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

The paroxysm of visions flayed through as a rip tide that broke, ebbed, and stranded him. Arin came back to himself, his eyes streaming the tears of fierce heart-ache. He tasted the tang of death and despair, and ached for the bleak damage yet to occur. Once while caged in crystal, assuaging a wraith, he had translated such findings to music, then lifted the tissue of pain to a gentle requital through resonant melody. But Tarens was a being of flesh, prisoned inside the range of his cognizant senses. Lacking an instrument, speech only remained: and the stark terror of sounded words left the musician wretchedly paralyzed.

If he spoke, Arin dreaded the crushing discovery, that the singer perceived by his inner awareness might be just a wishful figment. To shatter a dream of such exquisite purity surely might wound his spirit deeply enough to destroy him. More than silence, he dreaded his flawed human voice might be found lacking in range and tonality.

Perhaps vicious uncertainty ripped a sound from him.

‘Are you all right?’ Tarens cried, from the dark. ‘Arin? Save us both! Are you injured?’

‘No.’ The word burst from his lips, half gasp, half whisper, a cork unleashed by a torrent. Arin’s concern could do nothing else. Only stem Tarens’s poisoned depression before sorrow blighted the man’s open heart and stunted his generosity.

‘Listen to me!’ Forced past reserve, the phrases burst free in a crisp, antique accent. ‘Your sister was never content as a crofter! She will serve out her year’s term at the temple, embroidering vestments and altar-cloths. Her fine needlework will bring her a skilled job at a quality dress shop. Your brother will never return to a farm. His loss of the boys cannot rest in that setting. He will find a new life as a clerk, enjoy songs with a circle of erudite friends, and marry a good woman for comfort.’

Tarens’s staggered amazement was palpable. ‘Arin! My friend, whoever you are, how can you claim to know this?’

The question floundered into tense quiet. The uneasy answer was not safe to broach since the truth implied seer’s gift. Such had happened before: prescient visions also had forecast the inquiry of the Light’s diviner. Which suggested a faculty that out-stripped intuition. Content to stay Arin, beyond fearful of Tarens’s right­eous distrust if such talent branded him with the wickedness of proscribed sorcery, he retrieved his jacket and rifled through its bundled contents. The flint striker and bronze clip were too easily found: more damning evidence of a breadth of vision unimpaired in the dark. Frantic to salvage the man’s benign faith in him, Arin fashioned a rushlight.

He hoped that the wavering flame unveiled an innocuous presence: of a lean fellow with tousled black hair and green eyes, earnest with care and uncertainty. ‘Friend,’ Arin said gently, ‘by all that I am, whatever that is, I promise I won’t ever harm you.’

His assurance was not rough, or grating, or flat, but instead possessed a mellifluous lilt that all but unmanned him with gratitude. The elusive remembrance of a bard’s ability might not be a delusion, after all.

The rushlight steadied. Its honest exposure should reveal the terror that shadowed his unknown origins.

Tarens returned an unruffled regard from a hideously battered face. He saw no reason yet to shy from the fearful thorns of uncertainty. Crofter, he had been. But his fighter’s temperament sprang from a loyalty solid as bone. He said carefully, ‘We found you where the old lane leads to the ruin of the ancient earl’s court south of Kelsing. The Koriathain sometimes make use of that place for their private rituals. Have you an active connection to them?’

‘If I did,’ Arin answered, stung to leashed rage, ‘I was held as their captive, most likely for an unclean purpose.’ He shuddered, hesitant to broach the nightmares that troubled his sleep. ‘By no means would I let them retake me.’ Shown Tarens’s appalled consternation, he added, ‘Your question is forthright! But if I don’t remember, I can’t guarantee you don’t walk in dangerous company.’

The awkward moment spun out to the hiss of the fluttered flame. How to account, that no recall existed? Or explain an experience that lurked outside reason, formlessly venomed by the latent horrors of a term of helpless entrapment?

While Arin struggled for tactful language, Tarens eased the tense pause with the innocence of human decency.

‘Since you don’t know what set you to flight, let’s not rush to press judgement. You may be the marked quarry, but I’ve been condemned. Survival has joined our fate.’ Before that recrimination could wound, Tarens added, ‘I regret nothing, do you understand? In your own way, you took risks for my family. All of your acts have done right by them.’

Last gesture, the crofter snuffed out the rush lamp. In patent reassurance, he settled and slept, deliberately vulnerable to the busy works of his mage-sighted companion. Surely he heard, as he nodded off, the purposeful strokes of edged steel being honed across a scrounged whetstone.

At due length, three broken kitchen knives were refurbished as daggers. Arin’s cut-leather belt wrapped the grips, with his oversized breeches retied at the waist with a braid made from scavenged string.

