Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon

Perhaps angered that his effort disclosed no overt wickedness, the True Sect’s high officer spun and confronted Efflin with a narrowed stare. ‘Your sister’s testimony appears to support the claim that your bedridden illness kept you from involvement.’

‘I submit myself anyhow,’ Efflin demurred. ‘As head of my household, and a man of true faith, I insist that your divine calling ought to make sure.’ Tears streaked his cheeks openly. For grief, he shouldered the practical choice: if the loss of a brother could not be salvaged, reprieve must be secured for the sister who might still be saved.

Tarens acknowledged, with desperate relief, that his ruinous action had not gone for nothing. Through blood and hazed pain, his stolid calm bolstered Efflin’s selfless courage.

The examiner’s search was dismissively cursory, a corroboration less exhaust­ive than a ceremonial inquiry processed by a formal trial before Kelsing’s temple tribunal. The sentence was read straightaway, the harsh quittance pushed through in the heated rush to bring Tarens’s act of slaughter to punitive justice.

‘This croft will be sold at auction,’ the True Sect official declared. ‘Of the proceeds, one-third share will go to the temple coffers as due forfeit for the guilty party. The other two-thirds stay reserved in trust for the sister and brother surviving, provided they shall be exonerated by the heretic murderer’s sealed proof in confession. They will suffer penance. Let them serve the temple as forced labour for the term of one year and count themselves graced by my leniency. For the fact that their traffic with a suspect herbalist flouted the temple’s authority is a misdemeanour that narrowly skirts the more dangerous charge of complicity with the forces of Darkness.’

As the sergeant bent to free Efflin’s hands, the examiner snapped final orders to his dedicate captain at arms. ‘Hitch up the croft’s bullock. Load our wrapped dead in the cart along with the chained prisoner, and choose eight lancers as escort. A temple processional will meet their arrival at Kelsing’s front gate. By then, I’ll have the diviner’s widow informed and peal the bells to honour her husband’s passing. The murderer’s trial will be held today, with the formal sentence by sundown and execution by fire at dawn tomorrow. This family stays in close custody, meantime. Let them bear witness to their brother’s fate as a lesson against the taint of consorting with Shadow.’

The arms captain saluted. ‘What of the rest of my troop? We still have a renegade sorcerer at large.’

‘Dispatch them for the man-hunt, of course.’ The examiner’s words faded into swished silk and torch light as he made his way out of the cottage door. ‘I will assign you another diviner and also requisition a league tracker with dogs. Quarter the district and find Shadow’s minion. Drag him back dead if his viciousness warrants.’

Kerelie sank to her knees beside Efflin. Shock and terror left her in shreds. Her older brother’s trembling arms closed around her, fever-thin and bereft of comfort. Too easily, their desperate stay of reprieve could lapse back into deadly jeopardy. Tarens had yet to surmount the extraction of his final confession. Sister and brother could do nothing but cling to each other, meantime, helpless except to endure on the chance their lives might be spared in calamity.

Naught could be done to ease their cruel anguish as the dedicates hauled Tarens away.

Late Autumn 5922

Man-hunt

Tarens fought his temple wardens at each step, once they dragged him beyond the porch stairway. Hope forced the necessity although for his own sake the struggle was futile. Even if he broke away shackled, the fury of eight mounted lancers would serve him a brutal comeuppance. Last desperate mercy, lost to a grim fate, he battled for need to be served that quick death before the last shred of courage forsook him. The frost-hardened earth muffled his tell-tale noise, and a shut door hid the grim scene from his family. More than their distress, Tarens feared to stand trial.

Not because of his guilt: a diviner killed to win a sorcerer’s clean escape sealed his death on the scaffold already. The risk must perish with him, that the temple examiners might wring him to further betrayal. He wrenched his broad shoulders and dug in stubborn heels. Given a large man’s manic strength, he yanked the paired men-at-arms who restrained him off stride.

One tripped over the low fence that rimmed the mulched garden. The other, clubbed by the swing of his chains, fell back with a broken arm.

While the dressed ranks of the escort recoiled, and strict order unravelled to shouting, Tarens ducked under a destrier’s girth and burst into a hobbled run. But no welcomed lance-thrust skewered his back. No enemy’s vengeful blade cut him down or spared him from the course of due process. The Light’s dedicates responded with ironclad discipline, for all that he lashed out with kicks, even bit, as their mailed fists pummelled him to defeat. No one cuffed him hard enough to break his head.

‘You’re spoken for the fire and sword, once you’ve faced the temple’s tribunal,’ the troop captain snapped. ‘Accept the harsh fact!’ He bellowed again to quell his provoked company, then promised, ‘We will hear you sing for the Light’s examiners when they extract your confession.’

