Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon

“Do you think?” gasped Davien, unable to muzzle a vicious onset of the shakes. Kharadmon’s damnable perception was true. He had not stabilized even wayward control of his untoward legacy. Until he mastered himself, a drake conflict was the last conceivable place Althain’s Warden would wish to dispatch him.

Summer 5923

Diversion

While The Hatchet’s elite dedicates seized the rogue galley and ransacked an empty cabin, their absent quarry braved the gale’s aftermath aboard a lugger festooned with nets. Another soaked fisherman swathed in stained oilskins withstood the search in plain sight. No one glanced sidewards at men seining cod. Particularly one whose chapped chin itched with several days’ stubble.

Few ever beheld the Light’s avatar without the groomed panoply of his state dress. Yet true human dignity owned no such pride. Lysaer fielded the grimy discomfort with astonishing equilibrium. Instrell Bay tossed to a moil of cross chop, the hazard of a gentleman’s razor apt to risk a slit throat. Vanity cheerfully balked at testing a new valet’s expertise: particularly one curled up in green misery, seasick and suffering the back-lash from a True Sect examiner’s invasive probe.

Dace groaned in a berth, too ill to do aught but heave up his guts in a basin.

The Light’s avatar was not wont to fraternize. Court etiquette instilled by his royal birth maintained a cool distance from the mean lives of his servants. Yet a buried facet of his character emerged under the anonymity of borrowed oilskins.

Stripped of his state status, Lysaer sat on the drenched deck, learning to mend a frayed halyard from the youngest sailhand, aged nine. Two bent heads and two sets of hands, the smaller pair correcting, spliced the hemp plies to thread the masthead sheave without binding. Lysaer’s care-free laugh floated back on the wind. The boy’s flush reflected no awe. His eagerness guided an aristocrat’s fingers, unfamiliarly shorn of seal ring and jewels under the dousing spray.

The storm eased at dusk. Breeze slackened, and night fell dense as spilled ink. Crammed below with the off-watch crew, Lysaer ate rough fare from a common pot. Dace peered at his liege by the reeling swing of the lamp, braced for patronizing indifference. Instead, blue eyes lifted, Lysaer noticed his servant’s wakeful regard.

“Has the headache eased? Then you need to eat something. Perhaps a bit of broth will stay down?” The hand that offered the bowl lost no elegance, raw with blisters and slivers of rope.

Dace always had grasped the quality that once earned Sulfin Evend’s relentless loyalty. Not before this had he seen the humility behind tonight’s earnest solicitude.

He could not refuse the gruel and spoon, regardless of his queasy stomach. His liege tucked him under the blankets again when the bland nourishment failed to settle. Dace recuperated, excused from his duties, while the fishing lugger ploughed up Instrell Bay, rounded Atainia, and smashed westward into the frigid waters wreathed in pale fog and afloat with the summer’s calved icebergs. Here, where the perilous reefs met the current of the polar ocean, Lysaer tended the nets, glued in fish-stinking sweat alongside the hard-working crew.

Yet shared labour never led him to confide. Whatever purpose took him to north Tysan stayed shrouded in self-contained silence.

A servant dared not presume to venture an inquiry. Though his unsettled awareness suggested the avatar courted disaster, Dace lacked the effrontery to broach the perils of an unknown decision. Close enough to touch intimate flesh, and prized only for quiet efficiency, the steadfast valet must watch what unfolded and hone his perception to compensate.

The lugger meantime tacked her wallowing course off the desolate coast of Atainia. She plied her nets. Shrouded in mist, she dropped her anchor at last off Miralt Head in the grey hour past sunrise. There, gently rolling, she awaited the breeze, while the settled calm sheened the swell salmon pink and mercury as a polished mirror.

Dace worked on deck in the half-light. Supplied with a heated bucket and soap, he took a razor to his liege’s neglected grooming. The rigid jaw being scraped exposed his liege’s clamped tension. Yet Lysaer withheld criticism or encouragement. Dispatched along with his scruff of blond beard, the care-free banter with the lugger’s crew: again the aristocrat, he endured his subordinate’s handling in withdrawn reserve.

Dace fretted, hoping the rude setting excused his inexperience; while under fog, a port only know at second hand through its history came awake at the water-front.