Stretched out to rest, tensioned yet by unease, Arin listened as the gusts winnowed the thickened snowfall outside. Musty air filled his nostrils. He could not shake off the haunted impression of another prior experience: that somewhere before, the hitched breaths of an injured friend had been sealed by a blizzard inside of a root-cellar. The cramped ambience spun him a gruesome dream, stark with the memory of desperate straits, and more vivid than uncontrolled prescience…

Then, the reiving cohort of lancers had worn black-and-gold surcoats blazoned with entwined snakes and lions. The innocent’s cottage just put to the torch crackled in red conflagration, whipped under a white-out blizzard. In that day’s frigid air, amid drifts trampled pink, sprawled the large, honest man their knives had tortured to find him. Heart-sore, he strove with his healer’s skills to stem bleeding and bind riven flesh. The damage lay beyond any remedy. Even so, he rejected the dying man’s plea for abandonment: ‘For your gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath, Dharkaron witness.’

He finished the dressing for honour alone. ‘You didn’t betray me,’ he told that wounded man, whose agony, suffered in his behalf, came to refuge in the comfortless chill of a root-cellar.

Amid winter’s freeze, sheltered in earth-bound quiet, the reliving carried the same fetid smells: of breathed air and wrapped wounds, congealed blood, and the hounding dread of uncertainty.

That man’s fatal anguish had wrung him to voice the bitter extent of his sorrow: ‘You failed nothing and no one. I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown that will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’

‘Long life, and my blessing,’ said the ghost in his nightmare. ‘The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’

Arin wrenched awake with a gasp, shuddered by the throes of after-shock. Somebody’s callused hand gripped his arm, and another muffled his screaming.

‘Arin?’ The concern was Tarens’s, not some long-dead trapper. ‘You shouted in your sleep.’

Carefully tactful, the crofter released him. Respect did not rush to ask probing questions. Yet the fabric of pretence had shredded. As fugitives roped together by destiny, one man understood that he was the sole cause of his fellow’s hapless endangerment.

Worse, the relentless peril that stalked them trafficked in blood-letting stakes. Arin sat up. Arms wrapped over tucked knees, he rested his forehead against his crossed wrists.

Tonight’s outbreak of recall suggested a history his spirit cried out to disown: chased as quarry before, he had survived because a strong man with great heart had died for him. More, his own peal of sorrow restated the lines of a prince’s oath to a feal liegeman. Incontrovertibly, he had a past and a name: dangerous facts all but certain to drive the committed factions that hunted him. Though to the last fibre, he viewed such a royal legacy as abhorrent, for the worse, Tarens was already ensnared in the weave of that intractable heritage.

Scalded, Arin reaffirmed the past vow hurled into the teeth of his enemies. ‘I don’t leave them my wounded.’

If the selfless kindness that brought Tarens to shelter a destitute stranger was not to share a dog’s end, the misery of their cooped quarters must be sustained throughout days to come. Just as before, the diligent searchers would leave no stone unturned, and no weedy field untrampled in their manic furor. Therefore, no quarry’s tracks must be found in the pristine drifts. With luck, under snow, the temple dedicates would overlook the buried depression at the root-cellar’s entrance. For safety, the fugitives holed up inside must stay immured until the next thaw. The bare ground would have to be frosted iron-hard before they dared emerge, first to forage, then to move on.

As wretchedly plagued by the capricious onset of an early winter, only one person alive stayed at liberty to illuminate Arin’s veiled past. Dakar the Mad Prophet sulked in shadow beneath the bleak spire of Althain Tower, buffeted by the cruel north wind. He needed no seer’s gift to forecast the squeeze of the crisis: beyond doubt, his accursed role in Prince Arithon’s past would run him afoul of the Koriathain.

Dakar had crossed their filthy agenda before, even quashed the wily gamut of their probes in his time as a crown heir’s appointed protector. Under Fellowship auspices, in lawful standing as Asandir’s agent, he had been the target of their baneful plots often enough to wring him to cold sweats. The fresh prospect woke the spectre of nightmare, since the thankless quittance of his apprenticeship stripped him of the Sorcerers’ backing.

At loose ends, three days later, Dakar reeled yet. From outraged denial, to obstinate dragged heels, to packing his tinker’s haul of possessions, he loitered outside the tower’s shut gates, abandoned to his own devices. The warded locks were fastened, behind him. Ahead, the worn spur of the north trade-road seamed the barren wilds of Atainia; daunting, inhospitable terrain for a traveller stranded afoot.

Southward, the ancient track flanked the iced current of the Isaer, passed the massive node that harnessed the lane force at the Great Circle, then met the cross-roads at the crumbled Second Age ruin, where the river’s head-waters welled from an underground cavern. Asandir’s journey lay that way, en route to the mountain outpost that sheltered a persecuted clan enclave.

