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 satisfied 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.
The carriages parked. Mounted dandies milled in obstructive fascination, while the High Chancellor and the armed company's field sergeants seized charge and barked irritable commands to set cordons. The heaving press sorted itself like stirred glue. While rescuers stormed the collapsing tents, a bucket brigade formed, and the first naked priests sprinted out of their torched pavilion.
They were not alone. Each had a boy-child clamped to his neck. Coughing and shrieking with tearful hysteria, the mites wore naught but grease-paint and perfume, and the sparkling gleam of paste jewelry.
Surprised fingers pointed. A shocked matron shrieked. Upright citizens recoiled. Hard-bitten campaign officers jeered. While veteran troops whooped in mocking laughter, the recruit infantrymen under their orders hurled down their filled buckets in poleaxed disgust. The frightened boys released their bellowing clients, t
hen bolted, streaking like hares through the crowd. Catching them paled beside watching the Light's high priest, nakedly protesting his innocence. Raiett Raven reined in his plunging horse. While the onlookers jostled to snatch the best view, his lashing contempt carried through wind and smoke and the racket of outraged catcalls.
'I am sickened!' Poised at the forefront of political disaster, he had to distance himself to avoid getting mobbed. 'Shame on us all, that honest funds were allotted to raise a temple for scum! Spare us! The vice masquerading behind the seal of our Prince Exalted is worse than a shaming fraud! In the name of the blessed avatar himself, I will see each wretched malingerer stripped. Justice will be served for abusing the public trust to support lewd acts and depraved habits!'
While the soldiers rounded up the buff miscreants, and the bucket brigade surged to toss mud clods, the breathless children pelted into the brush, met by the arms of their kinsmen.
'Time to go,' said the bard. He asked one of the boys to guide his sightless step through the rapid retreat to the craft quarter. Dakar himself was too crazed with relief to question the need for that ruse. Breathlessly rushed towards shelter and safety, then panting to catch his lost wind, he crouched in a noisome cranny between sheds. There, he measured the public outcry, and the course of the fire, fast reducing the Light's wrecked encampment to ashes. He cleared a throat stinging from laughter and smoke and realized he owed an apology for the ignominy suffered at Simshane's. Turned in redress, he encountered a shock: the blind bard no longer accompanied them.
'Where's the singer?' he blurted.
Fast as thought, a scout clamped a hand to his lips. Armed men from the war camp now fanned out on patrol, enforcing the need for strict silence.
Dakar had to wait till their threatened straits eased before he dared press for an answer. Too late, he learned that Arithon had returned to the cooper's shop to face down the official inquiry.
'He's a free singer, and blind,' allowed the brusque clansman. He shrugged off lathered worry, wary fingers poised on his knives and his eyes like chipped flint as the children were bedded down under sacking in a sympathizer's fusty warehouse. 'The man can't be held responsible for what he couldn't see. Since the cooper's kinfolk know nothing at all, he had to stay. No way else could he prove out their innocence.'
Dakar caught his breath, wrung by visceral dread. Fast as he dodged through the warren of shanties and burst into the ramshackle craft shack, he came too late. The cooper's distraught wife let him know that the bard's steady answers had satisfied no one.
Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn had been taken up-town in the custody of Raiett Raven's personal guard. Left behind without means to slip through the security set over the governor's mansion, Dakar blotted
fresh sweat and questioned the desolate craftsfolk. 'Did the singer resist?'
'In fact, he went smiling.' The burly cooper shook his bald head, unsettled a bit by the question. 'We all understood the arrest was a farce. The fellow had nothing dishonest to hide. Even the soldiers showed him due respect. They led him off on the back of a horse and allowed the lyranthe to go with him.'
'He'll be back by morning,' Dakar was assured by the tow-head who sharpened the adze blades.
Except for one suspect, insidious fact, recollected too late for avoidance. The Mad Prophet remembered the insouciant stakes lately placed on a public wager. The free singer's boast would be delivered tonight with a twist of excoriating arrogance: that the brilliant allure of his music could enact a palliative cure for insomnia.
'By the rank breath of Dharkaron's Black Horses!' Dakar swore, pressed to frightened exasperation. No belated rescue might follow; no impromptu act of fast salvage. Rathain's crown prince had gone to the adder's den, with six hours of darkness left before dawn and no man at his shoulder to back him. 'My blind idiot, you are setting the hare on the fox! What in Daelion's name were you thinking?'
Etarra's High Chancellor himself stayed on edge since his return from the priesthood's debacle. The recurrent nightmares that ravaged his sleep meant his sixty-five years no longer rode his frame kindly. Ascetically thin before he had deserted his family interests at Hanshire to assume the mantle of s'Ilessid service, Raiett, still called Raven, now wore the semblance of a nerve-wracked hawk, gaunt-cheeked, and beak-nosed, and craggy. His magnetic presence and keen intelligence wielded ruling authority with unimpaired prowess. The peridot eyes still burned like chill flame in the cavernous frame of deep sockets. Scorched by his impatience, the servants saw him divested of leathers and arms, freshly shaven, and reclad in the comfort of house clothes.
