by Janny Wurts
Summer 5925
Impact
Tarens roused to a toe in his back, jabbed through the side of his tent. Stiff muscles unravelled by yesterday’s drill complained as he stirred and rolled over. He groaned, eyes opened to black, with dawn’s filtered gloom nowhere in evidence. “I’m not on the night roster, curse you!”
“Tethos!” The urgent whisper was Dakar’s. “Move your bumpkin’s hide, damn you! Get up!”
The following kick snagged only canvas, while the false name attached to his current position caught up with his laggard faculties. Tarens shoved to his knees, grumbling. Any day, in the misery of war-bond service, he felt worse than the times he had drawn the short straw for milking. Earl Jieret’s fickle gift of instant alertness deserted him, utterly, unless he slept under the stars. Stumbled upright, head bent beneath the low ridge-pole, he yawned and scratched at yesterday’s bruise on his chest.
Dakar’s urgency nattered on without respite. “Tethos, you need to let us in, now!”
For of course, the entry was laced shut, a deterrent against the camp’s pilfering thieves with his father assigned on patrol. Tarens fumbled through the stifling darkness, and clumsily untied the knots.
Dakar shoved inside with a second, slight figure braced upright against his shoulder. “Don’t brighten a light,” he snapped, puffing. “I’ve come for shelter in a crisis.”
The flare of someone’s passing torch cut off as the canvas slapped shut at the Mad Prophet’s heels. Snapped fully alert, the big crofter noticed the stricken figure Dakar supported was female.
“Elaira? She’s hurt!” Shocked, Tarens cleared the pair’s blundering passage past his vacated cot in cramped quarters. Wise precaution, the spellbinder chose to move blind before use of mage-sight that might flag the temple’s diviners.
“She’s unharmed,” Dakar qualified, groping until he bashed into the camp chair. “It’s the straits of Arithon’s capture afflicting her.”
“They are bleeding him,” gasped Elaira in hoarse distress, embarrassed her weakness required male strength to assist her into the seat.
“What?” Tarens clasped her clammy hands, horrified. “Why inflict such a cruelty?”
Dakar found the filled pitcher beside the wash-basin, soaked his cuff, and knelt to bathe Elaira’s forehead. “The filthy tactic is practised by necromancers to weaken initiate mage talent.”
Steadied by the cool water, Elaira stiffened her boundaries and recouped the presence to qualify. “In this case, Koriathain are wielding the knife to deplete him before he’s surrendered for execution. Prime Lirenda’s afraid of him.” Shocked by a shudder from head to foot, Elaira mustered the rags of her courage. “As Matriarch, she won’t jeopardize the order’s resources or burden herself with the risk of putting his Grace to death under the order’s aegis. Her dark bargain’s been struck with the True Sect priests in trade for Arithon’s person. His formal demise as the Spinner of Darkness wins the Light’s sanctioned blessing for the sisterhood and grants the High Temple’s endorsement to practise arcana under the Law of the Canon.”
The bitter pause stretched, laced by the rancid taint of greased mail, and the pungent bite of the lye soap used to kill lice on campaign. While the kindly crofter choked back futile anguish, the fat, worldly spellbinder strangled his grief and made a lame stab at diplomacy.
“What can we achieve at this pass, pinned under surveillance by temple diviners?” Too wise to lie outright, Dakar wielded reason to dodge the admission they faced a lost cause. “Surrounded by dedicates three thousand strong, in the clinch of The Hatchet’s armed war host, an intervention gets all of us killed without saving your best beloved.”
The camp chair creaked to Elaira’s stiffened affront. “You speak as if you think Arithon’s helpless, no matter how often you’ve witnessed his ferocious tenacity.” Angry enough to spit nails, she continued, “Doomed or not, he doesn’t cave in to defeat! Against a dire set-back, even drained white by the Grey Kralovir, you’ll remember, he kept on fighting. The point’s never been about what we might do. I came here to follow his opening move and back up his wild-card strategy.”
Merciful darkness hid Dakar’s shamed flush and Tarens’s stricken dismay. Language did not exist, then or anywhere, to soften the impact of abject despair. Amid staring disaster, the enchantress’s refined intuition had yet to grasp the vile scope of the new Prime Matriarch’s crowning play. The double-blind coup of a True Sect execution made Arithon’s plight the irresistible bait for Elaira to reveal herself. The diabolical stroke freed the Koriathain for their vengeful move to enforce Elaira’s defiance of her sworn oath.
