Читать книгу Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 16

Autumn 5922

Borrowed Time

Elaira braced for the next frontal attack launched against her by the Prime Matriarch. The Sorcerer’s warning, that Fellowship powers granted Arithon’s plight no further protection, woke the urgent need to unwind the riddle posed by the Biedar tribes’ intercession. Key to that answer lay three hundred leagues distant, amid the torrid black sands of Sanpashir. Already a renegade Koriani initiate, now determined to treat with the order’s most ancient arch enemy, Elaira expected the sisterhood must actively move to defend their close interests. Every hell-bent resource they owned could be unleashed to forestall her safe passage.

Therefore, she guarded her tracks and took flight through the spine of the Storlain Mountains. Travellers avoided those rugged wilds, far southward of the ancient pass at Lithmarin and well off the established route that linked land-bound trade with the deepwater harbour at Redburn. The hardy clanborn who trapped in the deep vales never ventured the high country alone. Few beyond the Fellowship Sorcerers braved the fault-line that bisected the continent where the collision of tectonic forces wrestled with titanic violence.

From the gouged channel of Instrell Bay, and against the primordial vistas of lava that bubbled the steam pots that bordered Scarpdale, the buckled strata of bed-rock ramped upwards. Towering white pinnacles scraped the sky’s roof, until the wracked terrain subsumed again and plunged into the reef-riddled fissure of South Strait. Where such mighty pressures shocked the earth’s bones, explosive shifts whiplashed the flux lines. Quakes tumbled the weathered scarps into slides, and spurts of destabilized electromagnetics erupted as howling gales.

A lone woman afoot was an insectile speck, tramping these trackless wilds. Overshadowed by clouds, or choked under the mist snagged on the vertical buttresses, Elaira journeyed where ice-falls and split rock keened to the savage winds. She laboured against the white-out blizzards that flayed her exposed skin like shot needles. Yet the same brutal elements also granted her a back-handed measure of safety. Storm and avalanche, and the roaring cataracts that tunnelled through crevasse and glacier produced the violent energy needed to confound the subtle venues of arcane surveillance. Enough to thwart even a circle of Senior seeresses, at least until she mastered the change imposed on her by Arithon’s current predicament: the fragile defense that hinged upon the kept secret of his anonymity. He carried no recall of her existence. But she, who safeguarded the trust of remembrance, still endured the empathic channel that linked her with his intimate being. Infallibly, Prime Selidie’s malice would seek to exploit that subtle connection.

If Elaira failed to seal off her unruly emotions before she left the Kingdom of Havish, all stakes would be lost. Packed light for speed, her cerecloth bedroll held only jerked meat. The spare shirt and a tin panniken in her satchel wrapped no more than basic healer’s supplies. She slept in the open. A steel-shod staff tested her steps on the ice-fields, and the knife at her belt that shaved wood for kindling also skinned her snared game and dug tubers. One night, she bedded down in a cramped cave, steamed by the malodorous seep of a hot spring. Another found her camped on an ice shelf, bridged over a tumbling freshet. Always, she sought running water, or places where the tumultuous elements swirled with turbulence. She dared even those sites where the sprites, known as iyats, gathered to feed upon chaos. If their fiendish pranks broke her rest, the same interference thwarted the sisterhood’s scryers.

The burning jab of their probes never ceased. Elaira lost count of the times she plunged naked into deep snow. Such acute discomfort broke off the assaults, which struck always when she was most vulnerable. Anytime her alert focus drifted, the Prime’s spies thrust to rifle her mind. Over the course of two and a half centuries, such relentless pursuit had stalked her for an oath breaker’s punishment. But since their coveted male quarry’s escape, the old cat-and-mouse stalemate had broken. The prize became Arithon’s tenuous freedom, with herself the game-piece to expose him.

Elaira rammed her spiked stave into the glare ice scabbed over a tumbling streamlet. She assayed the next precarious step, her breath plumed in the bitter air. As she edged down the jagged scar of a ravine scoured bare by a recent rockfall, the lethal endangerment posed by the terrain became a pittance beside the love that made her a target. The day must never dawn that the Prime’s balked ambition should seize on the chance to use her again.

