Читать книгу Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 19

Late Autumn 5922

Man-hunt

Tarens fought his temple wardens at each step, once they dragged him beyond the porch stairway. Hope forced the necessity although for his own sake the struggle was futile. Even if he broke away shackled, the fury of eight mounted lancers would serve him a brutal comeuppance. Last desperate mercy, lost to a grim fate, he battled for need to be served that quick death before the last shred of courage forsook him. The frost-hardened earth muffled his tell-tale noise, and a shut door hid the grim scene from his family. More than their distress, Tarens feared to stand trial.

Not because of his guilt: a diviner killed to win a sorcerer’s clean escape sealed his death on the scaffold already. The risk must perish with him, that the temple examiners might wring him to further betrayal. He wrenched his broad shoulders and dug in stubborn heels. Given a large man’s manic strength, he yanked the paired men-at-arms who restrained him off stride.

One tripped over the low fence that rimmed the mulched garden. The other, clubbed by the swing of his chains, fell back with a broken arm.

While the dressed ranks of the escort recoiled, and strict order unravelled to shouting, Tarens ducked under a destrier’s girth and burst into a hobbled run. But no welcomed lance-thrust skewered his back. No enemy’s vengeful blade cut him down or spared him from the course of due process. The Light’s dedicates responded with ironclad discipline, for all that he lashed out with kicks, even bit, as their mailed fists pummelled him to defeat. No one cuffed him hard enough to break his head.

‘You’re spoken for the fire and sword, once you’ve faced the temple’s tribunal,’ the troop captain snapped. ‘Accept the harsh fact!’ He bellowed again to quell his provoked company, then promised, ‘We will hear you sing for the Light’s examiners when they extract your confession.’

Tarens made the lancers drag him to his feet. No effort he made forestalled the brute muscle that wrestled him towards the hitched wagon, heaved him inside, and bashed him prostrate. He blasphemed. Spitting the blood streamed from his crushed nose, he cursed his unwanted survival. He had a sister’s thread of complicity to hide, and the burden of Efflin’s honesty. Give the Light’s priests their chance to unravel his mind, and any small fact might be twisted for leverage to reverse the lenient sentence that spared them. Tarens sweated under shattering dread, that the canon tribunal might pry out the criminal evidence that his brother’s illness may have been healed by dark practice.

His defiant bid to be dispatched beforetime devolved to raw rage and rough handling. Tarens was pummelled until the pain reduced him to gasps that silenced his abusive speech. Limp, bruised, and bloodied, he lay pinned half-senseless on the musted straw spilled from the poultry crates. No soldier sullied his immaculate appointments to clear out the cluttered wagon-bed. They ploughed aside the fruit-baskets and osier cages, and roped Tarens out straight by his manacles beside the tarp-covered corpse of the slaughtered diviner.

There, he shivered, stretched on his back, choked by the welled drip of his shattered nose. The gall of his failure gave way to despair as the yoked ox was lashed forward. The cart creaked and rolled from the rutted yard, while the biting, pre-dawn cold spread a murky, starless sky over him. Chills wracked his pulped muscles to misery, and the rough motion jounced his cracked ribs. When he cramped in hitched spasms that threatened a faint, his escort sent a flunkey back to the well, then doused him with a pail of water. Weighed down by chain and shuddering in soaked clothes, Tarens suffered in helpless straits for a ghastly journey to Kelsing.

His plight moved his escort to ribald amusement. Through the chink of spurs and steel weaponry, Tarens weathered the filth they heaped on his dead mother. He gritted his jaw and stifled back screams when the riders capped their verbal slangs with jabs from their lance-butts. When the game they made of his torment raised boredom, their derision changed to speculation that chewed over the latest fragments of gossip. Tarens caught snatches through his spinning senses, as their conversation threaded between the cart’s grinding racket and the clatter of the restive horses.

‘…haven’t condemned a dark-monger to burning for as long as I’ve been alive.’

