Yet how daring the reel, and how giddy the pace, Dakar failed to anticipate. Not until after the sunwheel gold was unveiled in the dusty glare of the stone-yard. The mason cocked back his filthy, slouch hat and related the audacious scope of Prince Arithon’s planned machinations.
Much too late, the sane man found the sense to refuse. In the stifling sheds, helped by an anxious wife and three boys, the shop’s craftsmen packed their tools and belongings in preparation for swift flight. They were town-bred and upholding a choice that would see their home and livelihood abandoned against certain charges of treason. The spellbinder regarded the two close-mouthed clansmen, for whose sake these stout folk offered sacrifice. The strapping fellows were half-stripped to load wagons, and collared, if not actually captive. The price of their ruse had been paid all the same. Both sweated in pain from the heated iron that had disfigured their muscular forearms.
‘Why are these people doing this?’ Dakar asked point-blank, as the displaced family bustled around him.
Both clansmen stopped work. One replied in Paravian. ‘They act for what’s right. It’s an ironic twist out of history’
When Dakar’s distrustful glower stayed fixed, the other posed conscript explained. ‘Apparently their mother was once taken prisoner by Earl Jieret’s war captain, Caolle. He’d slaughtered her brother during a caravan raid to save the secret of our liege’s whereabouts. But the sister was weaponless. She had two weans. Stuck holding the knife, Caolle lost his nerve. Since he couldn’t slit three helpless throats in cold blood, the bunch was held in Daon Ramon, then released when their news lost its value. The old lady’s stayed bitter. Still funds the league’s bounties. But her older boy had seen through the lies that drive townsmen to kill for our differences. The mason who helps us is that man, grown, and now it’s our children he’s saving.’
Dakar mopped his face, seized clammy with dread. Having heard tonight’s plans in their damning entirety, he found no assurance to allay the fear that still leached at his shrinking resolve. ‘We’re not just effecting a rescue,’ he challenged. ‘Follow this through, and you set your young sons at worse risk than gelding abuse by a brothel.’
Both of the clanborn fathers stared back. The one with the bruised look around his eyes said, ‘For all the bodily harm they might see, their lost sisters stand to lose more than their lives. As a Fellowship spellbinder sent here to curb necromancy, if you can’t find the gall to lead these coaches up-town, then charter law binds us to force you.’
Dakar mounted the driver’s box with shaking knees. The reins of the team weighed like lead in his sweating grasp. He rousted the horses, set the front vehicle rolling, not by choice, not for courage or duty, but for the lives of twenty-four boys, and for the friend whose unreserved trust relied on a flawless deception at Simshane’s.
By then, the Master of Shadow was installed at the sunwheel pavilion, strings tuned for the priests, with the first set already in motion.
The most infamous night in Etarran history since the renegade prince’s failed accession began with a murmur, as the reddened sun dipped into the haze of a fair-weather twilight. The routine, written summary that detailed the Light’s vanished tribute gold had cleared the torpid delay of officialdom and reached the Lord Marshal’s desk. A dispatch runner was bearing the customary sealed copy to Raiett Raven, when the closed coaches led by a grim-faced, fat driver reined up at the rear entrance of Simshane’s House of Exotic Delights.
There, two massive chests were unloaded by eunuchs. The lids were pried open, and what had worn the semblance of plain, Skyshiel granite chimed through the proprietor’s covetous hands. His nod to his staff tied up the exchange: two dozen young boys clad in bangles and paint were loaded and sent on their way. The packed coaches that bore them ground through darkening streets, wheel-spokes glinting by lamplight. A bribe ensured that they cleared the south gate. More coin, and a discreet, spelled deception circumvented the routine inspection. The draft teams lumbered slowly downhill, while inside the town, a tip-off enclosed in a sealed affidavit was slipped into the Etarran Lord Magistrate’s evening docket.
By then, the news of the infamous gold theft had been sorted by Raiett Raven’s secretary. Since the High Chancellor now changed his state robes for his customary light supper, and given that he preferred to reflect in solitude as he dined on his private balcony, his staff withheld the interruption until the steward brought the dessert wine.