Once betrayed at such cost the true heart shrank to contemplate, Arithon had consigned that power of choice into Elaira’s steadfast hands. For both of their sakes, her strength must shield him through his harrowing hour of weakness. Exhausted in the fallen silence of twilight, her feet sore down to the bone, she sheltered amid a stand of stunt firs, cragged roots anchored like a miser’s clenched fists into the cracks in sheer rock. Possessed of the same tenacious endurance, Elaira huddled by a frugal fire, sinews limp as unravelled knit. Stars blazed above the snow-blasted summits, foil-stamped against gathering darkness. Here, no saving disturbance existed to upset the reach of a crystal transmission. Selidie’s scryers might snatch that advantage to break her resistance. Elaira hoarded a store of dry wood. She would shove her hand into live coals if need be to deny the Prime Circle’s intrusion.

Yet nightfall deepened without undue threat. Only brutal cold and astringent breezes whispered and moaned through the lopsided evergreens.

Elaira pressed her fraught hands to her face. Discipline never had tamed her inner bond with Prince Arithon. The instinctive alignment of magnetic rapport burned in her each moment, made urgent as breath by her solitude. Worse, Arithon’s acute danger drastically heightened the already volatile interface. His emotions flared hers into flash-point gestalt without warning: vividly intimate as he brought in fresh game, and the homely croft woman who sheltered him attached him with a nickname not even a dog would have answered.

Worse, the flat twang of her town accent offended his musician’s ear, coarse as ground glass to the lyric awareness once titled as Athera’s Masterbard.

Through his eyes, Elaira captured his sly effort to thwart the irksome presumption. His laughter laid siege to the sternest resolve each time he deplored the address by turning his backside in clownish rebuff.

The by-play lightened the enchantress’s spirits until his yearning, bewildered desire – to be as he was – sought relief from the desolate pain of his alienation. Quietly, Arithon flagged the fair-haired brother’s more sympathetic attention. Then, with a bit of flaked charcoal, he started to write out his preference on the slate hearthstone. The first of his sketched characters wrung Tarens pale.

With the sister too preoccupied to take notice, the crofter’s shocked hiss quashed that first earnest effort to establish a personal trust. The dropped charcoal, stamped beneath a rough boot, obliterated the crude writing. Tarens whispered, frantic, ‘Light save us! If anyone realized you knew the old tongue? We’d be ruined, my friend, and you’d meet your death. Condemned as clanborn or else burned alive, executed for renegade sorcery.’

Alone in the brutal alpine cold, Elaira suffered the blow as a silenced witness, while fear and distrust quenched the tentative spark of her beloved’s stifled identity. Buffeted by the cruel gusts off the glaciers, she gasped as the tears blurred her eyes. Her heart could break for the lifetime’s trove of experience that lay sundered from Arithon’s grasp. Without power to comfort, she ached for his outsider’s misery as he leaned forlorn on the largesse of strangers, pretending to drowse while his trapper’s fare simmered in the kettle slung over the flames…

* * *

…too anxious for subtlety, Kerelie kept nattering as though her subject were deaf, or born nerveless. ‘Suppose the fellow knows witchery, Tarens?’

‘What makes you think that?’ The brother reseated himself at the trestle. Too poor for a lamp, forced to squint in the glow of a spluttering tallow dip, he resumed stitching a mend in the torn harness strap, broken after the folly that led him to tie the ox up by the reins. Rattled himself, and unskilled at pretence, he kept his head bent to his work.

‘Well,’ Kerelie temporized, her usual piece of fanciful sewing draped over her knee, ‘you can’t pretend that the oddities don’t cling to the man like jumping fleas. He’s gotten that scrawny hen to start scratching. You’ll see she’s recovered the gloss of good health. The grouchy bird follows him like a tame pet. Tell me you don’t notice? The animals thrive something more than they should when he helps with the chores in the barn.’

Tarens shrugged. A fallen lock of fair hair veiled his face as he ducked her direct regard.

‘You know that our ox dislikes strangers,’ Kerelie pressured. ‘If the brute doesn’t tread on their feet or balk outright, it sidles them into a post. Yet your vagabond leads that beast hither and yon without the least roll of an eyeball.’

