Initiate's Trial

by Janny Wurts

  Collected except for an angry flush, the sisterhood’s messenger raked off her hood. ‘Canny man.’ Since his strained tension was not due to the remnant headache caused by his knocks at Arithon’s hand, she analyzed the searing humiliation inflicted by wounded pride. The Hatchet nursed the volcanic seethe of his fury, pent for a flash-point eruption.

  Cold stalker herself, the Prime’s emissary pricked him to measure that vulnerability. ‘Can you say where your rat has run to ground?’

  ‘I have theories.’ The Hatchet disengaged her, surged towards the barrel, and upended the bolt with his kill. Violence implied what his bland words did not, as he nailed the rodent’s gasping carcass next to its expired fellows. He was not sanguine since his crack patrols beat the forsaken brush and flushed nothing. ‘A few scraps of evidence suggest the direction to guide my armed hunt.’ But the furtive glance he shot her sidelong showed frustration ignited to interest.

  ‘I offer your coveted quarry’s location.’ A temptress’s honey masked over poison, the dangerous woman declared, ‘More, I’ve a talisman precisely tuned to hasten your epic requital.’

  ‘And the price?’ Not so easily bought despite his galled shame, The Hatchet folded short arms and stonewalled the gambit. ‘What oath of debt must be sworn for this gift? Do you think I’m a fool? I’ll nail my varmint without owing your Prime an unsavoury future service.’

  ‘No price, except what you already crave.’ Her gloved gesture encompassed the idle captains, equally strained as they sought to eavesdrop through the piled provisions. ‘Have these dedicate men enact the Light’s glory. Take your rightful conquest of Havish and destroy the Master of Shadow my order also wants dead.’

  ‘That grants you the chance for a private discussion.’ Fast as a ricochet, The Hatchet barked to his by-standing officers, ‘Stage a field exercise. Collapse the camp, form columns and have the men ready to march. Then wait on my word to advance or stand down.’ A viper’s move reclaimed the cross-bow, followed by the snapped epithet his kennel-men used to present a bitch in heat to the hound.

  The insulted messenger tightened her lips and gave chase as The Hatchet stumped out of the supply tent.

  Moments later, installed in discomfort on a leather seat inside his pavilion, she looked on while the snobbish equerry brought a filled basin and rinsed the stains of slaughter from his master’s hands.

  ‘Say your piece, woman.’ Booted feet propped on the adjacent seat, The Hatchet stewed away with snap-frozen impatience. ‘Spit out what’s needful. Be quick. Save your breath with regard to that talisman.’

  ‘Consider, before you dismiss my advantage.’ Young of face and form beneath her rider’s dress, the Koriani sister stared back with cool equanimity. ‘If the sorcerer moves on before you spring your trap, your browbeaten captains can’t help. Which way will you scramble them to press the chase?’

  ‘Waste my time brangling, I’ll toss you out.’ The Hatchet grabbed the proffered towel, whip-snapped the folds open, then shot upright and blotted his fingers. ‘I’ve no stomach for pandering or the idle moment to sit here being wooed by a whore’s pleas.’

  Taller, her slenderness frail before his contentious, broad shoulders, the enchantress rose also. She seized the basin before the servant whisked past. Just as provocative in her contempt, she nestled the filled vessel amid the markers arrayed on the map table. While The Hatchet stiffened to that brazen challenge, she attacked, ‘Pay close attention. I won’t demonstrate twice. You’re familiar with a primitive compass fashioned from a charged needle and cork?’

  The Hatchet’s annoyance mirrored the cobra, reared up with hood flared to strike.

  Koriathain, and arrogant, the sister unbuckled her message case. The sheaf of dispatches inside were blank, carried to mask the false bottom she removed to produce a silk packet. ‘This construct works on a similar principle but activates a bit differently.’

  Intrigued, never placated, The Hatchet eyed the bait she unwrapped with care taken to shield her bare touch: a round wafer of cork, affixed to a spiral of copper wire that caged a sliver of crystal. ‘I’ve not seen the fragment of common quartz that could be magnetized to seek a fugitive,’ he said in disgust.

  ‘Tuned, rather, and more.’ Hands masked from view, the Prime’s messenger set her little construct afloat. ‘This piece has been fashioned into a lure with an inducted emotional imprint that will draw your bastard sorcerer like a tame hawk to your wrist.’

  ‘You mentioned your scryers have unveiled his refuge?’ The Hatchet barged ahead for the gist. ‘Start there, before you defile this place with the heresy of unclean practice.’