Across town, the anonymous affidavit planted with the magistrate encountered a different frame of delay: it was readdressed and turned into the hands of the acting officer of Etarra’s garrison. The parchment arrived at the watch change, as the Lord Marshal departed for home. His night sergeant signed in, a gaunt creature known for blunt fists and a vicious temper. His ambitious, hard eyes perused the sealed statement, and widened. ‘Dharkaron’s trampling Five Horses avenge!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you look where those thieving priests cashed their tribute?’ Seasoned troops were rushed off to ransack Simshane’s brothel before its pervert staff could snatch time to melt down the critical evidence.
Dakar’s rented coaches, by then, were reined up by the verge, apparently stalled by the failure of one wheel’s linchpin. When a passing carter pulled over to offer assistance, the livery barn’s borrowed driver agreed to shoulder the nuisance of the repair. The fat lackey’s live cargo was transferred to the volunteered vehicle, bound and gagged, and bundled from sight under blankets. More coin changed hands. Slightly mussed, and reeking of scent, the boys rolled on their way in a slatted dray crammed with hogsheads.
In the sunwheel pavilion, the Light’s oblivious priesthood dined on roast swan and wine, their snowy raiment resplendent under candles and torch-light. If the loss of their gold left them with galled nerves, the skill of the bard was a tonic. Their rankled mood eased to his hand on the strings, and the honeyed gift of his singing. His talent raised no taint of distrust. Under the sighted acolytes’ scrutiny, he had pressed his bare lips to the relic containing the Blessed Prince’s plucked hair. That potent talisman should have unmasked any minion of Darkness. If free singers elsewhere were held in suspicion, this one had established his harmlessness. Since his repertoire extolled the Light’s glory with every sincere sign of reverence, by the hour the picked bones were cleared from the boards, his credentials were taken as sterling.
Up-town, the High Chancellor’s repast enjoyed no such felicitous tranquillity: the belatedly delivered official parchment caused the decanted wine to be abandoned beside a fluttering candle. Black-clad and grim, Raiett Raven raced from his balcony, shouting for spurs and boots, to be followed by an armed company of light horse to escort him at speed through the gate.
Across town at Simshane’s, beside the gutted wreck of his desk, the distressed proprietor now pleaded in irons, alongside his weeping head eunuch. The purchase document bearing the sunwheel seal was being read off by an astonished equerry. Given the two chests of Alliance-stamped gold as firm evidence, Etarra’s night sergeant realized he was in over his head. He dispatched two men, who rushed word of the horrific scandal to the senior ear of the off-duty Lord Marshal.
That errand zigzagged from the man’s private house to the packed doors of the up-town theatre. There, a snobbish refusal to let in the uniformed watch created more fuming delay. The shouting cut through the players’ performance. The Lord Marshal left his seat in his formal attire, to the tittering amusement of Etarra’s pedigree society. Whispered talk swept the boxes throughout the last act, while the grooms’ gossip also chewed over the stir as two liveried lackeys were sent at a run to the governor’s mansion. For all their haste, they failed to inform the High Chancellor. His lordship’s rattled butler opened the door in the wake of his master’s precipitous departure. The stalwart attempt to intercept him at the stable proved a wasted effort. Raiett had already mounted and gone.
‘Valley bound,’ grumped the grizzled master of horse. ‘Whipped his best mare in a towering fury, which isn’t his usual,
believe me.’
The stable-boy’s scandalized comment was ripe. ‘Old Raven swore he’d rip gizzards for negligence before he ever licks arse for a bunch of disgruntled priests.’ Not convinced any lump sum in bullion had slipped through the Light’s obsequious fingers, Raiett was bound to have somebody’s blood, just for the stinging effrontery. ‘Aye so, wait and see. He’ll force satisfaction. That upright, brass tack won’t bury a victimized theft on his orderly turf at Etarra.’
Night deepened, with the up-town propriety moiled through by an ever-widening dissonance. More messengers clattered down torch-lit, brick streets. The armed squads of the Lord Marshal’s horsemen rammed their purposeful way past the idle rakes seeking sport. Cries for right of way detained the elderly rich, jaunting on social calls in their glittering, lacquered carriages. In small knots, the bored and the curious abandoned their engagements to investigate. Soon the shake-down at Simshane’s drew a titillated crowd, while on the roadway below the south gate, the town-guard, with warrants, surrounded the parked hulks of two suspect coaches.