Fed to the teeth with the hazardous affairs of his former master, and festered to a grudge like a canker, Dakar turned his back and set off for the nearest town habitation. Weeds snagged at his boots. Too short-strided for the rough ground, he stumbled across stony gullies washed through the wheel-ruts. Few wagons ventured this desolate land, laid waste since the tumult of a First Age battle, with bleak, scoured hill-tops whipped to thin dust, and vales that whispered of keening ghosts, slagged yet by the glassine pits of past drakefire.

Solitude gave Dakar too much time to brood. Independence did not leave him care-free. His tuned awareness picked up the warped flow of the lane flux, unbalanced still by the echo of ruin a wrathful dragon had unleashed at Avenor. Disharmony and disease still choked the realm of Tysan, a condition unlikely to find a reprieve under the True Sect’s doctrine. If such weighty matters correctly belonged under Fellowship oversight, Dakar had suffered the Sorcerers’ company too long to stay blinded by ignorance. Aggravated, each step, he vented and kicked a loose pebble.

The spiteful impulse injured only his toe. While the missile cracked off a boulder and bounced, the Mad Prophet hopped on one foot and let fly. ‘May Dharkaron Avenger’s immortal black horses drop steaming dung over Asandir’s field boots!’

The Sorcerer’s footwear, likely as not, would walk scatheless through the encounter. Worse, the maligned gravel would imprint the curse, since the Athlien singers had vanished. The Mad Prophet yanked his flapping cloak tight and sullenly shut down his mage-sense.

If he must blister his tender soles and spend brutal nights in the open, he would endure the unpleasantness without the bother of a refined connection. More, if the crux of Fellowship need pressured him to volunteer to safeguard Rathain’s hunted prince, he was older, and finally wise to the fact the position was star-crossed! Riddled with pernicious pitfalls and foes, with the man himself given to powers and strengths unimaginably dangerous.

‘Damn all to Sethvir’s manipulative maundering!’ Dakar swore. The Warden’s almighty earth-sense knew how keeping that post had wrecked the last footing for a friend’s trust. Dakar could not weep. Not anymore. His recriminations were long since spent for an anguish that could not, in life, be erased. His unsavoury duty in Halwythwood, and again, after warning, at Athir, had unequivocally served Fellowship interests through the betrayal of Arithon’s personal integrity.

If the royal victim ever discovered the secret price paid then to win his survival, Dakar understood what his hide would be worth! In his shoes, the guilty party would run, never to shoulder the lash of reprisal from the infamous s’Ffalenn temper.

‘Murder would be kinder,’ Dakar muttered, and pumped on short legs to hike faster.

He reached Lorn three days later, puffing and tired, with chafed heels and both ankles blistered. The town was no place to cheer dismal spirits: little more than a barnacle cluster of dwellings attached to the rocky northcoast, sandwiched between a clouded, pearl sky and the pewter shine of the winter breakers. Dusk had fallen. Under the smeared smoke from the chimney-stacks, the rimed cobbles in the narrow streets sheltered the slink of ­scavenging cats, and the briny miasma of fish guts. The years since the revival of navigation had shrunk the port back to an isolate haven for mackerel boats.

The market lay deserted, where by day the garrulous matrons diced and salted down the dawn catch. The risen, raw wind already had chased their benighted gossip indoors. As eager for comfort, Dakar steered between the bleak, wharf-side warehouses and the netted thatch roof of the chandler’s. The hot glow of lamp-light steamed the roundels of the sole clapboard tavern when he shoved his bulk through the squeaky plank door.

Conversation quieted before him, replaced with the owlish stares by which grizzled, backwater salts measured an outsider. Even the urchin stopped begging for scraps and turned round eyes towards the cloaked stranger.

Dakar surveyed the coarse company, daubed in the thick shadows from the tallow lamps slung from the ceiling beams. Unattached men sprawled at the trestles, flushed with drink as they elbowed to cuddle the barmaids. Others with wives and young children at home downed their pints and hob-nobbed with friends. The widows with black scarves tied over their hair, and the ham-fisted matrons crammed into the corner nooks, while the wizened elderly snoozed by the hearth, too arthritic to haul twine on the luggers.

The acquaintance Dakar sought was not present.

Aware if he ventured abroad that the doors would be closed to late lodgers, he waded inside over mud-brick floors tracked gritty with sand. The taint of wet wool and sweat was ingrained, and the attitude jaundiced as the offal dumped out for the sharks. Lest such contempt be mistaken for welcome, the muscular landlord propped against the bar priced his beer to fleece strangers.

His brew would be sour as pig swill, besides. Dakar might have matched the extortion with coppers spell-burnished to gleam like silver, but the clam stew with hard bread he wanted sold for only three pence. He seated himself on an empty bench, ordered supper, and ate. Talk of nets, sails, and weather resumed, pointedly directed around him.