  Her smile stayed hidden. His protest came too late. Her hook already had snagged his obsession. ‘The Spinner of Darkness hides in plain sight, did you know? He’s attached himself as an honest man in one of your dedicate war camps.’

  The natural rage that suffused The Hatchet’s jowled face served the sisterhood better than spellcraft. Before the cork whirled still with the pointed end quivering due east, the Light’s Lord Commander succumbed, wedded to the Prime’s purpose as a weapon to corner her quarry. ‘You will flush the Master of Shadow from the healer’s corps assigned to your eastern flank.’ By the close of the brief demonstration, the specialized shard of crystal changed hands, secured in a twist of silk.

  Lost to his bitter need for reprisal, The Hatchet snatched for the last straw of due caution. ‘What drives your Matriarch’s motivation? Why risk the punitive might of the temple to play my armed dedicates for her cause?’

  No answer arose from the vacated furniture. The secretive sister’s uncanny departure briefly darkened the command-tent door. She was a shadow, then a blurred memory, there and gone in the blink of an eye.

  The Hatchet shivered. He snapped impatient fingers, which brought his equerry running with his cleaned cloak. While his gold braid and polished accoutrements were fussed into place by the servant, he regrouped his intrepid poise. A task force quick-marched to investigate healers could do the campaign no harm. He would stash the cork and its damnable sliver of crystal on his person with no one the wiser. Best to seize the preemptive course of bold action, that the vile use of magic should never be necessary.

  A cold blast that fore-ran another black storm, the gust shrilled through the casement at Althain Tower. Its force riffled the pages of the opened books and lashed every unbound parchment into air-borne mayhem. Sethvir dropped his dipped pen and snatched after the fly-away leaf of his current manuscript.

  ‘The Hatchet will succumb to the Koriani overture!’ huffed the discorporate colleague just breezed in to rant. ‘Since the Light’s thrust is now the Prime’s jockeyed game-piece, her lair should be watched, mark my words.’

  Sethvir scrubbed spattered ink from his wrist with a sleeve cuff already spotted. ‘Too dangerous.’ His misty glance lifted. ‘Selidie’s latest design will see Arithon flushed into flight or cut down. We can’t stop this.’ Braced for explosive umbrage, and quicker to snuff out a windy lecture, Sethvir added, ‘I can’t sanction the risk. Our straits worsen if you became compromised, Luhaine.’

  More pages flapped. The winnowed quill spiralled upwards, and a leather-bound volume on mushrooms slapped shut to a miffed puff of dust. ‘Don’t claim Kharadmon hasn’t broached the nasty matter ahead of me!’

  ‘Neither has he.’ Sethvir laid his forearm across his salvaged sheet, which distractedly smeared the wet ink. ‘The Waystone’s been invoked. Selidie’s bound a choice circle of Seniors under her sole directive.’ Strategically placed at Torwent, Ostermere, Backwater, Barish, and East Bransing, those engaged talents were welded into one force through the great amethyst’s matrix. The Matriarch already worked to seal the elaborate ring of her construct to wreak the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s downfall in Lanshire.

  ‘I’ve seen the gist of her spider’s weaving!’ Luhaine raged in tempestuous retort. ‘The entanglement’s ugly. You’ve noticed the gambit that fashioned the bait?’ A manic whirlwind, he trampled on,
streaming ribbon bookmarks and candle-flames with uncharacteristic carelessness. ‘Damn the black hour that Ath’s adepts sent Elaira’s personal quartz back into the Prime’s ruthless hands!’

  ‘Grace would back their reason.’ Sethvir blinked, his dreamer’s gaze vapid as he bent to retrieve his strayed pen. ‘The wisdom that moved the White Brotherhood’s choice must unveil in due time.’

  Luhaine dismissed future vagaries, pitched to quibble over the tangible present. ‘The Prime surely knows I’ve upset the longevity binding she laid to secure her leash on Elaira.’

  Sethvir’s lips twitched amid the fleece beard overdue for a trim. ‘There was swearing,’ he allowed, brightened to wistful mirth. ‘Even a curse with your name on it.’

  Luhaine’s chill pause imparted disdain. ‘Do stop wasting time over trifles!’

  The Warden of Althain combed the spun-glass shock of hair from his temples. ‘You came to ask how the Prime intends to make use of the crystal’s contents?’

  ‘I should worry!’ Enfleshed, Luhaine would have wagged an admonishing finger. ‘That quartz holds the imprint of everything Elaira said or did until the hour it left her presence.’

