by Janny Wurts
Tarens shivered, often hazed by the invasive tramp of armed troops in a place where no townsmen had trespassed for centuries. By day, his pulse throbbed to the thunder of drums that beat out the pace for the True Sect advance. He sensed the crack of silk pennons on the wind, and ached for the friend who ran, haplessly chased down the gauntlet as the gap narrowed between opposed factions. The flux keened to the advance of King Gestry’s war band, pressed on forced march to wrest back the desperate hope of an intervention. They pushed from the west, singing to raise their defiant courage against the agonized certainty of the life-blood soon to be spilled. Death waited at the north shore of Lithmarin. Tarens’s crude instinct could not predict when the unequal battle would become joined. The flux currents transmitted their imprint by intensity, with little regard for distance. The deflections unleashed by the line of advance could be far off or nearly on top of him.
King Gestry’s doomed stand might come too late. Or worse, engage and fail to hold out long enough for the sacrifice to spare Arithon’s life. As haplessly caught in the same deadly mesh, three clanborn youngsters determined past sense to act in behalf of their threatened crown prince.
Tarens tagged their back trail without mercy, thwarted by their insolent, trail-wise expertise, and hungry again for the pressure that shortened the time he needed to forage. Worn lean from the fortnight spent in hard chase, he cat-footed into a shady hollow curtained in the limpid streamers of sapling willows. The dimple left by a dried vernal pool showed a grey carpet of leaf mould, recently rumpled. Warned by that unweathered scatter of brown, Tarens paused.
His smile was as crooked as the scar on his disfigured nose. Jieret’s distinctive experience marked the patch of turned leaves and disclosed the tell-tale signature of a laid trap. Tarens smothered his laughter. Fondly mindful of his nephews’ lively antics, and the whispered conspiracies that had led to furtive fingers unbuckling harness straps, he took stock. Scratched at the dandelion growth of the beard he had not dulled his steel to keep shaved, until untoward stillness let him confirm the taut pocket of a nearby, watchful presence. Since the young rogues aimed to mock his demise, he chose on wry impulse to speed things along. He unsheathed the broadsword filched as a prize from The Hatchet’s stolen chariot. Then he propped the bare blade against a handy tree and stepped four-square into the noose.
Rathain’s clan children practiced their forefathers’ crafts with particular vengeance. The trigger twig snapped at first touch underfoot. The sprung bough whooshed upright, freed of the deadfall fashioned as counter-weight. The noose whumped tight and yanked Tarens upside down with a force that knocked out his wind. Dangled in a slow spin, he waited, his loose jerkin rucked to his chin, while the rushed blood suffused his face and darkened his eyesight.
The black moment of faintness dissolved into sparkles, then melted into the aliveness of vision: Sight showed him Sunwheel banners and blood, and voices raised in praise of the avatar’s glory to call down the destruction of Shadow. The destined moment approached: a battle of levin bolts and cruel steel, where the dying imprinted their final agony into the spring-tide flux. Which assault to wrenched senses hurt far too much, as violence unfurled blight and dissonance through a seasonal tapestry spun only for joyous renewal. There was Light and bleak death, and light that was life, until the appalling dichotomy threatened to rend the gauze fabric of reason.
Tarens’s stressed outcry spluttered through the splash of cold water, hurled into his face. Another voice, stridently petulant, demanded, ‘Iyat-thos, why are you tracking us?’
His vision cleared. Shaking, consumed with unnatural dread that the Sunwheel advance was in fact dreadfully close, Tarens met the blunt glare of the speaker, rendered upside down, and revolved into view by the spin of the rope. The eyes were hazel, set in a square-cut, tanned face, and contentious beneath the sleeked-back roots of a walnut braid, tinged to red glints in full sunshine. Esfand s’Valerient stood with arms folded, the leather-wrapped hilt of a shoulder-slung sword disregarded in favour of a cut pole fashioned as a crude javelin.
Tarens gave him the rebuff in clan dialect. ‘I grant your insolence no civil standing.’
A prod dug his side from another hacked stick. The view turned, replaced by Khadrien’s contemptuous disdain, dusted with freckles beneath foxy tangles of hair. ‘You cannot lay claim to our people’s courtesy. Your accent is town-born.’