Tarens grunted, the plink of his hammer against the awl made the ready excuse to duck conversation.

Kerelie out-waited his reluctant stand and picked up once the hole had been punched. ‘Someone taught that man knowledge of herbals, and not in a kitchen patch, either.’

‘He’s not my vagabond,’ Tarens replied. ‘What makes you think I have answers?’

By fretful habit, Kerelie scraped a knuckle along her scarred cheek. ‘I say he could be an uncanny creature dropped into our midst.’

‘He appreciates things,’ Tarens amended. ‘You feel that quality with his attention. Dumb beasts respond by giving their trust. Where’s the mystery in that? He understands language, and if he’s a mute, he doesn’t need speech to make himself understood.’

Kerelie poked her embroidery needle through a fold in her loose sleeve. Overlarge for the delicacy of her stitches, her prim hands rummaged into her basket for the emerald floss to embellish a rosebud. She was not a mean spirit. Only frightened, and worried past peace for the brother who stubbornly languished in sick-bed. ‘Koriathain prefer to take on mutes and half-wits. You don’t think our stray served their interests?’

‘If he did,’ Tarens argued with rock-bottom certainty, ‘the order would have done away with him. He picks up connections and details too fast. That’s not a safe quality to keep in the presence of dark arcane secrets.’

The pause hung, sweetened with the fragrance of birch coals and the burbling of the meat stew. Kerelie knotted her hands and glowered at her brother until at last he was forced to look up from the harness.

‘You were never thick-headed,’ she scolded. Then added, persistently honest, ‘Are you willing to risk our livelihood? More, would you gamble that vagabond’s life on the chance that you could be misled? By tomorrow, we could face a temple diviner sent to probe for heretical practice. Do you truly believe the Light’s faith rests its cases on anyone’s heart-felt conjecture?’

‘Those herbals are all that’s kept Efflin alive!’ Tarens snapped, riled by his innate sense of loyalty. ‘Are you saying we should act upon groundless fear, disown kindness, and throw the man out?’ Engrossed by his sister’s well-founded challenge, and not least, by a shared anxiety, the big crofter also forgot the tucked figure, miserably stilled in the shadow behind the filled wood bin…

But the distant enchantress cried out, locked in empathy and unable to bear Arithon’s quick stab of agony from her vantage in the Storlain Mountains. Loss of memory had not dimmed the acuity of his gifted talent. The bitter argument between brother and sister smashed his frail poise at a stroke.

As initiate master, his extreme sensitivity tracked every nuance of subtle distress. The captive centuries spent under forced threat, healing the crazed terror of free wraiths, had laid his heightened awareness wide open. As the blunt blast of blame and raw stress battered into his unshielded nerves, the shock hit like a punch to the viscera.

Dizzy nausea shot him to his feet. The notion his presence might cause someone harm woke the echoes of forgotten horror. The drive to avert catastrophic misfortune lashed him to instinctive flight. He was gone, out the door in one silent move, both dinner and comfort abandoned. The latch fell. Only a chill swirl of draught marked the wake of his frantic departure.

While Tarens whirled, stunned past words of regret for the hurt bestowed by his carelessness, the distant enchantress encamped in the mountains shed furious tears. She raged at her fate, that the mate she cherished as her own flesh and blood should become so bereft! The prodigious, bright talent whose labours had dispelled the worldwide invasion by Marak’s hordes of hostile entities should never have been abandoned to languish alone in such bitter ignorance.

Which quandary baited Prime Selidie’s trap: Elaira dared not give way under pressure, no matter how vicious the consequence. She sucked a cold breath to rebalance her rocked poise. The signet ring of Rathain on her hand bequeathed her its burden of secrets. She was the defender of all that it held, and by Arithon’s placed faith, must sustain the harsh crux with her eyes opened. Or else become broken by sheer despair and take her heart’s beloved down with her.

Amid desolate rocks, by the glimmer of starlight, she shouldered the watch through another bleak night.

Yet this pass, far worse than a scryer’s assault rattled her shaken defenses. As Arithon’s headlong flight through the wood distanced him from the cozy croft cottage, he gave rein to his natural instincts. Elaira shared his acute stress and confusion. She also shuddered as his inner senses exploded. The same terrible onset raked through her like fire as the rogue gift of far-sight his straits had made him forget smashed across his rifted perception.