  ‘Emotionally, yes,’ Sethvir agreed, deft enough to cap the conclusion. ‘The matrix still harbours the record. But at that point, Elaira’s love for Arithon was repressed by her oath, and yet unrequited.’

  ‘No less powerful for that!’ Luhaine said, gloomy. ‘Don’t pretend his Grace will not risk life itself to recover that vital memory. The sad fact he’s blocked his own recall on that count won’t stop his relentless pursuit.’

  ‘Best pray his own seal of protection stays intact!’ Sethvir warned, anguished for the cruel straits that yet forced that intimate record into Elaira’s safekeeping. A mate bonded through the primary attunement of his crown sanction made their union an unmalleable match. ‘If Arithon should wrest back his former awareness, we can’t prevent the Prime’s use of her as the matchless weapon to cripple his will.’

  ‘Worse,’ Luhaine barraged, undeterred, ‘don’t deny the filthy transgression! Even I felt the ripple that darkened the flux! Don’t pretend that yon meddling witch sent to Lanshire didn’t spin secretive wards to mask The Hatchet’s heretical talisman from the True Sect diviners.’

  ‘Quite.’ Sethvir sighed. ‘Since we can’t intervene, naught’s left but to wait for Prince Arithon’s fate to unfold.’

  ‘And everyone’s swallowed that passive approach?’ Luhaine’s shrill tirade breezed onwards, incensed. ‘Lysaer’s cursed balance hangs on by a thread. Surely Asandir’s damnable oath should have made Kharadmon quarrel­some!’

  Sethvir glanced away. ‘I’ve kept him too busy. He doesn’t yet know,’ he confessed with evasive reluctance. ‘We have more than Arithon’s plight in distress. Traithe required help to evade an examiner, and Kharadmon’s intervention was fastest. Asandir’s on the crisis with Verrain at Meth Isle, and you might better serve the Fellowship’s need by sorting the tangle that threatens Davien.’

  That desperate appeal gave Luhaine pause. ‘The dragon who’s bound him has settled to hibernate? Ath above, he’s incarnate!’ Once Seshkrozchiel cocooned herself into stone, her dreamless sleep might span centuries. ‘Davien cannot survive locked in stasis so long!’

  ‘He won’t unless he repeats his transition as a discorporate.’ Sethvir’s doleful regard surveyed his mussed sheet of manuscript. ‘You’ve noted the problem. We haven’t much time. Your careful diplomacy is Davien’s best hope. Please lend your skilled effort? Convince the dragon it’s needful to release him, or contrive him a living alternative.’

  ‘I’ll treat with Seshkrozchiel. Just don’t feed me the pretentious pap you’re not worried,’ Luhaine huffed in parting. ‘I saw your last line before you smeared the ink. The words you had written to archive this mess were hopelessly incoherent.’

  Sethvir blinked. Caught red-handed, he wiped his damp palms, sanded out the marred text, and dipped his mussed quill. He restored his distraught lines, moved to grim relief. He had not been browbeaten to reveal the grand upset Prime Selidie held in reserve: that her bid to shatter the compact also hounded Lysaer’s cursed weakness. Once in a millennium, Althain’s Warden managed to blindside Asandir’s eagle eye. Yet to outfox Luhaine’s lugubrious nature this once posed no victory at all, but instead gave rise to further alarm in the slipstream rush towards calamity.

  The morning The Hatchet’s surprise patrol descended to flush the Spinner of Darkness began no differently in the east-flank camp. Through daybreak’s slant shadows and pallid spring sun, the roar from the drill field slammed the rancid air trapped beneath the cook tent’s greased canvas. The hungry men eating scarcely looked up, inured to the rough exercises staged daily to curb the excesses of idle troops.

  The Light’s outlying companies were bored, marched weeks on end through the desolate barrens that bounded the Scarpdale waste. Supply wagons mired in the slurry of mud, where melt-water puddled the treacherous gullies masked under clumped brush, and the hidden quagmires lay quilted over in virid mosses. The snail’s pace bred fractious discontent and crapulous fights.

  Blunt contusions replaced injuries from enemy snares, just as damaging to flesh and bone and as hard on the troop’s corps of healers. Overworked as the rest by the relentless grind, the small, dark-haired fellow with the sensitive hands broke his bread, astraddle a bench to one side of the group seated at the main trestle. He ate in silence, while the blowsy trollop who served plates swished her skirt past his leg in saucy invitation.