High and sweet, the temple bells sounded carillons, stitched by the cries of hawkers and gulls, female laughter, and swearing stevedores. Staccato clacks spoke of board shutters being thrown back on the wharf-side trinket stalls. Miralt had been settled since the early Third Age. Its wide crescent harbour cut into the Camris headland, ice-bound through the winter. The seasonal bloom of brisk trade swarmed over the bones of what had been, for centuries, a back-country settlement: until the Light’s avatar first disclosed his divine mission in the open street.

A riot sparked off by a captured assassin had been quelled, and a ravening mob stunned into an awed retreat. Yet the spectacular display of Light unleashed then did not explain Lysaer’s reticence. His brooding more likely stemmed from the time of the Great Schism recorded in True Sect scripture.

The brutal, eye-witness memoir penned in Sulfin Evend’s personal journals provided perspective. The liegeman who had stood his adamant ground for Lysaer’s sanity became a contentious target after the fall of Alestron. The fighting man’s rankled script described his battle-worn troops, denied victory spoils to shoulder the refugee crisis incited by the wrathful dragon that unleashed a fire-storm on Avenor. Amid the smoking ruin, Sulfin Evend’s account sketched the priesthood’s seditious influence. Gouged pen-strokes reflected his efforts to blunt the influence of Desh-thiere’s curse: and which prevailed. Lysaer’s sensible policy had backed Fellowship edict and jilted the priesthood’s demand to rebuild Avenor’s slagged ruin.

But the triumph had incurred an unthinkable price.

Then and now, gadded by the Mistwraith’s directive, Lysaer wrestled to curb a fanatically entrenched religion. Again, his pursuit of responsible justice might tip zealotry over the brink.

Once, Sulfin Evend’s command of armed force had contained the volatile storm like a lightning-rod. His muscular will had transplanted the High Temple’s disputed authority to Erdane. Statecraft and political acumen tempered the Light’s runaway creed, until his heroic, relentless support became undermined by filthy rumours. The jackal pack of his rivals had scented blood in the cries of apostasy from the priests, until charges of collaboration with Fellowship sorcery named him the Heretic Betrayer.

Dace laid aside the razor and shivered. The perils bequeathed by that past had grown teeth, with centuries of Canon doctrine given a deadlier reach. The battle about to be joined held no quarter if, under the fresh threat of curse-born madness, Lysaer resumed his brash fight to disband the religion.

Dace reached for the towel, awake to the fury that hardened the shaved jaw-line he blotted dry. The sen Evend descendant could only mourn the ancestral courage that once had foiled the repeated forays of hired assassins. The terrible price spoke yet on the page where Sulfin Evend’s firm grasp on the pen was cut off, reft by the poisoned cup that the priests’ machinations arranged for his downfall.

Etarran history recorded the aftermath, stripped of the desolate grief: of the beleaguered flight out of Tysan, while Sulfin Evend lay comatose, undone by the near-fatal attack, which left him blinded and crippled with palsy.

The cryptic summary resumed months later, the fallen champion’s slurred words recorded by a punctilious scribe. Compiled for posterity, that piercing entry shouldered the blame for the mis-step that cost Lysaer his control over the Light’s dedicate troops.

No chronicle spoke of the intimate strain, or the fear, as Lysaer had defied the swords of the temple war host to salvage the life of his helpless friend. True Sect scripture enshrined only the poisoned account of the Heretic Betrayer’s corrupted influence. Canon history of the Great Schism insisted that Lysaer s’Ilessid had turned apostate to the Light’s cause.

By unadorned truth, the withdrawal from Erdane had been triggered by ambush, and the harried retreat across Camris, a feat to save Sulfin Evend, condemned by a Sunwheel decree and at risk of being savaged by a zealot mob. Lysaer had been forced to wield light against his deluded pursuit. When the galley he seized escaped to sea out of Miralt, she had rowed into the gales of late autumn, while the handful of trustworthy officers forestalled her pursuit at the dock.

Of the bravest and best, none had survived to reach haven under the governor’s law at Etarra.

Oppressed by that history, Dace oiled the razor, and heaved the bucket of suds over the lee-side rail. No surprise, that his liege’s expression stayed wooden. For Lysaer, the clangour of temple bells and the northcoast combers breaking like slivered glass bespoke the ghosts of his sacrificed dead.

On this day, ruthlessly living, the faithful had multiplied a thousandfold. The True Sect Canon ruled Miralt, the established order emerged into view as the early mist lifted.