In suspension, not helpless, Tarens twirled about, surveyed last by Siantra, her own seal braid repressively neat, with fey eyes, deep-set in her triangular face, the turbulent grey of a storm-cloud. Her rapt interest pierced beyond skin and bone. Surely talent perceived the left mark Jieret’s touch had impressed on his spirit, since she pronounced unequivocally, ‘Nonetheless, he is one of us.’ Against Esfand’s hissed protest, her rebuke was granite. ‘Cut him down. He won’t run, at my word.’
Tarens’s view revolved to the patched green of the willow grove, while instinct spoke before reason. ‘For Sidir’s descendant, no need to stand surety.’
Come full circle, Esfand’s earnest features crimped into a frown. ‘Who are you? No one has pronounced her ancestral name that way for over two centuries.’
Steel spoke: a knife blade, unsheathed from behind. Esfand shouted, too late. Khadrien’s hasty slash severed the rope and dropped their victim in a head first tumble.
Tarens caught himself on his hands, broke a fall meant to damage his neck, and flipped himself upright. Through fair hair tangled with musty leaves and senses upended by vertigo, he encountered the sharpened end of the stick, leveled at his throat by the shiftless braggart. ‘Any of mine would be thrashed like a child.’
Abrasive with bravado to prove himself, Khadrien spat, ‘Townsman, you trespass!’
The rustle of Siantra’s outraged advance drew more steel and thrust in between. ‘I’ll speak for the burden of my friend’s discourtesy!’ To Esfand’s appalled shock, against Khadrien’s glower, she championed the pretentious stranger. ‘Whatever this man tells you, however outrageous his claim, for honour’s sake we must listen! True Sight has revealed him. His aura can’t lie!’
Esfand’s sturdy features went white. ‘Siantra, what are you saying?’
But Tarens elbowed her protection aside. ‘Stop quibbling! We haven’t time. My charge matches yours: to see your liege clear of the True Sect’s invasion and get him safely away to Rathain.’
‘This liegeman does have the right!’ Siantra insisted, fast enough to quash further objection.
‘We’ll talk on the move,’ Tarens insisted, then reddened three faces by knowing precisely how to free the slip-knot that fastened his ankle. He hurled the rope towards Khadrien’s chest, which forced the poised stick sidewards to field the surprise without catching the punitive lash of the follow-through.
When the crofter spun to retrieve his stashed weapon, he all but collided with Esfand, who snatched up the sword’s grip ahead of him.
The youngster offered the weapon hilt first and conceded with striking aplomb, ‘Who taught you the trap?’
Tarens burst into laughter. ‘The man who perfected it. Your people knew him as Earl Jieret s’Valerient. But we have to move, or else forfeit the chance to hear me explain.’
‘He’s serious,’ Siantra broke in, sharply urgent. ‘Listen!’ In fact, the sweet trills of the song-birds had faltered. The rustle of wind did not overwrite silence, but masked a bass rumble, ominous as the growl of an on-coming storm through the sultry back-drop of greenery.
‘That isn’t thunder,’ said Esfand, alarmed. ‘Drop it now, Khadrien. We have to run!’
Survival eclipsed the last, stubborn argument. The measured boom of the drums from the open warned of the True Sect’s on-coming advance. Too soon, too exposed, and dreadfully vulnerable, the small party of four faced the outbreak of war, with the pitched battle almost on top of them.
Dakar stood within line of sight at the forefront of the king’s war band. A shuddering bundle of nerves bathed in sweat, he shiel
ded his eyes against the barrage of low, morning sun that bedazzled his vision. Before him, the massed host of the Sunwheel invaders shimmered against the bare scarp, a jacquard weave in thread-silver and gilt that seethed forward in lockstep formation. The blare of an officer’s horn signalled the dedicate troops to close ranks. The brass notes drilled into his ears like steel bodkins. An initiate mage should be far removed from this field, given a feather-wit’s measure of sense.
But the royal war-captain’s challenge was just: the prophet who incited the Crown of Havish to attack at all costs should prove out his conviction beneath the king’s banner.