  Too shy to glance up, he murmured a friendly rebuff. She grinned and flounced off through the boisterous talk from the past night’s patrol, mingled with the swirled smoke from the bread ovens.

  ‘We flushed that black horse that runs free on the heath.’ The comment hung while the stout sergeant shoveled a link of hard sausage into his mouth.

  The cook’s boy’s eager soprano chimed in. ‘The stallion the master of horse staked his bollocks that no one can catch?’

  ‘He’s lost pay on the matter,’ filled in a wolfish scout, paused between picking his teeth. ‘Excused his flat wallet and salved his pride with a curse on the brute’s wild spirit.’

  While the cook’s bellow maligned someone’s squire for a pumice filched to sharpen an officer’s sword, a lanky dedicate with a lantern jaw sidled up to cadge the warm dish-water for his neglected shave.

  ‘Likely escaped from some rich bloke’s paddock,’ he dismissed, head rolled sidewards to lather his neck. ‘Even matted with burrs, can’t deny the fine breeding.’

  An idle bone-setter lent wicked spin to the gossip. ‘The groom who got kicked swears it’s got a ghost eye. Claimed the uncanny creature stole mares from the picket line without leaving a track.’

  A detractor scoffed outright. Through the distanced blare of an officer’s horn, another scout ventured, ‘Perhaps it’s the shape-shifted minion of Shadow we’re wasting ourselves trying to chase. Why not stake out archers? An arrow from cover would prove whether or not the fell creature’s an apparition.’

  The sharp-eyed man shaving wiped his scummed knife and prodded the silent bench-sitter, frowning. ‘What do you think, fellow? Is that horse a Shadow-sent demon?’

  ‘No.’ The dark-haired healer finished his buttered crust, then ventured in mild reproach, ‘The animal’s feral, and simply hungry.’

  ‘What?’ said the tracker’s scout, startled to sarcasm. ‘You’ve bested my calling and crept close enough to count the beast’s staring ribs?’

  ‘Likely he has.’ The gaunt surgeon wiped his mouth, and defended, ‘Past question that one spends enough time out foraging in the deep thickets.’

  ‘The best root-stock for remedies grows in the shade.’ A touch red in the face as the butt of rough laughter, the little man rose to his feet. He glanced in apology to the chap shaving and dropped his soiled plate in the wash-pan.

  To the scout, who still stared, the chief surgeon suggested, ‘For the sake of your he
alth, watch your step, not that horse, while you’re out on patrol.’

  The wisecrack dismissal of that sound advice was cut short by a grizzled veteran. ‘Haven’t yet seen a spring trap rip up a man’s guts? Then don’t slang the blighter stuck with the needle, stitching you up as a casualty.’

  The chaffed scout retorted. Through jocular noise and the screen of blown smoke, the evasive eye-witness slipped from the cook tent.

  Grown accustomed to the solitary rambles that replenished the healer’s herb stores, the camp sentries passed Arithon through their lines without question. Cued by his shoulder-slung satchel and the spiked mattock for harvesting plant stock, they waved him on his way without care that he wore no Sunwheel insignia. His issue scarlet cloak stayed behind, too likely to fray on the briar.

  The drab leathers and dun wool jacket he favored blended into the scrub. Arithon required no furtive play of Shadow to vanish from casual sight. Scarpdale’s gravel soil resisted tracks, except in the gullies, bogged with black mud, where the game trails ran tangled through thickets of thorn and dense, greening willows mottled in sunlight.

  The other hoofed fugitive lurked in the same cover, too sly to be overtaken. But the plight of the errant black horse could be read from the prints left pocked in the puddles. Arithon encountered the ripped shoots of grass uprooted by voracious grazing. The filched caches of oats he sometimes laid out for the animal were always accepted.

  He carried no such token kindness today, having drawn unwelcome eyes and a tracker’s meddlesome interest.

  Nor did this secluded gulch shelter the elusive runaway. No flicker of night black hide drank the sun: only the flit of small birds and two crows, raucously vexed by a ruffled hawk, perched a stone’s throw from their nest site. Arithon stripped off his boots, hung the slip-knotted laces over his neck, and wended his way through the marshy pools. He parted the streamered fronds, newly stitched with their delicate peridot leaves. The sapling trunks yielded medicinal bark valued for drawing down fever. If the routine patrol detected his activity inbound from their sweep, any veteran dedicate knew at first hand: sound leather would crack, soaked too often.