The dazzle of gold winkled first, where slant sunlight polished the egg-shell domes gilded over by temple revenue. Visible next, the milk outlines of buildings, block towers, and the spindled rails of the galleries crowning the headland in many-tiered splendour. Dull trade port no longer, the Light’s worship had repaved the town in palatial opulence, a necklace that shimmered like opal along the wide curve of the harbour. Shrines and sanctuaries and hostels overlooked the bleached wharves, where, in summer, the galleys of the Sunwheel priesthood rocked gently, their pencilled spars varnished citrine and amber, and rigging strung with white pennants streamed gold fringe like the glister of sparkling wine.

A fair vista, nested with coiled adders, and an insane prospect for a covert venture.

Breeze shivered the dew from the lines. Through the spangle of droplets, a skiff drawn up alongside delivered the pilot to steer the squat lugger to her paid dockage.

“I’ll be changing clothes,” Lysaer informed his servant. “Brush up a doublet and trousers tailored in plain cloth of respectable quality. Afterward, if you please, have my luggage strapped up and brought topside for landing.”

Lysaer’s choice to enter Miralt without artifice made tactical sense to his valet. The jewels sold off to hire his passage left coin enough for a respectable boarding-house lodging. Discarded also, the pretext of station, where glittering ornament would have attracted undue envy and curiosity. Yet modest trappings and impeccable manners allowed an unknown young man of good looks into the upper-crust practice hall. Lysaer was admitted to the stylish baths frequented by the unmarried dedicates and the idle rich.

Dace observed the seamless acceptance, primly composed, from the side-lines. A proper clean towel draped on his arm and his master’s kit parked at his feet, he was skirted like furniture by the more stylish servants. Many an impoverished aristocrat visited Miralt for holy penance, attended by faithful old serving-men.

But even plain cambric and linen could not reduce Lysaer to anonymity. His skill with the sword sparked whispered comments. Dace adhered to propriety. He disclosed nothing to sate the curious bystanders though ragged nerves made him sweat when an off-hand remark likened his master’s fair grace to the beauty of the divine avatar. Since Lysaer never mentioned his background, his admirers speculated on their own.

“Likely he’s from a family with too many sons and limited prospects,” suggested the whiskered fellow who managed the idlers’ wagers.

Heads nodded. Many an ambitious sprig came to Miralt chasing his youthful dreams. Scholarly hopefuls applied to the Light’s priests at the temple. The fiery idealists who craved adventure flaunted their prowess at arms, where their mettle might earn them a dedicate captaincy.

“That one needn’t lather himself in the ranks,” a wistful bravo observed.

His stout companion added a smirk. “Handsome enough to break hearts as he is? The right bed or marriage could better his station without risking his pretty neck.”

“Do you think?” another gallant remarked. “Those lovely blue eyes might string the ladies along. That heiress from Erdane whose father dropped buckets of gold as a temple offering? Well, she tried to plaster herself to his side. Got her charms refused with sweet words and no interest.”

Dace fretted, distressed by more than feminine overtures. Within two days, as the hall’s avid sportsmen learned not to waste silver on Lysaer’s opponents, the Sunwheel officers jockeyed to cultivate him as a recruit.

Their target smiled with disarming candour. Folded into their circle, he consented to spar with the elite dedicates in their company.

Ever discreet, Dace brought dry towels as bidden. He fetched water, not amused by the performance of youthful innocence. Lysaer risked lethal stakes, blindsiding Miralt’s most devout professionals. How long before veteran sword-play sussed out the experienced ripostes Lysaer withheld from his side of the practice match?

A week passed without incident. Too personable to seem devious, Lysaer masqueraded a talent too raw to clinch a decisive bout. Dace watched male vanity played without shame to side-step social restraints. A hired valet must support the brash act, while the back-slapping, over-confident victors swept their glum loser along to the bath.

There, hot water eased battered muscles, and more: amid rosy intimacy and veiling steam, Lysaer’s guile gave teeth to the statesman’s weapon of neutral silence. Loosened conversation echoed into the dressing-room where, meekly waxing his master’s boots, Dace watched the ploy of green innocence inveigle the dedicates’ confidence.

“… be fighting aplenty, lad. Not only against unbelievers, but the worst breeding enclaves of black practice. Opportunity’s ripe! The move against clanblood opens up a rare chance for early promotion.”