Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts
have singed the order’s ranked Seniors into embarrassed retreat. ‘By my accurate count, his Grace has recalled nothing, yet. He’s worked no craft at all! Beyond a bard’s turn of phrase with a flute, and the resonant notes to move iron, he’s carried off his friend’s rescue by straightforward subterfuge. A few darts made of tinker’s pins, aimed with effect, and the mischievous instinct that knows where a strategic bonfire will raise tempers and draw in stray iyats.’
Asandir frowned. ‘Then Arithon hasn’t yet tapped the force of his born gift for Shadow?’
‘No.’ Sethvir lowered his fingers, limpid turquoise eyes widened by acute distress. ‘Last night, his Grace moved at large in the yard of a travellers’ inn with no more protection than a burlap bag used to hood his face.’
‘It was snowing?’ Asandir observed, thoughtful. A seasoned winter traveller, he knew that grooms often sheltered their heads with grain sacking under a pinch-thrift stableman. ‘You don’t feel the prince was cautious by restraint, in line with his sly touch for cleverness?’
The reluctant pause lagged. Sethvir picked up the gold-and-black hawk’s quill with fidgety care, and said presently, ‘Earlier today, a temple high priest claimed to have sensed an act of dark spellcraft disturbing the flux lines. But actually, no such deflection took place. The True Sect’s examiner at Kelsing conducted the search of an innocent’s home under that falsified testimony.’
Asandir raised straight eyebrows, coarse as steel filings on his weathered face. ‘Ah.’
Sethvir’s anger acquired a dangerous spark of leashed rage. ‘More, that brazen lie marked an honest crofter for the scaffold and saw his family stripped of their landed inheritance.’
The logic required a beat to unravel. ‘No craft was used. The lane currents were silent. Else we’d have had Koriathain themselves drawn to Arithon’s refuge like crawling lice.’ Asandir sat very still, sensitive to the myriad threads of inquiry sorted by the vast range of his colleague’s earth-sense. ‘Then whose poisoned suggestion tipped off the prying diviner?’
‘A snitch with a rumour,’ Sethvir answered, too tightly succinct. ‘One inept, rebuffed suitor informed the temple those crofters had sheltered a ruffian.’
‘Quite a long leap, to peg a mere beggarman sight unseen as an affirmed minion of Shadow.’ The knifed lines of Asandir’s frown intensified. ‘How did Arithon raise undue attention?’
‘The deep empathy he evolved to appease Marak’s wraiths has entrained him to hear the nuanced pitch of emotion. A neat trap,’ Sethvir said, ‘exploiting the fact he still is quite defenseless, without a haven, and left with no secure route for escape.’
With all recourse hobbled in Arithon’s behalf, the old set-backs festered like thorns in the flesh, that the temple’s sway over Tysan remained absolute. The canon’s long-standing doctrine of fear kept the ports and the borders locked under a Light-sanctioned chokehold. Which ironclad security had been what prompted the Koriathain to locate Arithon’s spelled term of captivity at the ruined earl’s court at Kelsing. If their brazen connivance also used the false faith as the sleeve to flush out their fugitive, the move seemed an ominous excess.
Asandir gauged Sethvir’s raw nerves and probed gently, ‘Prime Selidie cannot fear the s’Ffalenn penchant for vengeful fury at this pass.’ Not if Arithon had yet to recall why he should bear the initiate witches a capital grudge.
Sethvir folded the sleeked hawk feather into a silk cloth, then picked up the gaudy flask. The indigo glaze, emerald vine-leaves, and scarlet birds glinted with gemstone brilliance as he raised the vessel up to the light and peered askance through the flawed glass stopper. His colleague knew not to press him. When the Warden chose to deliver bad news, his word often struck like the fall of a hammer and smashed every alternate option past salvage.