“The Fellowship Sorcerers can’t move to defend you, or any of us, given our stake in Arithon’s interests.” The Mad Prophet braced for her blistering argument, no matter the hour was past to plead for sensible precautions.
Debate was useless, in any case. The blared fanfare of the temple’s horns split the night, proof that the True Sect’s coveted prize was delivered alive for Canon retribution.
Torchlight flared without, to more shouting commotion as the war camp seethed awake. Dedicates rousted out of their blankets raised cheers, electrified by the announcement that the Master of Shadow was taken into True Sect custody. Someone jangled the cook-shack bell, surrounded by whooping companions. Chorused voices chanted pious slogans, while the priests gathered for the pre-dawn devotion burst into ecstatic song.
Dakar shut his eyes, devastated. The clammy chill of prophetic foresight confirmed what he already knew: the Light’s triumphant, staged slaughter was going to happen at noon.
Mail scraped against a sheathed weapon, without. Then a flared torch cast a man’s grotesque shadow across the tent canvas. Too quick for response, the loose flap swept open. Tarens’s father shouldered inside, returned early from scheduled patrol. The disastrous influx of light from behind caught the irregular visitors in huddled conspiracy.
Dakar’s dissembling wits seized charge first. He clapped his hands over his middle and folded with a soulful moan.
“Bad food,” quipped Elaira, snatching his lead. Her gaze lifted in touching distress, she appealed to the family penchant for kindness. “Poor fellow. His billet lies next to the armoury. The constant clangour would drive a man mad who wasn’t doubled with gripe. Would you mind? If he might stay here in peaceful quiet, I’ll do my part looking after him.”
“By all means.” The bemused veteran raised his eyebrows, then winked, satisfied the flimsy story would pass amid the massive upheaval. “Belike he’ll get over his ailment the quicker without the camp healer’s putrid decoctions.”
His son received a less sympathetic appraisal under a keen eye that missed nothing. “Get dressed. Morning field drills are cancelled. That leaves you a little time with your friends before being called up for duty. The Hatchet’s dispatched the bursars under priority to appropriate timber. Haulage from the sawyers will demand at least eight pairs of oxen and a sober teamster to yoke them in harness. We’re tasked with erecting a scaffold before midday’s execution, but the work can’t begin until after the lumber’s delivered.”
Outside, the deep bray of horns resounded, drowning the drums sprung up in the tumult. Deafening noise seized the trembling air, split by the bugle of the parade trumpets and shrill blasts from the officers’ whistles, blaring for order. Conversation defeated, the battle-worn father wrapped his burly son in a crushing embrace. He delivered his last exhortation into Tarens’s ear. “Whatever frightful subversion you’re planning, Light’s grace, I beg you, don’t get yourselves caught! I’ll cover for your friends’ presence. Abet your desertion, if you must flee. Just don’t make me bear your ruin by Canon writ at the hands of the Sunwheel priests.”
The blast of the temple horns at Daenfal called the faithful to witness the imminent demise of the Spinner of Darkness. The ominous, deep note resounded four times every hour. Which desolate thrum of vibration set an ache to the bone, even in the stone cell below-ground where Arithon lay
incarcerated.
There also, Vivet languished in duress, slumped behind a locked door in the bare, vaulted ward-room tucked under the magistrate’s hall. Several tallow candles burned in the fixed metal wall sconces, caged in mesh against sabotage. The bench underneath her being too heavy to lift, she possessed nothing to ignite, beyond her own clothing.
The perfidious sisterhood had cast her off, and bound her fate over to temple authority at the High Examiner’s demand. The act was a charade, played on the groundless pretext of sating the priesthood’s suspicion of Valien’s paternity.
“Do as you wish with the mother, meantime. Our order won’t question your judgement.” The summary dismissal carried down the outside corridor as the Koriani peeress departed, her conclusion faded to echoes beyond the iron-strapped door. “Her child’s your surety of compliance. We ask only that you keep them separate until the day’s business is settled.”