The bartered, live cargo had vanished long since. The rental hack’s driver knew nothing. Brisk questions devolved into fist-shaking threats that unravelled to frustrated shouting.
The burgeoning fracas launched echoes uphill. Errant sparks to stacked fuel: Etarra’s pedigree elite relished a social gaffe as nowhere else on the continent.
Meantime, the hotly sought children were safely sequestered in the darkened gloom of a harness shop. There, the erstwhile mason’s two conscript clansmen settled their terrified tears. They assessed with soft questions, bolstered flagged spirits, and selected eight boys who possessed the audacious nerve to score a courageous revenge.
Dakar watched those small warriors straighten cowed spines. Sly grins became snickers. The most determined of the child volunteers was no less than the panicky sprite who had landed the festering bite on his thumb.
‘You don’t have to prove your young manhood to me,’ he assured, as the boy stepped up to the mark.
‘It’s those priests who should worry,’ the wee demon pronounced.
Dakar laughed, at last shaken loose by the chance to spit in the teeth of self-righteous authority. Granted the pluck displayed by last night’s captives, he would see the snide viciousness driving Arithon’s ploy orchestrated into a command performance. Committed, he saluted the determined clan parents and loaded the chosen contingent of boys back into the empty hogsheads. The barrels now carried a vintner’s guild brand, with the wagon currently bearing the load painted to match the conveyance owned by Etarra’s best winery.
Dakar tucked another sunwheel-sealed requisition into the breast of his shirt. Now whistling, he leaped on the driver’s box, then rolled the laden vehicle from the shed, attended by two apprentice masons reclad as lackeys. On schedule, the mule-team was reined towards the lit tents of the Light’s frocked evangelists.
As the wine-cart creaked from the darkened warren of craft shops, the looping road from the town wall was not quiet. Above slope, in meshed timing, the paired torches of the High Chancellor’s outriders blinked through the gate piercing the lower barbicans.
‘Dharkaron! We’re slicker than butter on bread,’ enthused the young man to the Mad Prophet’s left.
No chuckles emerged from his sober companion. ‘Too easy, perhaps. Mind your back. We’re sure to be gutted as heretic dissenters if we get careless.’
Dakar hushed the stray talk and soon pulled the team to a stop at the verge of the practise field. While the bored sentries who manned the priests’ checkpoint arose from their dice to verify clearance, he easily tracked the whipped flare of the cressets, where the second armed company from the Lord Marshal’s garrison now escorted the pair of stalled coaches. They had turned downhill, zealously chasing the trail of Simshane’s execrable bargain. Paused at the hack stable, they would grill the head hostler. The geezer was deaf, and would also know nothing, since the rental fee had been paid with clean silver, under false name and employment. They were not going to get as far as the mason’s, whose compound was already emptied.
The wine shipment to the priests being expected, Dakar’s burdened cart was waved through. He rolled his load up to the central pavilion, conferred with its polished sunwheel steward, and received a signature on his receipt. A fox grin and a wave stirred his idling henchmen. ‘Let down the tail-board. No dedicate wants to dirty their linen, so they’ve asked us to pile their shipment inside.’
More sentries admitted them through the back flap.
The sweet-ringing shower of music from the bard affirmed a finale now smoothly in progress.
‘We’re spot on target,’ Dakar informed the men. Since he dared not try mage-craft in a sunwheel encampment endowed with a gifted examiner, the party masquerading as vintners had to plug their ears with soft wax. Dakar thumped a barrel in prearranged signal, and inside the tent, the blind singer’s fingers configured a deft change in tempo and key. The music acquired an unearthly, sweet strain. Unaffected by an uncanny harmony that tugged mind and heart towards oblivion, the fake wine broker’s men proceeded to unload their wagon.