He was up and pacing the unadorned closet he kept for debriefing spies before his burdened outriders could dismount and escort the suspect free singer upstairs.
'My Lord, your instructions?' the liveried butler inquired.
The trailing hem of Raiett's belted robe whispered on tile as he spun between strides. 'Have my armed men bring the prisoner in. Drag up the oak chair.'
At the butler's raised eyebrows, Etarra's High Chancellor snapped outright, 'You think I'm uncivil? Too bad. Keep him bound. I'll want cord, as well, for his ankles.'
Raiett was poised still when the guardsmen arrived. Behind him, the tall candelabra were lit. A log on the hearth threw off cloying heat. The combined glare rendered his motionless form as a mirrored reflection. His preferred black velvet was flecked with shell clasps, and his silver hair combed, shoulder-length. Lean hands clasped, he watched the prisoner dragged in with a viper's drilling intensity.
If the singer had faked blindness, his act was unflawed. The guard leading him guided each diffident step. When his heel hooked on the threshold, the white eyes stayed fixed, and never once flickered downwards. The aged face displayed no tell-tale creases of crow's-feet, and the mismatched, cast-off clothing was ineptly patched at elbow and knee. The instrument borne by the trailing guard was nondescript, a likely find in a jumble-shop.
The bard seemed as harmlessly ancient and worn. Pressed into a seat in the unpadded chair, then bound hand and foot for rough questioning, the odd creature seemed submissive enough. Except those sensitive, showman's hands showed not a quiver of nervous distress.
Raiett was not wont to miss a detail. Further, as the rumpled white head tipped his way, cued by the sound of his breathing, the expressive mouth curved with the insolent suggestion of cynical forbearance.
All effrontery, in fact, the bard chose to speak first. 'The lyranthe of herself cannot frame words. Is this an interrogation?'
Caught setting the instrument on a tasselled couch, the trailing man-at-arms blushed.
Raiett replied in time to forestall the soft idiot's contrite apology. 'The lyranthe of herself does not cut down pitched tents. Or set them aflame to unveil a staged scandal. Confess why you came to discredit our priests, and we can begin with a round of polite conversation.' He waved the guard back to assume position in the hallway outside the closed door. By established custom, a taciturn pair of veterans remained on station behind the strapped captive.
'I didn't come for polite conversation.' The bard shifted his shoulders, to no avail. His aged wrists were affixed to the chair-back, tight enough to cause him discomfort.
Raiett edged a step closer. 'Did you not?'
Blind eyes never wavered, but the weather-lined face lit up with engaging amusement. 'I came to sing. You're not care-free?'
The High Chancellor was no sorcerer. His measure of born talent could not pierce through the audacious layers of wrought subterfuge. Yet the keen prompt of instinct made him sure of his hunch: this man was the Master of Shadow. Lifetime connoisseur of intrigue, Raiett Raven savoured his moment to challenge the peril placed at his private disposal.
'Nor am I your enemy,' said the man in the chair, 'the shame to your upstart priests notwithstanding.'
Which declaration was a slap without parallel, a taunting dare to unmask the bold sleight of hand, or expose the arcane trick and prove the Light's defamed delegates had been victimized. No, Ra
iett acknowledged: the damage was done. Tonight's display of vice could not be eclipsed. This frail singer's arraignment could never appease the contempt of a thousand outraged, sober witnesses.
'Our summer campaign's defanged, nonetheless,' Raiett declared with stripped irritation. 'Give me a reason why you should not bleed without trial for your malicious act of live sabotage.'
The mirth that dogged the bard's lips disappeared. 'Because no one's died yet. I am here, as I promised, to offer a permanent cure for the nightmares that cause your insomnia.' The old singer's eyebrows, perhaps, showed the faintest tuck of impatience. 'Release my hands. Send your guardsmen away. You cannot dismiss the harsh facts in this case. Dare you afford to misjudge my appeal? If you fail here, what fate for Etarra? Can your misguided faith save the people you govern? You have rats in your cellar. By all means, let them breed. Ignore their insidious pestilence, while you scour my empty carcass for fleas.'
Blind eyes bored straight ahead, but no flawless performance could defer the fraught crux: now the hands in their bindings were rigid.
Raiett Raven measured that first sign of stress. Then, stung incredulous, he also divined the blistering courage behind the urgent appeal. 'You were Fellowship-sent?'
The guards stirred, behind. The burly one with the unquiet eyes closed his fist and unsheathed his belt-knife. The blind singer would know by the dissonant ring that the drawn steel bore a lethal temper, If he did not flinch for the blade at his back, he was not impervious, after all.
Springing sweat striped down his temples. 'Does that matter, my friend?'
Raiett returned a clipped head-shake, cranked to a strained note of sorrow. 'My choice holds no sway any more, my bold lark. Your offer comes far too late to spare any-one. Bid farewell to the sun. For you, the bad dreams won't be ending at daybreak.'
'No execution in public?' said the bard to his captor with taut grief. 'I won't have my clean passage across Fate's Wheel?'