Vivet swallowed, afraid. Too late, beyond salvage, she sweated over the unforeseen quandary that the order’s interests had discarded her service. As though she posed a venal embarrassment, her anguished pleas on Valien’s behalf had received stonewalled silence and furtive glances. Reference to her future confounded by broken-off snatches of hushed conversation, she found herself shackled under Canon Law for ice-blooded, tidy convenience.
The High Examiner’s unnerving trial must be endured as a matter of form. A daunting formality, but surely no threat. Due process would prove her boy’s blameless birth. The truth lay beyond question. Valien was not Arithon’s issue.
Yet no justified line of consolation restored Vivet’s quietude. Empathy frayed the illusion of comfort, immured within sight of the prisoner who languished insensate behind a barred grille.
Arithon lay sprawled, cuffed in chains, his limp form grimed with the suds from the gutter, wicked into his clothing and hair. Blood seeped with sullen persistence through the sodden bandage dressing his wrist. The right palm and fingers scraped raw from his uncontrolled slide down the rope seemed too frail, lifelessly robbed of the vibrant dexterity that had wrought artful melody on the lyranthe. The slack features of witless unconsciousness decried the charge of criminal sorcery. Dread haunted Vivet with vengeful persistence, that the man who had sacrificed all to stand by her might not recoup his wily awareness. Surely not in time to forestall his demise on the scaffold. His turned head exposed his watered-milk pallor, the parted lashes of his bruised lids still as death over dulled, vacant eyes.
“Arithon. Please! You need to wake up!”
If he heard, her appeal aroused no response. Only the use of his actual name forced the bitter acknowledgement of his integrity.
Regret hitched Vivet’s breath. Ripped to the quick by his shocking helplessness, she beheld the gravity of her mistake. Arithon’s treatment of her belied every evil ascribed to him by the religion. She had blinded herself in denial for years, only to stare down the ruin engendered by her betrayal. Escape at this pass lay beyond reach, an irreversible defeat under her dearth of resources.
Vivet shut her eyes upon welling tears, wrenched by sobs that threatened to tear her in pieces. “By Teeah’s fair covenant, what have I done?”
Grated footsteps in the outer corridor interrupted her pang of conscience. Startled to her feet, Vivet whirled as the key sprung the lock and the door moaned open on strapped-iron hinges. Four armed dedicates entered, followed by a robed priest with pink skin and gentle blue eyes. He regarded her with kindly concern written across his scrubbed features.
“My dear, for your own sake, mind your careless tongue. The supplicant in your situation ought not to denounce our true faith. In particular, under the unwise presumption that nobody else might be listening.”
Vivet sat on the bench, the starch pummelled out of her. Chilled fingers clamped in her skirt to disguise her trembling, she said carefully, “Teeah’s covenant underwrites the elders’ law, by which every village in Ettin is governed. The archive predates the blessed avatar who founded your Canon. How does a code that serves justice threaten your upright practice of the Light’s principles?”
The priest sighed. “That point begs the question, certainly, yes? Fires, they say, never burn without smoke. After all, your debased little shamans’ nest came to harbour the Spinner of Darkness. Mercy on you, I’m sorry. Prepare yourself.”
His regretful gesture signalled the dedicates, who closed in and seized her. “My daughter, you need not fear the presence of grace. For the sake of your unsullied salvation, your case calls for the High Examiner’s scrutiny.”
The panicked fight in her crushed by main strength, the men dragged Vivet bodily upright. They secured her ankles with a leather strap. Buckled cuffs on her wrists, and threaded an overhead rope, then strung her on tiptoe from an iron ring-bolt, as if she were a dangerous criminal.
Vivet’s frightened cries shattered off the close stone. Tearful pleading evoked only the priest’s passive sympathy. Whether Arithon registered her hoarse distress, his own plight forestalled chance of rescue. If the dedicates cared, their dutiful poise stayed unmoved.
The examiner swept in as the knots were made fast. The men finished their task and melted from his path as though his snowy vestments packed a lethal poison. The priest stood aside also, hands clasped in his sleeves, posted for the duration.
Vivet’s terror redoubled. Dread jerked her backwards against the restraints like an animal ear-marked for slaughter. Pent breath left her lungs in a reflexive scream as she thrashed in panic to evade the ringed hands reaching to frame her face.
