchet commandeered two replacement spearmen, then barked at his veteran reinsman: ‘Drive down to the dock. I’ll shift the criminal bastards myself and be shut of this gross waste of time!’
The mounted captain’s stiff protest became trampled.
‘Bedamned to my dignity!’ Battle-axe jaw jutted under the gleaming, link strap of his helm, The Hatchet laughed. ‘Let’s see who dares to flout my personal pennant.’
He braced his short-legged frame on propped arms and bellowed for haste. A whip snap advanced his four-in-hand rig, harnessed in gilt to white horses. Equipped for turf and with spiked hubs for battle, the steel wheels scored gouges into the street cobbles. Over the vehicle’s rumbling noise, The Light’s Hatchet spouted his bale-fire displeasure to the breathless spearmen crammed in behind him.
‘You’ll kill any scum who gets in my way! I won’t have my conquest blunted for nitwits, or piss away the chance to stage o
ur assault past the Darkshiel River before Havish can bolster its routed defense.’
At least one alert officer at the dock-front grasped what his pension was worth: he spotted The Hatchet’s streamered blazon as the armoured chariot cleaved into the moil. His orders shellacked the reserve troop in time to muscle the unruly populace from the path of the team’s studded shoes and the razor-edged slice of spun wheels.
By then, the squad on the wharf had prodded their charges halfway to the landing. Both captives stumbled, their muffled eyes blind. The husky one thrashed in sullen resistance. His smaller henchman dragged heels and swayed, while two hassled dedicates wrestled him upright, forced to bear him on as his legs buckled.
‘Bootless cravens!’ The Hatchet’s sneer grew pronounced as his charioteer fought the horses and rig to a standstill beside the slap of green chop at the breakwater.
Subject to their commander’s rapacious regard, the tried dedicates scrambled and miserably failed to redress their untidy files. They could scarcely remedy the misfortune, that prisoners dragged towards their last gasp at the pyre rejected co-operation.
Scorched past tolerance, The Hatchet ordered both spearmen to prod the sorry business along. ‘I want those clowns roped inside this chariot without any further delay.’
While the reinsman struggled to hold the aggressive team with no groom’s assistance from the ground, the sensible captain assigned to the cordon ventured an impertinent protest.
‘Lordship, is that wise? Those men are said to bid fiends through dark practice. Surely given the risk, you might send for another transport.’
‘Nonsense!’ snapped The Hatchet. ‘This vehicle has seals against fiend bane, aplenty. Or is your faith misplaced? Does the ordained craftwork of a temple-blessed ward not frame an adequate protection?’
The cornered subordinate cleared his throat, red-faced under the implied blasphemy.
Since The Hatchet viewed sacrilege with contempt, his rankled frown softened to irony. ‘Your worry is groundless.’ His scorn denounced the pathetic display as the smaller fellow in chains was pried away from his crimped grip on a dockline. ‘If that mawkish pair possessed uncanny powers, do you think they’d be cringing in fear for their lives? Were they Shadow’s sorcerers, and not sniveling wrecks, they’d have done for their keepers and dismembered the ship that delivered them!’