He whimpered, beset, while vision upon vision of what soon must be hammered into his shattered awareness. Overset, stumbled onto his hands and knees in chill leaves, he panted in traumatized panic while the incomprehensible blaze of his wild talent seized the posited threads of the future and unfolded them into simultaneous multiplicity. Drowned in that welter of colour and noise, he floundered, bewildered. The rushed assault of overlayered images flickered onwards like a meaningless storm. He found no bearing: until one view captured his focused attention and fused into a clarity sharp as cut glass…

By tomorrow’s dawn, an official mounted in ceremonial panoply would invade the croft with a cavalcade. The yard would be cluttered by gold-and-white banners, while shod hooves chopped the neatly mulched garden. While the armed outriders circled the cottage, their glittering captain would crash his mailed fist on the door, under temple authority. Doctrine confirmed his lawful right to arrest anyone who resisted. A search by his men would toss through every room. Despite the genuine strain of dire illness, Efflin would be hauled from his blankets. The bed where he lay became stripped to the frame. Men with drawn swords would hack mattress and ticking to shreds. Yet the Light’s avid talent would find naught to incriminate. None of the closets held any trace of the herbalist reported by an upright citizen’s complaint.

‘He’s not here,’ Kerelie insisted, past tears. She wiped her scarred cheek, undone with relief that Tarens was off to haul fire-wood and not underfoot with his ready fists. ‘Since no one knows where the odd fellow’s gone, your questions cannot be answered.’

‘Nothing’s been found?’ the lance captain snapped to the temple’s baffled diviner. ‘No item sufficient for an arcane scrying?’ Failure at last would press him to withdraw his men. While they trampled through the wrack of upended belongings and formed up outside for departure, he would leave the distraught woman with an emphatic warning. ‘Keep your door closed to strangers. The high priesthood at Erdane says Shadow is rising. A minion of Darkness is wakened and walking abroad, we’ve been told…’

Shuddering breaths pulled between his locked teeth, the fugitive huddled in the icy wood as the bout of slip-stream vision tattered to smoke and receded. He grasped what he saw well enough to perceive the precarious veil of innocence that shielded his benefactors. If authorities sought him, perhaps he was a criminal, although he could not remember the enormity that branded him as an outlaw. At least his shoddy rags were untraceable, burned down to ash in the cottage grate. Nothing he owned remained behind for a hostile talent to seize as proof, or use to track his subtle essence. Keep scarce and stay hidden, and he risked no one’s safety. Cold and privation could be surmounted. He had the resourceful, inquisitive intelligence to survive the bleak onset of winter. Steadied once more, in command of himself, he pushed upright to seek a snug bolt-hole for shelter and sleep…

But the haven created by his reasoned calm eluded the enchantress, cross-linked as his helpless observer. For her, Arithon’s momentary, insightful vision lashed her to alarm: the True Sect’s diviners were unleashed to run down a minion of Darkness. Initiate-trained, the Light’s examiners dispatched their servants abroad. Primed for an arraignment, such armed dedicates would harrow the country-side, played on the puppet strings of their creed and the canon law rigidly enforced from Erdane’s high temple by a susceptible priesthood.

Whose secretive ploy had provoked such a search?

Elaira suspected the Prime Matriarch’s ambition manoeuvred this cleanse to root out her fugitive quarry. Worse yet, the Fellowship’s stay of constraint gave free rein to permit that unholy alliance. The religion’s fanatics subsisted on faith since their grand avatar’s abdication. Wracked into factions by the theosophers’ jostling debates, and pitched by self-interest to extend the firm reach of the temple’s influence, the Light’s zealots and their righteous, false cause lay ripe for seduction as Selidie’s diligent tool.

Hounded already, Arithon could be hunted across Tysan anywhere he tried to flee.

Nothing might turn the relentless adversity he might be driven to face. Aching, exhausted, while her distant beloved also braved a frigid night, Elaira gathered her courage, dried her eyes, and wrapped herself in her lonely bedroll. More than ever before, if she slept, she must ward her dreaming awareness. Under stress, reluctant, she sought shelter behind the endowment left to her in Arithon’s ring.