“Hold still!” The examiner fisted two handfuls of her auburn hair, his remorseless hold pinning her struggle until his clamped grip boxed her temples.
His fixed gaze trapped hers. Powerless as a mesmerized hare, she could not blink to break his locked stare. One split second, her scalp felt licked by the burning agony of molten flame. Then his honed talent bored into her forehead, trampled down privacy, and rifled the seated core of her consciousness.
Her life store of experience was winnowed and flayed, every personal intimacy plundered. Ruthless talent dissected the content and discarded the pulverized dregs. The violation raised indescribable pain, the emotion and motives of her innermost being pierced by a coercion that raped mercy. Undone, shredded piecemeal, Vivet sensed the unholy blaze of excitement sparked off by the memory the True Sect fanatic expected to find: her passionate instant of congress with Arithon, inflamed by the proscribed use of enspelled aphrodisiacs.
“Light save the innocent, what have we here?” The Examiner’s feverish zeal overwrote any pretence of detachment. He analysed none of the subtle details; disdained the fair course of an inclusive review, that would have affirmed a partial encounter cut short ahead of consummate completion. Instead, he dropped his invasive probe with a jolt that shocked nerves the length of his subject’s strapped body.
Vivet sagged, wrung pithless. Savaged by a throbbing headache, she heard the True Sect verdict declared through the buzz in her ears.
“The child’s parentage is tainted, begotten in sexual congress with Shadow Himself. As the Spawn of Darkness, I pronounce Valien condemned by the Light. Let him die on the scaffold alongside his father, consigned to damnation by fire and sword.”
“No! Look again!” Vivet shuddered, still pleading, “My son’s paternity sprang from common stock. I swear, soul and spirit, he’s innocent! Test my word through a second trial, or at least grant a humane stay of clemency until the sisterhouse record confirms the boy’s town-bred lineage.”
The Lord Examiner chided her, his brusque manner saddened by pity. “Your order acceded to the temple’s claim to enact the sacred duty of your prosecution. Why under the blessed Law of the Canon should I profane my faculties, wallowing in the wanton filth of a heretic’s perverted lies?”
Vivet recoiled as though doused in ice. Her disbelief raked the immaculate priest with a hatred that left her shaking. “May Dharkaron strike down your blinded devotion to a hollow faith.”
“Grace hallows my cause!” Vivet bristled with rage. “You miscall your practice of betrayal and murder to foster divine enlightenment?” She tossed back snarled hair and shouted defiance. “The poor wretch you have caged is a mortal man, and my son, a child born harmless. You priests may gild your warped creed in pomp ritual to cozen the masses. But the merciful truth strips your scripture as fraud and condemns your false justice as slaughter.”
The High Examiner flicked his ringed fingers towards the by-standing dedicates. “Still her tongue. Now! Before she revokes her remaining chance for redemption.”
Senseless in desperation, Vivet spat in his face. “I rue the day I met Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, thrust into his destiny as the used instrument of Koriathain. But more than any sordid act in my life, I regret that my weakness has mired my son in his downfall.”
The High Examiner dabbed off her spittle, the sparkle of his embroidered sleeve scarlet under the grease-fed flicker of flame-light. “You have declared yourself in alliance with evil. Renounce your wicked outburst at once. Would you spurn the glory of the Light’s compassion and darken your immortal spirit forever?”
“Your doctrine is heartless,” Vivet retorted. “Decency does not sentence a child to a vicious spectacle of ritual slaughter.”
“Decay must be expunged, even by amputation,” the examiner corrected. “Purity of conviction alone minds the lamp that keeps Shadow’s corruption at bay.” A harsh pause ensued, while his reverent fingers caressed his Sunwheel pendant of office. “I serve the highest good. For humanity’s sake, could I let the reckless seed of a black sorcerer survive to poison the next generation?”
Run dry of tears, shattered beyond hope, Vivet met defeat in the zealot’s enraptured eyes. She said, “Moral posturing may have misled me once. But not any longer.” At the anguished end of her strength, with naught left to protect, she discovered her courage. “Don’t spout your adulterated theology, or justify sanctimonious treason to me! Not after I’ve given over to you the two lives in this world I hold dearest. If Valien and Arithon die by the sword under your accursed Canon, their murder has already besmirched my name on the rolls of the Fatemaster’s judgement.”