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

He was not left to mind his anonymous business. Another woman tucked into one corner was equally shunned by the locals. Although she wore the same smock blouse and wool over-dress, her lily-white fingers had never flensed a wet cod. The sigil she pitched against Dakar’s aura flicked his nerves like a scuttling spider.

The Mad Prophet choked. He blotted the chowder broth sprayed through his beard and slurped onwards. Apparently innocuous, stupid, and fat, he measured the execrable nuisance: Prime Selidie’s rapacity wasted no time. Already, he was pinched in a trap laid by the Koriathain. More, the power that hounded him was no trifle. The witch had more sisters stationed nearby, equipped with the force to shred his defenses.

Cornered, alone, he was tacitly warned to accede in quiet surrender.

Dakar spat out a mauled clot of gristle and sopped up the last driblets of gravy. Bedamned if he meant to move before he settled his dinner. The enchantress could fume herself purple meanwhile. Tysan’s dogmatic aversion to sorcery meant a sister reliant upon a quartz focus dared not wield her blatant craft in the open.

Inspired, Dakar belched, clutched his middle, and yowled. ‘This vile soup is tainted! Does the house poison guests? I’ve been gouged before for the price of a bed when bad stew laid me low with a belly-ache!’

A smatter of laughter arose, cut by the inn matron’s roar from the kitchen. ‘Going to spew, are you? The gutter’s outside! No refunds here for a whiner’s gut, nor warm milk for a griped constitution!’

Dakar doubled over and moaned.

Nobody else who consumed the same fare took pity on his distress. The bar-keeper ignored him. While his enemy watched, Dakar ripped off his belt. He tossed the strap onto the trestle hard enough to make the looped coin pouch clash loudly against the brass buckle. Cloak shrugged off to puddle around his ankles, he unlaced and peeled his twill jerkin, then groaned and crumpled arse down on the floor.

Heads turned, hatted and bearded and weathered, amused by his histrionics.

Dakar shuddered and held his breath. When his pouched cheeks flushed to vermilion, he rolled up his eyes and flopped into a faint.

Evidently out cold, he lay like a log. Where a dishonest bumpkin anyplace else would snap up his obvious bait, Lorn’s slack-witted brutes showed no interest. Instead, the burliest onlooker grabbed the suds pail from the tap. While he doused the felled landlubber back to spluttering consciousness, the beggar child finally dived after the abandoned purse. The predictable happened: his disreputable, grimed hand blistered on the spellbinder’s wards as he tried to pilfer the contents.

The treble scream as the boy singed his fingers sheared over the rumbled laughs and snide comments. He was quite unharmed, beyond a few moments of painful sensory illusion.

But where conjury was anathema, the lad’s cry raised a furor of panic.

While the timid backed into the corners and prayed, the brave brandished raised benches and bottles and closed in to trounce the unholy practitioner. The door banged as someone left at a run to fetch the town’s armed authority.

‘That’s your sorry response for a lad caught out, thieving?’ Dakar yelled through the commotion. Soaked to dripping, hunched over with belly-ache, he shoved erect in the jostle. Backed to the wall by a breastwork of benches, he pealed on through the bar-keeper’s bellows and the child’s roaring tantrum. ‘Your snotty brat looks fit for work. Let him earn honest pay washing pots in your scullery and thank me for the sting of a timely correction!’

But instead, the harpy from the inn’s kitchen barreled out with her meat skewer angled for blood. ‘We don’t take interference from upstart sorcerers!’

Dakar dug in his heels. Safe, he hoped, from the underhand wiles of Koriathain, he measured the angry fishermen who crowded to carve him in strips. ‘Damn all to Dharkaron!’ he railed in their teeth. ‘And the same to the Light’s idiot doctrine.’ Only a suicide would blaspheme the True Sect’s Canon by the name of Ath’s Avenging Angel. Annoyed that Lorn’s inept constable was tar-slow to collect blatant malefactors, Dakar ducked a swung fist. ‘Why beat a sick man? Take that ne’er-do-well snip who shoved his sticky mitt in my coin-purse!’

Buffered amid the pummelling scuffle, with both eyes alert for the Koriani meddler, a short man tussled by a pack of stout locals failed to see the town’s hastily summoned defender: one who gleamed, out of place, in the white-and-gold robes bestowed by the high temple at Erdane.

With the vested Sunwheel diviner came the immaculate armed escort, dispatched for the annual headcount of the Light’s faithful. Dakar’s rude discovery of the surprise entourage met the mailed fist of the dedicate whose righteous clout dropped him unconscious.

Dakar woke behind bars. A connoisseur of dark cells the length and breadth of five kingdoms, his nose broke the news that Lorn’s dungeon outstripped the most noisome. He languished in fishy straw used sometime ago to pack mackerel. The stink threatened to kill him. Worse, clutches of starved rats rustled to feast on the rotted bits of fins and glued fish-heads. The slide of hairless tails and scampering feet tickled over him, while beneath, the floor stirred to an army of questing roaches. His nape throbbed, his eyelids were crusted, and the slob incarcerated before him had mistaken the water pan for a chamber-pot.