‘Dharkaron Avenger’s black bollocks take honour!’ Since Dakar could not get drunk, he hoped Sethvir was listening; more fervently, he wished the virulent sting of his saddle-sores and the sick flutter of nausea upon the absent person of Asandir. ‘Once folly, twice fatal, you Sorcerers insisted throughout my apprenticeship.’ The spellbinder had taken the arrow for Arithon before: stepped into harm’s way and nearly perished of the Koriani binding wrought to ensure a fatality. After that narrow brush, today’s bid for death ran beyond suicidal. Front and centre, King Gestry’s forces stared down the maw of wholesale immolation.
‘Regrets?’ snapped a familiarly sarcastic voice, arrived on horseback beside him. ‘You look faint of heart. Do you need to be propped upright before you slide from the saddle?’
Dakar shrugged off the brusque gibe. ‘Speak for yourself. Only rank ignorance measures a man by appearances.’
Gestry’s war-captain grunted. ‘You look green enough to heave up your breakfast. No offence, if I hedge my bet.’
Dakar swallowed. He was in fact wrung to hollow distress because he had dared the unthinkable, outfaced by the horrific prospect of slaughter: dosed himself with narcotic tienelle leaves to augment his prescient faculties. For his nightmare forecast had come to pass: Lysaer’s personal banner streamed over the white-and-gold Sunwheel of the religion. The day would be ruled by Desh-thiere’s curse in the language of fire and blood.
Positioned as advisor at the High King’s left hand, the spellbinder shouldered his reluctant role. Eyes squeezed shut, senses reeled by the scents of hot horseflesh and oiled steel, and the sour sweat of his overcranked nerves, he absorbed the disturbance as the blunt war-captain reined his mount into stride on his Grace’s opposite side. To the man’s acid roil of distemper, Dakar said, emphatic, ‘You must call the charge. Now. We have no other option but failure. It’s too late to retreat.’
‘Let them come to us,’ the war-captain rebutted, annoyed to abandon surprise and commit his troops over a rise that lent even the semblance of minor advantage. ‘What difference over a handful of minutes? Our losses already are fated.’
Dakar wrestled the drowning surge of stifled apprehension and fear, not his own, but the men’s, clamped under discipline as the stilled foot-troops awaited in ranked formation. To the war-captain’s molten seethe of reluctance, he said, ‘The order’s a tactical necessity, required as a diversion.’ Scarcely able to think, Dakar bludgeoned his scattered wits to explain, ‘Lysaer’s entanglement with Desh-thiere’s curse is infallible as a weathercock. He has pin-pointed Arithon’s flight. The shift in the flux currents lets me extrapolate the near range of future probabilities. If you don’t press the shock of engagement immediately, the Sunwheel light horse on the eastern flank will be ordered to move on a sighted disturbance. They are within reach to run Arithon down. Our strike from this vantage will draw Lysaer’s attention, we hope, long enough for delay.’
The war-captain bit back his fierce despair. Mail jingled against the dull boom of the drums as he dismounted and knelt at the feet of his High King. ‘My royal liege, only at your command.’
And as generations of greatness before him, Gestry Teirient’s’Lornmein of Havish rose to the bleak hour and assumed the harsh weight of his crown. ‘Sound the charge,’ he affirmed, braced to challenge the disastrous fury of Desh-thiere’s curse.
The war-captain rose, fist to heart, then departed to relay the order with lips clamped against bitter protest. Through the whispered cloth flap of the blazoned standard, the young man attuned to the weal of Havish softly summoned his page. The boy came, obedient, and silently unlaced and removed his liege’s leather bracers. Laid bare on the wrists of a king whose dearest thrill once had been a common armourer’s work in the forge, the gold bracelets gleamed, inset with matched rubies. The paired jewels served as master keys to the smaller gems in the state collar. Bestowed upon coronation, the stones had been mined on the far world beyond West Gate, cut and endowed by Paravian artisans to invoke the intent of the royal who defended the land.
A rustle of impetuous movement and the muted scrape of steel marked the keen stir of anticipation, as the war-captain’s relayed directive stiffened the ranks poised on either side.
