Softly as the whisper of wind, Tarens was eased in careful stages through the gloom between the dusty, back rows of stalls. Past the straight slots used to quarter cheap hacks, and the boxes for the quality livestock, the hay driver’s mules were tied up with the nags, munching nose-bags of oats. Across the aisle, a mountainously muscular bull jangled the chain that secured its nose-ring. Huge, black and furious, it pawed and swiped its capped horns, eager to trample all comers to mincemeat.
Which rampaging peril hooked the vagabond’s interest.
‘Here, let me,’ Tarens croaked. The late darling consigned to the knackers made him expertly skilled with brute-tempered bullocks. Since death by goring seemed preferable to facing the temple’s tribunal, he veered on unsteady legs and took up the goad he found hooked on a nail. Ceded the brazen initiative, one defensive arm clamped to his injured side, Tarens sucked a wheezed breath and staggered forward. He jabbed the bull’s flank. When it humped up and plunged, he judged his moment, shoved into the board stall, and dropped into a roll through the straw. Impetus carried him past the beast’s forelegs, then broke through a musty veil of old cobweb and fetched him into a huddle beneath the stout slats of the manger.
Just as agile, nipped in tight behind, the vagabond slithered into the fusty nook, still packing the tarp. While Tarens shuddered, vised helpless with cramps, his friend’s resourcefulness lined their noisome refuge with hay, then fashioned a makeshift bedroll. He tucked Tarens inside to get warm, then took charge of the goad and ducked out to pursue the necessities of their survival.
The crofter laid back his sore head, at last granted a measure of surcease. While the wind keened outside, and thickened flakes drifted into the season’s first snowfall, he gave way to the grief that seeped stinging tears through his bruised eyelids. Shortly, he slept. Or else unconsciousness granted its fugitive gift of oblivion.
Much later, he roused to the ice-kiss of snow, packed into a compress and pressed against the throb of his disfigured face. Shock drove the last gasp of breath from his lungs. Then the grate of his splintered nose drove him to whimpering agony. A warmed cup touched his lips. The vagabond gently coaxed Tarens to swallow a bitter brew of valerian mixed with willow bark. Drugged into a haze, he still had to be gagged to stifle his cries through the trauma of splinting. His crushed nose required reed straws and stuffed rags to redress such drastic damage. A skilled healer somewhere had trained the deft hands that ventured such bone-setter’s work without flinching.
The after-shock left Tarens dizzy and limp. Sweating, he languished. The oblivious bull chewed its cud overhead, while the relentless, doctoring fingers moved on and unlaced his ripped clothing. His skin was toweled clean with a wet burlap sack. Past question, the handling was expert: each cut and bruise was assessed, then plied with the strong remedies filched from the hostler’s stores in the tack room. The snow packs were replaced with a poultice of wintergreen mixed into goose grease and bound into place with the leg wraps kept for lame horses. The treatment was done in pitch-darkness throughout, quietly sure, without fumbling.
Legend held that born talent could see without light. The True Sect priesthood required no other sign to condemn any heretic charged with dark sorcery.
Tarens was too muddled to confront the dire proof or broach the issue of thorny morality. Whether spelled tricks or thievery had acquired the cup, or if dishonest practice had steeped the soporific tisane that eased him, the relief that dulled the mending sting of his cuts melted him into a stupor. As the braced flush of astringents soothed battered muscles, he swallowed the hot broth he was offered, then the second dose of valerian prepared to settle him. Adrift towards oblivion, he closed his eyes. If his soul had been traded for craven survival, his spirits were too low to care.
Deep in the night, he reawoke to the nightmare of searchers invading the stable with lanterns. This time in earnest, dedicates in white surcoats tossed through the straw in the horse stalls. Their shouts and commotion were joined by the clangour of the fire-bell, jangled to summon the hostler. The man shambled in, wrapped in flannel and beer breath. He climbed to the loft and kicked his sleepy grooms, until tousled horse-boys with hay in their hair tumbled, swearing, out of their blankets. Granted no chance to pull on their boots, they scurried on stockinged feet to fling open grain bins, lead out courier’s hacks, and shift haltered mules at the whim of the diligent task squad. More urgent outcries and pungent oaths filtered in from the carriage yard. Evidently the innkeeper’s outspoken wife fared no better in behalf of her rousted patrons as the temple’s foray swept through the tavern. Her curses blistered ears to no purpose. Pillows and blankets were put to the sword. Smoke laced by the stink of singed goose-down rolled in billows as the inn’s quilts and mattresses were torched in a heap. The fumes made the chained bullock bellow and paw. Its restive temper daunted the grooms, who cried blame on their fellows for the mislaid goad, inexplicably gone from its hook.
The troop captain gave their timid protests short shrift.
‘That vicious beast poses the least of your fears. A minion of Shadow’s at large in the district, and I’m under mandate to find him. Move that animal. Now! Or the ninny who shrinks will be put to the sword as a criminal collaborator.’