More than symbolic of blood-line and royalty, the white-gold signet had been worn by Rathain’s crown heirs back to the lineage’s founder. The inside bore the engraved inscription: ‘To my sons, from their forebears, back to Torbrand.’

Elaira cupped the emerald setting. Immersed in a seer’s trance, she focused her faculties into the mineral matrix. The imprinted tapestry of the ring’s history flowed over her opened perception. She sank slowly into the depths of the stone, aware of its multilayered legacy. Kings and sanctioned princes far and long before hers had stamped the whispers of their bygone lives in the ring. Unlike the focus stones wielded by the Koriathain, kept uncleared to preserve intact records, this jewel retained its past impressions under Fellowship precepts: its crystalline nature served human purpose by choice, in exact harmonic alignment. Elaira’s descent through its lattice became a light journey, untrammelled by conflict. Not every aspect contained within the jewel setting was laid open to her inspection. Wise enough for respect, Elaira bypassed those boundaries set under Sorcerer’s seals. The private memories from Arithon’s forebears stayed beyond her purview to access.

Her deep reach instead sought the gateway framed by the emerald’s inclusions, keyed only to her. A specific phrase, spoken three times by a man’s unbounded regard for her unlocked what no other could access. Chosen mate to the Prince of Rathain, Elaira alone could match and complete the bias of calm that once had enveloped a sea-side cottage in the impassioned moment of Arithon’s discovery that his pure feelings for her were returned.

She, only, recalled the arduous passage when the very same phrase was repeated: as a Sorcerer’s maze reforged their joined selves and scoured out all false reflections, man and woman had blended again, inseparable in mind and heart.

Worse, Elaira relived the last time, arisen on the wrenching hour when a false liegeman had betrayed Arithon into captivity. The moment revisited her in darkest nightmares, as the same outcry unleashed in extremity became their love’s bittermost affirmation. When Selidie Prime threatened Elaira’s life as the wedge to break Arithon’s integrity, third and final, his protest rang, still: ‘…Give me torture and loss, give me death, before I become the instrument that seals your utter destruction. Of all the atrocities I have done in the past, or may commit in the future, that one I could never survive.’

The echo, stone-graven, tumbled Elaira back into the moment she had faced death at Prime Selidie’s hands. Defenseless but never resigned, she could not fault the tragic choice, made while the throes of unbearable torment forced a desperate act, in resistance.

Shattered, yet defiant, Arithon spared her life. Saved her, by remaking as hers all the intimate joy shared between them. He ceded her everything: each cherished thought and every gathered memory of her encompassed within his experience. That sweetness of presence, treasured and true, was surrendered into her sole possession. Emptied himself, his given will yielded the part of his core self that was hers alone. Cut off and separate, he ensured that never again could the Koriani Order wield her mortality as the sure weapon to break him.

Royalty’s ring on her hand kept the record of Arithon’s grace within its inviolate sanctuary. An artifact of Rathain’s founding heritage, wrought under the sacrosanct auspices of Fellowship purpose, the signet’s protection predated the crown’s bond of debt to the Koriathain, which Asandir’s witnessed oath at long last had discharged. Within its safe haven, Elaira could let down her guard and dream past the reach of the order’s design.

The double-edged gift surrendered her senses to an unbearably vivid immersion. All that Arithon was, and everything they had been together enraptured her starved spirit and wrapped her in a state of exquisite tenderness.

Always, visceral sorrow reopened the wound. When night passed, and she woke to cold wind, snow, and solitude, the past remained hers, unsullied still. But the glory of the sacred dance was sundered, the unparalleled harmony of their union broken to spare her. If Arithon survived, he might recover the lost identity sheared from him to safeguard his freedom. Yet the part of his being conjoined with Elaira, sequestered for safety within Rathain’s seal ring, could not become reconnected. His enchantress retained her forlorn charge of the fact his male existence had once celebrated his true match. Unless the stake held by the Biedar at Sanpashir lent fresh insight to resolve the quandary, her heart’s future stayed hopelessly bleak.