Dakar opened his eyes. He propped his queasy frame in the saddle, ripped open in spirit and bled beyond remedy, while around him what seemed the whole world came undone. As though set into motion by the cast of Dharkaron Avenger’s Black Spear, the surge came without horn-calls. The signal that consigned the brave to the Light’s slaughter stayed silent: a brief, scarlet flash of fluttered cloth as the standard-bearer answered the hour’s exigency and dipped the crown’s hawk blazon into a left-to-right flourish.
The immediate surrounds shuddered and heaved as the war bands of Havish burst through the bundled broom breastworks uselessly placed for concealment. Their forward rush to engage the enemy roused a shout from the throats of the Light’s faithful. The noise resounded to the horizon, the voice of the vast northern host like the roaring thrash of a storm sea. Through the deluge of noise, the war-captain sent off a fast runner to dispatch his best troop of light horsemen to the right flank. Their task, tantamount to a suicide charge, must head off or engage any dedicates set after Prince Arithon’s heels.
Their valiant intervention could not be enough, should the centre lines crumple too soon. At the forefront, where resistance meant death, the battle converged towards engagement.
One breath before the rending collision of armoured flesh and edged steel, ahead of the instant when the fraught shouts through the clangour shredded to soprano screams from the maimed, Dakar gripped his mage-sighted focus with adamant strength. He locked down his boundaries, altogether aware that Arithon’s plight could no longer be saved by arcane observation. In contrary fact, the fury of Lysaer’s cursed madness posed a seer’s gift the most grave liability. Against unruly senses and buckling stress, Dakar aligned his augmented talent to assay the untried sovereign beside him.
Gestry sat his grey horse with straight bearing, his horseman’s slit byrnie belted beneath the scarlet surcoat bearing the crown’s hawk cartouche. The fist closed on his destrier’s reins stayed rock steady. Bare-headed, at first glance boyishly casual with his conical helm hooked by the strap to his pommel, he presented the image of self-possessed calm under pressure.
But a glacial pallor tensioned his profile. Beneath the battered gold circlet borne by generations of s’Lornmein forebears, his youthful features had been reforged under the fires of sovereign might. The altered perceptions begun by the crown seat’s attuned affinity to the elements intensified once the raw powers became invoked. The man consecrated as the land’s living conduit now wore flesh and bone as though smelted into refinement. His last ounce of immature flesh lay stripped. As though a frantic vitality torched him from within, his pale blue eyes shone fever brilliant. From hollowed cheeks, to clean limbs pared down to muscle and sinew, Gestry assumed the carved grace of a master-worked sculpture. That unearthly stature, refined day by day, endowed him with a presence that near stopped the breath to behold, until the drape of the clothes on his form seemed a clumsy disruption of harmony. The shell talismans tied for luck to his belt by his littlest sister, and the favourite knife made through the armouror’s tutelage now seemed the care-worn artifacts from a childhood cherished by somebody else.
A month since t
he invocation at Fiaduwynne, when the King’s Grace had raised the Paravian focus and gathered the flux to prepotency with intent to ward the free wilds of Ghent and Carithwyr. The abrupt change in plan to restage for attack kept those volatile forces bound in reserve. Throughout the march, the uncanny charge built, a wound spring held compressed by barehanded will. A feat royal character was fit to endure, but not without cost to the bearer.
Dakar mapped the heightened course of the strain ingrained in live flesh like a water-mark. As the human channel for the land’s power, wound in check week upon week, Gestry had to be strictly reminded to eat. Under constant, pent pressure, his restless nights passed nearly sleepless. The least sound in his ears would ring painfully loud, while the impact of daylight flared hurtfully bright and dazzled his sight into shimmers and rainbows. He moved as a creature with one foot past the veil, strung up and suspended. The dichotomy he suffered estranged him from the comforts of commonplace fellowship.
Kings who invoked the unbridled might of crown power were, none of them, destined for long reigns. Dakar had been an indifferent historian. But longevity and exposure to Althain Tower’s archives confirmed that no heir within living memory had withstood such a trial. The inked lines of the ancient record endured: near ten centuries ago, through the bitter effort to stay the Mistwraith’s incursion at Earle, manuscripts detailed the graphic price bought in bone and blood by the royal lineages. Demand had expended the pool of available heirs until the choice of succession devolved to the handful of survivors: then that irreplaceable heritage had been brought to the brink of extinction by murder under the knives of revolt.