As the reluctant hostler shuffled in compliance, Tarens started to a touch on his arm, quickly followed by furtive movement in the stygian dark beneath the board manger. He had shot peas as a prank in his boyhood: often enough to know the sharp hiss of a reed being used as a blow-tube. Sliced light from a torch winkled out the flicked shine of a miniscule dart, let fly at short range.
Unseen by the guardsmen outside the stall, the missile struck the sensitive flesh of the bull’s lower lip.
The split-second glimpse as the brute backed up, snorting, showed Tarens the ingenious invention: a sliver of metal, feathered with a snippet of goose quill, affixed with a bit of wrapped thread. One recalled the old jacket claimed by the vagabond when the shortened sleeves were unfinished. Both cuffs had been basted up with Kerelie’s precious steel pins.
The insectile prick gadded the sullen bull to a maniacal fit. Its capped horns raked wood and gouged up furrowed splinters, while showered slaver and dust sifted through the sturdy slats of the manger. If the nose-ring and chain kept the maddened beast tethered, the violent force as it plunged amok rattled and bowed the stout planks of the stall and dissuaded the bravest fellows from entry. Someone helpful fetched the bull’s owner, who also balked, however the lancers waved weapons and threatened.
‘So arrest me!’ he shouted, ‘Whose dimwit blunder upset the beast, anyway? Send that man in, first. No way I’ll risk myself to smashed bones while that bullock’s enraged.’
The hostler agreed, persuasively reasonable. ‘That brute’s certain to cripple anyone foolish enough to challenge its viciousness.’ He added, insistent, ‘Don’t think we’d have napped through yon dreadful noise! More, if your fugitives molested that bull, they’d be mangled meat, beyond question.’
The lance captain bristled, to no avail. His blustering effort to overturn sense met defeat upon the breathless discovery of the contraband stashed in the hay-cart outside. The bull’s tantrum was dropped for the spicier prospect of nailing the errant smuggler. After the culprit was smoked out and arrested, the bother of splitting grain sacks and pitching more harness out of the tack room lost out to the prospect of stirrup-cups filched from the casks. The lancers confiscated the spirits and retired to wet their gullets and lounge in warm comfort inside the tavern.
The grooms were left to set the stable to rights and quench the hot gleam of the torches. Tarens lay wakeful long after the last chattering horse-boy retired to the loft. The dust settled also, once the rampaging bullock ceased goring the wooden manger. Suspended between rattled nerves and drugged torpor, he lay troubled, under the cover of darkness. The distanced carousing as the drunken dedicates burst into boisterous song did not quite mask the stealthy stir as the fugitive next to him slipped out of hiding. Quietly
calm, with no fuss at all, the man plucked the stuck pin from the bull. The animal gusted one last surly snort. Horned boss lowered, it munched hay with supreme unconcern for the penalty served upon creatures who consorted with minions of Shadow.
But bovine simplicity failed to quiet the more vicious quandary of human uncertainty. Tarens never felt more alone in his life. Grief resurged, inconsolable. He missed the family irrevocably left behind. Savaged by loss and tormented by hope, he might never know if his rash intervention had saved their wrecked lives. All of his former choices were forfeit. He could not return. Whether he rued his impulsive strike against the temple’s authority, his fate was sealed. He had bound his destiny to a stranger with a questionable past, and a future that followed a frightening course of unfathomable motivation.
Early Winter 5922
Afterclap
Dawn came in a pallid wash of grey light, to the scratch of straw brooms and excitable chatter. The stable-lads swept piled snow from the cobbles and whisked the last of the spilled grain and debris the past night’s searchers had strewn in the aisle. That industry brought the ominous bent of fresh gossip to the ears of the fugitives hidden beneath the bull’s manger. The beast had not been collected at daybreak. Because Shadow’s rogue minion had not been found, nor any trace of the accomplice murderer, a True Sect decree extended the curfew that locked down the surrounding country-side. Only the head-hunters’ league moved abroad, out in force to beat the brush along with their mute packs of hounds, their trap-setters, and their skilled trackers.
The failed man-hunt whetted the unresolved air of menace, all the more since the new snowfall yielded the searchers no trace of a human footprint.
‘Uncanny, that,’ the head hostler declared, ducked in to throw butcher’s scraps to the mastiff. The horse-boys chewed over the scared round of talk overheard from the stranded travellers, or else fretted through their chores with naked unease. The curfew stultified the unsettled mood, with the Light’s lance captain stationed in wait, his hard-bitten company poised under the grim instructions to ride down any person who left the premises.
Within the white chill of the stable-yard, or huddled indoors around a roaring hearth, the whisperers spoke in haunted dread of the Darkness and revisited horrors from the ancient massacres; the grisly atrocities at Tal Quorin, or the grim battlefield at Dier Kenton Vale that had seen thirty thousand brave spirits struck dead in a day.
The war hosts slaughtered at Minderl Bay and Daon Ramon perished again, recounted in heroic ballads sung by itinerant minstrels. Past evils received the lurid embellishments of bar-keepers and wrinkled elders, until hearsay carried the stature of myth, and wilder fancy described the Master of Shadow as a vile being with raven skin and monstrous features.