Tarens made the lancers drag him to his feet. No effort he made forestalled the brute muscle that wrestled him towards the hitched wagon, heaved him inside, and bashed him prostrate. He blasphemed. Spitting the blood streamed from his crushed nose, he cursed his unwanted survival. He had a sister’s thread of complicity to hide, and the burden of Efflin’s honesty. Give the Light’s priests their chance to unravel his mind, and any small fact might be twisted for leverage to reverse the lenient sentence that spared them. Tarens sweated under shattering dread, that the canon tribunal might pry out the criminal evidence that his brother’s illness may have been healed by dark practice.

His defiant bid to be dispatched beforetime devolved to raw rage and rough handling. Tarens was pummelled until the pain reduced him to gasps that silenced his abusive speech. Limp, bruised, and bloodied, he lay pinned half-senseless on the musted straw spilled from the poultry crates. No soldier sullied his immaculate appointments to clear out the cluttered wagon-bed. They ploughed aside the fruit-baskets and osier cages, and roped Tarens out straight by his manacles beside the tarp-covered corpse of the slaughtered diviner.

There, he shivered, stretched on his back, choked by the welled drip of his shattered nose. The gall of his failure gave way to despair as the yoked ox was lashed forward. The cart creaked and rolled from the rutted yard, while the biting, pre-dawn cold spread a murky, starless sky over him. Chills wracked his pulped muscles to misery, and the rough motion jounced his cracked ribs. When he cramped in hitched spasms that threatened a faint, his escort sent a flunkey back to the well, then doused him with a pail of water. Weighed down by chain and shuddering in soaked clothes, Tarens suffered in helpless straits for a ghastly journey to Kelsing.

His plight moved his escort to ribald amusement. Through the chink of spurs and steel weaponry, Tarens weathered the filth they heaped on his dead mother. He gritted his jaw and stifled back screams when the riders capped their verbal slangs with jabs from their lance-butts. When the game they made of his torment raised boredom, their derision changed to speculation that chewed over the latest fragments of gossip. Tarens caught snatches through his spinning senses, as their conversation threaded between the cart’s grinding racket and the clatter of the restive horses.

‘…haven’t condemned a dark-monger to burning for as long as I’ve been alive.’

‘…think we may face renewed interest in the stymied campaign at the border?’

‘High time the court of Havish’s king was cleaned out as a breeding roost for warped practice and clansfolk.’

‘…surely would take a rising of Darkness to force the temple’s flint-fist bursars to loosen their purse strings. How many years have they waited to fix the shoddy roof on our barracks?’

‘Oh, they’ll pay! Always have. But for vestments with diamonds. The excuse will pack some pompous chump off east again to remand the delinquent avatar.’

‘A Light’s Hope? For real? You’re joking!’ The speaker snorted, derisive. ‘The high priest at Erdane won’t quell an outbreak of Shadow through mummery! Or waste his devout talent for such a fool’s delegation. The True Sect’s more likely to launch their case to condemn the fair-haired fop the traditionalists still revere as the founder of faith. Who wouldn’t bid to eclipse Lysaer’s power? The high temple conclave’s primed for the opening. I say they’ll depose him, seize his mayor’s seat at Etarra, and build up the warfront with the s’Ilessid treasury. Then watch how fast we’ll break the locked stand-off with Havish.’

‘Light’s own grace! Watch your tongue! Might find yourself wrung by the temple examiner alongside this wretch of a prisoner.’

‘…beyond all doubt the avatar’s abandoned the godhead! That’s if the Great Schism’s not a flagrant myth, and the man ever wielded true Light in the first place!’

‘No myth, boy. Don’t mock history. My grand uncle twice rode as a guard with the Light’s Hope. He’s seen divinity with his own eyes. The Blessed Prince never ages.’

‘You bought the legend for an old man’s maundering in his beer cup? That’s quaint.’

Tarens absorbed the by-play through his daze, too damaged to care about the old controversy that flared between the True Sect and the traditionalists. The tale held that the avatar once denounced his priests and barred Etarra’s gates against his protesting faithful. Pleas to win back his loyalty encountered rebuff. When the Temple’s delegation placed an appeal, the priests were kicked out with their banners in flames and their horses’ tails singed to smoking.

The veteran dedicate shrugged off his peer’s ridicule. ‘Greenhorn, you weren’t by chance signed on as a recruit to redeem your gullible relative?’

Through an indignant chorus, a louder voice prevailed, ‘Don’t cite the accounts in the temple archives. Likely some bored copyist got drunk on devotion and larked off. Who’s to say the lines of early scripture aren’t outright fancy? Nobody’s seen the like of the myth passed down from the siege of Alestron.’