‘…think we may face renewed interest in the stymied campaign at the border?’

‘High time the court of Havish’s king was cleaned out as a breeding roost for warped practice and clansfolk.’

‘…surely would take a rising of Darkness to force the temple’s flint-fist bursars to loosen their purse strings. How many years have they waited to fix the shoddy roof on our barracks?’

‘Oh, they’ll pay! Always have. But for vestments with diamonds. The excuse will pack some pompous chump off east again to remand the delinquent avatar.’

‘A Light’s Hope? For real? You’re joking!’ The speaker snorted, derisive. ‘The high priest at Erdane won’t quell an outbreak of Shadow through mummery! Or waste his devout talent for such a fool’s delegation. The True Sect’s more likely to launch their case to condemn the fair-haired fop the traditionalists still revere as the founder of faith. Who wouldn’t bid to eclipse Lysaer’s power? The high temple conclave’s primed for the opening. I say they’ll depose him, seize his mayor’s seat at Etarra, and build up the warfront with the s’Ilessid treasury. Then watch how fast we’ll break the locked stand-off with Havish.’

‘Light’s own grace! Watch your tongue! Might find yourself wrung by the temple examiner alongside this wretch of a prisoner.’

‘…beyond all doubt the avatar’s abandoned the godhead! That’s if the Great Schism’s not a flagrant myth, and the man ever wielded true Light in the first place!’

‘No myth, boy. Don’t mock history. My grand uncle twice rode as a guard with the Light’s Hope. He’s seen divinity with his own eyes. The Blessed Prince never ages.’

‘You bought the legend for an old man’s maundering in his beer cup? That’s quaint.’

Tarens absorbed the by-play through his daze, too damaged to care about the old controversy that flared between the True Sect and the traditionalists. The tale held that the avatar once denounced his priests and barred Etarra’s gates against his protesting faithful. Pleas to win back his loyalty encountered rebuff. When the Temple’s delegation placed an appeal, the priests were kicked out with their banners in flames and their horses’ tails singed to smoking.

The veteran dedicate shrugged off his peer’s ridicule. ‘Greenhorn, you weren’t by chance signed on as a recruit to redeem your gullible relative?’

Through an indignant chorus, a louder voice prevailed, ‘Don’t cite the accounts in the temple archives. Likely some bored copyist got drunk on devotion and larked off. Who’s to say the lines of early scripture aren’t outright fancy? Nobody’s seen the like of the myth passed down from the siege of Alestron.’

Other voices declaimed, until the stiff-necked officer in charge caught wind of the blasphemous chatter. ‘Since the Schism occurred over two centuries ago, our priesthood defines the sanctity of the canon. Your job’s to defend the Light’s grace from corruption! Clap your lips like a virgin caught out after dark if you want your sweet shot at advancement.’

The grumbler protested from the rear-guard ‘Service in the ranks is rude enough without bending to jiggle the butts of the Light’s inner conclave.’

‘Listen up, bucko!’ the officer snapped. ‘High Temple’s secretive feud with Etarra has seen better men drummed out of their whites in dishonour.’

The freshened breeze blew further chill through the talk, with the mounted procession compelled to rein in to flank the slow roll of the wagon. Another league passed before someone’s laconic check on the captive raised a bark to a lazy subordinate. ‘Flip the tarp off that corpse and shelter this wretch. We’ll catch something worse than a reprimand if he packs up and dies of the cold.’

‘…this poxy assignment!’ someone else carped. ‘It’s still black out here as a witch’s twat! When in the name of the Dark will we see the first glimmer of sunrise?’

‘Spooked by a few clouds, then?’

The round of jeers lapsed as a shouted call from the vanguard halted the double-file column. The oxcart’s wheels squelched to a stop, to more steamed oaths from the duty-bound lancers. Hoof stamps and snorts pocked the frigid air as their curbed destriers tussled the hold on their bits.