Others claimed his fell presence passed over the land as a wind, reduced over centuries to a bodiless haunt. A resurgence would turn the untrustworthy mageborn to minions and sow all manner of savage destruction. The riveting stories claimed Darkness himself snatched newborns from their cradles and leached their heartsblood in hideous rites of live sacrifice. If no one actually had lost a child, true relics remained from the campaigns fought against the servant of evil. Rusted swords were still kept enshrined, or sheaves of browned letters bundled in string, which told of the Light’s standard raised for divine cause under the avatar, Lysaer s’Ilessid. Everyone honoured a forebear who had marched and died in heroic defense of the Light.
Woven into the fabric of folk-tales, or indoctrinated by the temple canon, the factual events that drove past and present had become lost in the welter.
But not everywhere. As morning brightened, both the frenzied stress of the leagues’ stymied dedicates and the crippling discomfort endured by their cornered quarry drew the concern of another formidable power.
The Sorcerer who bore title as Warden of Althain might have appeared drifty and daft, immured in his tower eyrie amid the remote dales of Atainia. Yet his owlish stare masked a stature that soared. Sethvir had served as Athera’s archivist for close to nine hundred years. Ink stains on his spare knuckles and the frayed shine on his cuffs bespoke tireless days spent inscribing quaint script onto parchment.
But the hour did not find him sunk in rapt industry, among the emptied tea-mugs nestled between the detritus of leather-bound journals and dog-eared old books. Instead, burdened with the world’s most intractable problems, Sethvir had tossed aside his quill pen with fierce intent to tidy his cupboards.
Cobweb smudged his creased cheek where he knelt, swamped in clutter: tatters of silk ribbon and ancient strap buckles, the variegate egg-shells of song-birds, a grey wasp’s nest, and a jam crock inhabited by a live spider lay heaped with a clutch of old river stones, boxes of corks misplaced from his ink flasks, two hawk feathers, and a flagon with a cracked crystal stopper. The Sorcerer regarded the shelf just raked clean, apparently lost in bemusement.
That innocuous vagary was deceptive. Sethvir’s piercing acuity remained without peer the length and breadth of five kingdoms.
All events on Athera crossed the lens of his subtle awareness: from the doings of snails, to the hatreds of men, to perilous marvels unfurled like the pleats of a fan by the dreaming of dragons, both living and dead. Sethvir sensed the footsteps of the enchantress, Elaira, descending from the frozen heights of the Storlains by way of the white-water gorge which thrashed into the port town of Redburn. He knew the Queen of Havish was dying. Her frail breaths reached him, as his colleague, Traithe, kept the vigil to ease her final passage. Alongside the hibernation of bats, and the first rickle of ice that closed Northstrait, he also followed the tracks of the desert-folk, erased by the winds from the volcanic sands of the black dunes of Sanpashir. He heard even the gibbers of Desh-thiere’s captive wraiths, sequestered within the enspelled deeps of Rockfell Pit.
The extraordinary range of the Sorcerer’s sensitivity could trace the overlaid patterns unique to the vitality of each individual consciousness, and from them forecast the ripples of probability that streamed towards the manifest future.
When the Fellowship colleague just returned from the field found Sethvir’s cloud-wool hair tufted up into snarls, the sight raised a signal flag of distress.
‘You look like a sheep that needs carding,’ Asandir ventured carefully. He still wore his leathers. Pungent from his arduous sojourn abroad, he brought the fust of horse and the smoke scent of camp-fires into the bookish miasma of ink and antiquity. ‘Should I lay the blame on Davien, or the Koriani Prime Matriarch?’
Sethvir clipped off a shockingly filthy word: one better suited to embarrassed young men caught aback by the pestilent itch noticed after a toss with a harlot.
‘The witch brood is hatching up a fresh plot,’ Asandir surmised. But his rare laugh stayed silenced, and his chilly regard kept the bite of edged steel as he folded his tall frame into the squashed upholstery of the chair by the hearth. ‘Which arena?’
‘Where are they not meddling?’ Sethvir laid down a ribbon fastened with tiny bells, once worn by a Paravian dancer. His disgusted sigh seemed heaved up from the soles of his feet. ‘Like a plague of spelled rats, their Prime’s got the Light’s armed faithful scouring Taerlin and Camris to smoke out a minion of Darkness.’
Asandir steepled chapped fingers. ‘Arithon’s rediscovered the depth of his mastery and accessed the keys to grand conjury?’
‘No!’ Sethvir clutched his smutched temples, as if frantic to stem the torrent of disruptive images: of zealot lancers, and grim-faced league trackers with hounds, who avidly quartered the grey-on-white fields and scrub oak for two heretic fugitives: quarry in fact huddled inside a cold stable, with one of them battered half-senseless and terrified. ‘I would bless the good news, if his Grace had recalled even the glimmer of partial awareness.’
‘He hasn’t?’ Asandir probed with delicacy.
Sethvir dashed the forlorn hope, that the infamous s’Ffalenn temper may have singed the order’s ranked Seniors into embarrassed retreat. ‘By my accur
ate 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.’