‘The thrust has changed,’ Sethvir allowed. ‘Since Selidie’s settlement rests our oath of noninterference, the Prime’s decided she has the leeway to spin wider plans. I’m loath to suggest that Arithon may be of more use to her, now, as a gambit.’
‘They’re angling for Lysaer?’ Asandir snapped point-blank.
‘Let’s hope I’m mistaken.’ Sethvir tapped the flawed crystal. His finger touch sparked a blast of raw light. When the flash cleared, the crack that gave the glass character stayed: but the chip was erased, which impaired the stopper’s integrity. ‘Lysaer cannot be other than compromised.’ Either by the roused influence of the Mistwraith’s curse or through the born drive for justice instilled into his royal lineage, the Prime’s exploitive stake in high temple affairs must engage the attention of its forsworn founder.
With the sinister upshot that the delinquent avatar well might fall prey to that lure. The sisterhood yet bore Lysaer’s entrenched enmity. To thwart their machinations, and to wrest Tysan’s religious populace free of their corrupt influence, he might well step in and resume his lapsed charge as the divine figure-head worshipped by the Light’s faithful. Should the affray in the westlands push him to try, he would flirt with a peril beyond his means to defuse: Desh-thiere’s insidious geas never slept. Its subtle pressure would warp any action he took and distort even the most altruistic morality.
‘Is Lysaer yet aware he may face a fresh trial?’ Asandir ventured at length.
‘Oh, yes.’ The frightful back-lash could not be disowned, that Arithon’s restored freedom inevitably renewed the murderous compulsion to destroy his half brother. Sethvir granted the proof of that horror without words and shared a fragment of image: as nightmares had broken Lysaer’s sleep, and wrung him to cold sweat and dread before daybreak. The vicious dynamic resurged beyond quarter, with his cursed nemesis once more at large in the world. Already, the sterling strengths of true character staged the potential for a tragic relapse.
‘We face a bad call regardless,’ Sethvir admitted in gloomy assessment.
If, against weighted odds, the s’Ilessid sustained his avowed course and renounced his former posture of divine importance, he would leave the religion’s false doctrine intact, ripe for other arcane exploitation. Lysaer’s absence ceded the Prime a wide-open field to keep steering the True Sect’s high priesthood.
Which naked threat made Asandir bristle. ‘No chance the Matriarch won’t pounce on the choice to leverage the Light’s canon as her ready weapon against us.’
‘The Paravians’ return could shatter that web,’ Sethvir murmured, deceptively wistful. But the diamond gleam behind his veiled lashes bespoke tears before dreamer’s bemusement.
‘Check, then, if not mate,’ Asandir finished, tart for the venomous irony. For of course, with the old races lost to the world, the chore of house-cleaning such meddlesome spiders fell under the Fellowship’s purview.
The Koriani Prime would launch her ambitious assault, with the impasse bought by Arithon’s term of captivity broken at last. Marak’s invasive wraths might be banished, but the Fellowship’s hands remained overburdened. The discorporate Sorcerers Kharadmon and Luhaine yet laboured to dismantle the mighty wardspells, once fashioned to separate the rogue horde into single entities whence a masterbard’s song could transmute them. A grand construct potent enough to dim the world’s sun must be unravelled, each coil of energy harmlessly dispersed before the onset of explosive attrition. More, the life-web of two other afflicted worlds required to be mended and rebalanced.
Asandir’s practicality never minced words. ‘Either the Koriathain turn the might of the masses to shatter the compact, or we rend our own solemn oath by desperate means to prevent them.’
Sethvir picked a napped thread off his cuff. ‘We’re all too conveniently hobbled.’ Cheerless, he placed the repaired vessel in a niche where sunlight would fire the vibrant enamels. If the gesture brightened the cloud settled over the library, no rainbow might ease the gloomy predicament that Lysaer s’Ilessid had been formally outcast from the protective grant made by the Fellowship for mankind’s lawful settlement. An unmalleable point the Prime Matriarch planned to mine for her ruthless advantage.