Other voices declaimed, until the stiff-necked officer in charge caught wind of the blasphemous chatter. ‘Since the Schism occurred over two centuries ago, our priesthood defines the sanctity of the canon. Your job’s to defend the Light’s grace from corruption! Clap your lips like a virgin caught out after dark if you want your sweet shot at advancement.’

The grumbler protested from the rear-guard ‘Service in the ranks is rude enough without bending to jiggle the butts of the Light’s inner conclave.’

‘Listen up, bucko!’ the officer snapped. ‘High Temple’s secretive feud with Etarra has seen better men drummed out of their whites in dishonour.’

The freshened breeze blew further chill through the talk, with the mounted procession compelled to rein in to flank the slow roll of the wagon. Another league passed before someone’s laconic check on the captive raised a bark to a lazy subordinate. ‘Flip the tarp off that corpse and shelter this wretch. We’ll catch something worse than a reprimand if he packs up and dies of the cold.’

‘…this poxy assignment!’ someone else carped. ‘It’s still black out here as a witch’s twat! When in the name of the Dark will we see the first glimmer of sunrise?’

‘Spooked by a few clouds, then?’

The round of jeers lapsed as a shouted call from the vanguard halted the double-file column. The oxcart’s wheels squelched to a stop, to more steamed oaths from the duty-bound lancers. Hoof stamps and snorts pocked the frigid air as their curbed destriers tussled the hold on their bits.

Sapped to dulled wits by the strain on bruised sinews, Tarens gathered the pause concerned an unscheduled obstruction. A glow emerged through the felt blanket of mist: some prankster had lit a bonfire from green wood in the midst of the trade-road. The blaze piled up traffic in both directions. With none but the agile, mounted couriers able to surmount the ditch at the verge, an irritable pack of balked carters shook fists and shouted, while their discommoded draught animals coughed on swirled smoke and jostled to evade the whirled sparks chased up by the changeable wind.

The temple man wrestled the oxcart’s reins, swearing, while the fidgety escort of outriders closed their skittish horses into tighter formation around the chained prisoner.

‘This may not be a coincidence. Stay on the alert!’ The lance captain’s next order dismounted the company’s two strongest men and sent them ahead to sort out the confusion.

‘You’ll extinguish those flames!’ he called after them, anxious. ‘Pull apart the smouldering logs, stamp out the piled brush, and back off those carters before their teams pitch a fit and some blighted hot-head starts brawling.’

The nuisance would impose a lengthy delay. At least until the raked coals cooled to ash, with the steep banks of the drain ditches on either side set narrow enough to break wheels, and no burdened draught animal in its right mind likely to be cajoled to tread over hot embers.

Tarens languished in the wagon-bed meanwhile, surrounded by jumpy lancers and the dedicate officer, whose unhappy subordinate paced in tight circles, both hands full, tending riderless mounts. No one passed the time in loose talk, with every man’s nerves primed to face an assault by barbarian raiders, or bandits, or worse: an attempt by Shadow’s collaborators to liberate the condemned murderer. Never mind that the wretch was secured by locked chains, with the temple examiner in sole charge of the key, and the suspect family constrained under guard back at the ransacked cottage.

Bound in supine misery, Tarens suffered the worse. Though the draped tarp cut the edge from the wind, his swollen contusions had stiffened. What marginal surcease he gained from the stillness was undone by his tensioned cuffs as the brisk cold settled through his clammy shirt and wracked his outstretched body to shivering. The torment did not stem his terrified thoughts. Horrors awaited him in Kelsing’s dungeons, put to the question by the True Sect priests.

That pernicious dread colored the disgruntled change, as the two footbound lancers who dismembered the bonfire sprang back from their task with riled oaths. When their outburst cranked into yells of dismay, Tarens strained to see through the slat side of the cart. What seemed like a wind devil whirled aloft. The tempest sucked up cinders of ash and live sparks, gained momentum, then vindictively reversed direction. As the gyre raked over the row of parked vehicles, the lance captain had little choice but to spur ahead and take charge before further mayhem erupted. Two strides out, he cursed, almost thrown as his mount reared, wild-eyed, and determined to bolt. The beleaguered officer wrestled its frothed panic and shouted to warn the fuming subordinate left in charge of the rest of the string.

‘Clear those horses off! Turn the oxcart around and retreat at least one hundred paces. We’ve got fiends!’ Harried as his frantic horse crab-stepped, the dedicate captain vented a gush of relief for the nuisance. ‘No surprise we’re beset, given this lug-headed rash of hysterical upset.’