Nauseous, Dakar counted his blessings: he was not wracked by a hangover, or pulped by a bed-frolicking woman’s crazed husband, or worse, brothers outraged by a sister’s lost chastity. Expertly versed at survival in duress, the Mad Prophet knew how to upset a gaoler. Just by singing, he could make his presence unpleasant as nails pounded into the brain. Other wardens had thrown him out on his arse for drawing in plagues of iyats.

Lorn’s square-jawed trusty escaped such grief, due to the predation of the Koriathain, and because temple authority left no heretic sorcerer to corrupt their horde of spiff rodents. Lancers in white surcoats collected Dakar by the scruff before his bashed head stopped spinning.

He played uncooperative and weak at the knees. Despite centuries of civil­ized apprenticeship, the Fellowship’s cast-off spellbinder could belt out insults with dock-side flair. ‘I’m too sick to move,’ he finished off, douce, not faking the fact that the starch had run out of him.

Lethargy forced the hand of his captors. They smutched their white livery, heaved Dakar’s bulk upright, and grunted his dragged heels upstairs, where the predictable jumped-up clerk surely waited to record the sentence.

‘Don’t promise me justice!’ groused Dakar, en route. ‘I’ve seen the facetious performance before. The magistrate’s chamber won’t be a turd-box for rats. No, their two-legged cousins like floors without muck. They’ll expect me to wet myself for a gaggle of buffoons perched on a dais. They’ll wear jewels and prettier robes than you lot, with chins brown as yours, because anyone jostling for a promotion always polishes backsides with puckered lips.’

The warden roared and cocked his mailed fist. Dakar smirked and sagged into a curtsey. While the muscle that propped him upright bowed also, bent over by his unstrung weight, the chap’s armoured knuckles ploughed unimpeded into the stone wall. The screech of steel links made the most stalwart man cringe and caused Dakar to faint into a wad on the landing. The vengeful boots that kicked his larded ribs roused slurred mutters but failed to stiffen his backbone enough to stand up. There forward, he had to be towed by the wrists and ankles like a dead donkey. Onwards up the rough stair, then forcibly skated down a corridor floored with waxed wood, Dakar bemoaned the abuse until his sweated escort flopped him through the doubled doors into the chamber for judgement. Prostrate and panting, he exuded the reek of dead mackerel steeped in rat piss.

The Light’s diviner scarcely blinked at the stench. A bald fellow with translucent skin, he sat enthroned beside candles that lit his livery to eye-stabbing brilliance. The town magistrate and justiciar flanked him like book ends, with a stool set aside for a bothered clerk, and a sparrow-thin orator who plucked up a list and wheezed through the verified accusations.

‘The prisoner will stand for sentencing,’ the temple diviner intoned, his accent from upper-crust Erdani origins.

Dangerous history had roots in that place, where the mayor’s council once had been corrupted by necromancers. Though the cult was defunct, the shady influence still tainted the town’s entrenched factions. Dakar peered through cracked lids and held his tongue. Jammed between two upright guards, unshaven and itching and irritable, he watched the snake in white vestments dispense with all semblance of judgement by trial.

‘For the charge of blasphemy, you will be stripped to suffer ten strokes of the lash, followed by execution without appeal for sorcerous works and dark practice,’ the diviner decreed. ‘May the divine Light cleanse the taint as your wicked heart is pierced by cold steel, and your flesh is consigned to the fire.’

‘Are you done?’ snapped Dakar, revolted to nausea. ‘Better tell your thugs to let me lie down or someone’s sure to regret it.’ Ahead of the officiously outraged recoil, he folded and spewed up his guts. Last night’s sour meal spattered onto the dais and fouled the velvet slippers of his accuser.

Which lapse provoked an ear-splitting screech, and sealed his death at dawn, barely hours away.

‘Break wind and pray all you like!’ Dakar bared his teeth in a snarl. ‘Your lash will not bite. Your sword will not pierce. Worse, the Light you invoke is a shameless fraud! Fire itself should disdain the dry wood you stack to murder the innocent.’

‘Not so innocent.’ Divested of his sullied shoes, one foot raised while the obsequious clerk knelt to remove his splashed hose, the robed diviner pronounced, ‘I have not waived your right to a trial without reason. Before witnesses, you are confirmed as a seer. Not ignorant, but capable of prophetic fits and unimaginably dangerous! Lorn’s warden and two guards overheard quite enough to confirm your damnation. By your own words you named yourself in league with the Spinner of Darkness!’

Dakar sucked a sharp breath, abruptly unnerved. Not by the dire incrimin­ation, but from the nasty surprise that his upset stemmed from no head blow, but in fact arose from the queasy aftermath caused by a bout of tranced prescience.