One by one, the casks were hefted inside the pavilion and stacked behind the laid tables, with their extravagant flood of cinnabar candlelight. All the while, the bard plied his glittering strings. His spelled song wove light into a subliminal web. Peace settled, soft as air itself. The fluttering moths stilled pale wings and alit. The trill of night insects went silent. Bound into a settling, eerie calm, the sunwheel priests nodded off on their couches. They snored, while the glassy-eyed guards at their threshold lost focus and drifted, then collapsed at the knees, fast asleep. Dakar and his henchmen grasped their slack wrists. Shielded behind the bulk of the wine-cart, they hauled the recumbent soldiers inside. Throughout, the bard’s milky gaze never wavered. The lyranthe notes struck and soared, bright as gilt, bedazzling all within listening range into soporific delight. Dakar and his apprentices closed the door flap. Fast as men with a grievance, they bent to the task of unbreeching the prostrate priests.
Fat and thin, well-muscled or soft, the creatures were stripped of their smallclothes. Then the eight sleeping boys were removed from the casks. Each one was arranged, in their paint and perfume, in pliant repose alongside.
Meantime, the lyranthe’s spellbinding measures were brought to a masterful close. The bard arose smiling and gladly agreed to accept a lift home in the wine-cart. Dakar and his accomplices slipped back outside, the last one guiding the free singer’s step as he was helped over the tail-board. The stamped paper bearing the steward’s mark saw the vehicle clear of the camp and into the dense summer darkness.
Between shed rows, another driver appeared, took over the reins, and turned the wagon with the mason’s apprentices onto the east-bound road. Dakar and the blind bard parted ways with them there, melted into the nettles and wild scrub that bordered the edge of the tourney-field. A short way upslope, they were rejoined by the skulking pair of branded clansmen. Only now the conscript collars were gone, replaced by soft leathers and weapons.
‘We left the stage set to perfection,’ Dakar said, on fire with nerves as he crouched into the covering thicket.
The vantage permitted an untrammelled view: of the sunwheel pavilions, with gilt trappings agleam under the pale fall of starlight; of the weaving torches that demarked the site where two Etarran armed companies dispatched from up-town were presently jammed nose to nose. Arrived on level ground by the livery barns, and the ramshackle maze of the craft shacks, the High Chancellor and his outriders encountered the garrison’s contingent and exchanged their incredulous news. The venue became lamentably public: loiterers lured out of the recruit camp’s wine-shops overheard the raised voices. The Lord Marshal’s exodus from the theatre had also attracted a loftier trail of coaches and lamp-men, mounted rakes, and the idle curious: thrill-seekers drawn by the promise of sport and an insatiable nose for fresh scandal.
‘End game,’ whispered Arithon with sat
isfied glee. His swift fingers stayed busy, unwinding the lyranthe’s tuning pegs. The moment he had the bass courses loosened, he slipped his hand inside the instrument’s sound-hole.
‘Get ready,’ he murmured as he groped inside. ‘Mind you don’t piss yourselves laughing.’
The unsmiling clansmen checked the hang of their knives. They stood watch and guard as the free singer produced a shining collection of iyats. A soft flow of Paravian, a neat turn of talent, and Arithon imposed his directive. The fiends were unleashed to wreak vindictive mayhem, just as Raiett Raven’s smart horsemen formed ranks and spurred on to descend upon the encampment of priests.
The peace lasted as long as an intaken breath. Then a wisp of dust puffed across the parched ground. Movement rustled the central pavilion’s stainless expanse of taut canvas. A guy-line supporting the ridge-pole popped loose and slithered, dragging its uprooted sliver of stake. Another knot gave. A third rope came unravelled. The massive tent shimmied a moment, its golden sunwheel billowing. Then a spark bloomed from nowhere and fell. It settled downwards like a hellish red star upon the religion’s cloth emblem. Gilt glimmered a moment in crimson reflection. Then flame kindled, fanned into a whooshing blaze, as the unstable canvas ignited into conflagration.
Upslope, a wall sentry yelled. The watchkeep’s alarm bells shattered the night. Downslope, the slumbering war camp erupted. Men seethed from their tents. Hopping and yanking on clothes, they snatched up their armour and weapons. Crushed into the forefront, Raiett Raven’s contingent of riders reined up by the wildfire, chased by their straggle of thrill-seeking, pedigree gawkers.