Worse, the forevisions arisen through a black-out trance became fated. Althain’s Warden himself never found an exception: such events were predestined to happen.

‘This case is sealed!’ The magistrate banged down his gavel and dismissed the guard. ‘See the prisoner secured!’

Too facetious to detail the spurious vision foretold by Dakar’s errant gift, his priestly accusers rushed ahead with their plans for a public roast. Lorn’s dearth of a scaffold meant rousting the hands to nail up a makeshift platform. Lackeys dunned the fish-market smoke-shacks for wood, while the dedicates set the condemned into shackles and flung him back into the dungeon to languish.

There, the novelty packed a collection of gawkers against the cell door with craned necks. But the only Dark minion to face death in Lorn failed to satisfy their curiosity. He moaned on his back in the putrid straw, pathetic as anyone else who suffered the gripe from a crock of spoiled chowder. Eyes shut, he slept and snored like a walrus, which finally drove his nervous wardens to saunter away in disgust.

Dakar continued the racket, the rude noise needful to scare off the rats while he engaged his mage training and spiritwalked.

Immersed in deep trance, he projected his sensitized awareness into his outward surroundings: first into the straw, with its resident scavengers, until he could have identified every noisome rodent, cockroach, and louse maggot by Name. Farther, he expanded, through the forged essence of the steel grille, then the dank masonry that imprisoned him. Lightly as breath, he brushed past the two guards and the warden on duty. Dakar eased his boundaries wider still. Soon, he knew which clerks were diligent and which slouched at their desks as their quills scratched out copies of the summary judgement against him. No written account included the words he had babbled in prophetic trance.

Since a more active scrying could snag the attention of the Light’s pesky diviner, Dakar abandoned the fruitless thrust to recoup the content of his blind prophecy.

Softly, he extended his probe past the ivied walls of the magistrate’s hall. Beyond the cramped wing that housed Lorn’s guild ministry, harbour office, and ramshackle customs shack, he paused where the gulls roosted with heads under wings, beneath the roof peaks and carved cornices. The dark streets below were deserted, except for a drunk who staggered homeward between two companions.

Dakar girded himself in transparent calm, then traced the by-lanes and shut houses, with their slate roofs and dormers smudged in smoke from banked fires. Patience showed him the warded calyx of sigils that shadowed his greater enemy. The Koriathain regrouped, poised to help the Light’s priests fulfill their intent on the scaffold.

Dakar lacked the innate power to thwart them. A second attempt at diversion would spring an attack past his resource to counter. Since the sisterhood’s amplified spells of coercion failed to recognize the Law of the Major Balance, he evoked his knowledge of natural order and melded at one with all things. As frosted air and chill stone, sleeping bird, and even the dark coil of enemy sigils, he slid his merged awareness into, then past their hostile boundaries without impediment. He widened his range: combed through the straggle of the fishermen’s shacks, where honest families slept in their beds. Among them, the particular captain he sought sat awake, puffing a late pipe beside a lit candle.

Relief pushed Dakar’s scrying outward again. He encompassed the pier at the harbour-side: ran with the cold surge of the tide, and splashed as the wavelets that necklaced white foam against the slimed rocks of the breakwater. He became the breast of the salty sea, rocking luggers tied up at their moorings. If each boat had similar clinker-built planks and workaday piles of fish tackle, only one wore the seal of safe passage bestowed by a grateful Fellowship Sorcerer. There lay the spellbinder’s hope of release if he could contrive the means to make a rendezvous.

Dakar stilled the expansion set into motion. Centred within the known sphere he encompassed, he gently loosened his ties to the manifest present.

Adrift in the shadowy realm of on-coming futures, his seer’s talent sorted the overlapped images of what could be, and what might become. Trained focus breasted the ephemeral morass, and with consummate skill, traced the singular threads that concerned him.

Dakar saw the dawn, hard-edged with certainty; then a bled corpse on a scaffold of fish barrels, torched into flame. The alternate view, superimposed and much fainter, showed the unoccupied post and piled billets abandoned. He chose that branch, and from thence, viewed the fisherman of his acquaintance arise and eat breakfast, kiss his wife and three children, and stroll to the docks. Soon after, his boat with the Fellowship’s blessing raised sail and scudded from the harbour. Dakar re-ran that sequence and noted which alley-ways held posted guards, and where the Light’s lancers were quartered. He forecast at what hour the streets would become impassibly jammed with fanatical spectators.

Adept at his craft, he sifted the multiplied twists of event. As the probable thinned into the wisp of the possible, and the views of overlaid futures dispersed into fog, hazed over the glare of infinity, Dakar tested his choices. Through each posited frame of consequence, he selectively chose his best course. Then he woke to ground out his strained senses and reorient. Nerves steeled, he gathered his natural strength. Before the Light’s guardsmen arrived to collect him, the condemned paid his earnest respects to the rats, who had forborne to gnaw at his finger-tips.