Sapped to dulled wits by the strain on bruised sinews, Tarens gathered the pause concerned an unscheduled obstruction. A glow emerged through the felt blanket of mist: some prankster had lit a bonfire from green wood in the midst of the trade-road. The blaze piled up traffic in both directions. With none but the agile, mounted couriers able to surmount the ditch at the verge, an irritable pack of balked carters shook fists and shouted, while their discommoded draught animals coughed on swirled smoke and jostled to evade the whirled sparks chased up by the changeable wind.

The temple man wrestled the oxcart’s reins, swearing, while the fidgety escort of outriders closed their skittish horses into tighter formation around the chained prisoner.

‘This may not be a coincidence. Stay on the alert!’ The lance captain’s next order dismounted the company’s two strongest men and sent them ahead to sort out the confusion.

‘You’ll extinguish those flames!’ he called after them, anxious. ‘Pull apart the smouldering logs, stamp out the piled brush, and back off those carters before their teams pitch a fit and some blighted hot-head starts brawling.’

The nuisance would impose a lengthy delay. At least until the raked coals cooled to ash, with the steep banks of the drain ditches on either side set narrow enough to break wheels, and no burdened draught animal in its right mind likely to be cajoled to tread over hot embers.

Tarens languished in the wagon-bed meanwhile, surrounded by jumpy lancers and the dedicate officer, whose unhappy subordinate paced in tight circles, both hands full, tending riderless mounts. No one passed the time in loose talk, with every man’s nerves primed to face an assault by barbarian raiders, or bandits, or worse: an attempt by Shadow’s collaborators to liberate the condemned murderer. Never mind that the wretch was secured by locked chains, with the temple examiner in sole charge of the key, and the suspect family constrained under guard back at the ransacked cottage.

Bound in supine misery, Tarens suffered the worse. Though the draped tarp cut the edge from the wind, his swollen contusions had stiffened. What marginal surcease he gained from the stillness was undone by his tensioned cuffs as the brisk cold settled through his clammy shirt and wracked his outstretched body to shivering. The torment did not stem his terrified thoughts. Horrors awaited him in Kelsing’s dungeons, put to the question by the True Sect priests.

That pernicious dread colored the disgruntled change, as the two footbound lancers who dismembered the bonfire sprang back from their task with riled oaths. When their outburst cranked into yells of dismay, Tarens strained to see through the slat side of the cart. What seemed like a wind devil whirled aloft. The tempest sucked up cinders of ash and live sparks, gained momentum, then vindictively reversed direction. As the gyre raked over the row of parked vehicles, the lance captain had little choice but to spur ahead and take charge before further mayhem erupted. Two strides out, he cursed, almost thrown as his mount reared, wild-eyed, and determined to bolt. The beleaguered officer wrestled its frothed panic and shouted to warn the fuming subordinate left in charge of the rest of the string.

‘Clear those horses off! Turn the oxcart around and retreat at least one hundred paces. We’ve got fiends!’ Harried as his frantic horse crab-stepped, the dedicate captain vented a gush of relief for the nuisance. ‘No surprise we’re beset, given this lug-headed rash of hysterical upset.’

The volatile mix of flames and raw tempers attracted such bothersome plagues: the energy sprites, known as iyats, irresistibly fed on emotional frenzy. No rank outbreak of Shadow, this inconvenience would scarcely balk temple justice. The lancers’ mounts all wore banes on their bridles, tin disks stamped with ciphers of ward to repel the mettlesome influence. But the shabby paint on the croft’s borrowed wagon suggested that the worn talisman affixed to its shafts might have discharged from neglect. If its virtue had waned, the vehicle with its distressed felon aboard posed a fresh magnet for trouble.

‘Does one of those carters carry a shovel?’ the lance officer called, spun about in the tussle to quell his crow-hopping mount. ‘Requisition the tool, then! Move smart, and smother that fire straightaway. Those fiends won’t disperse until they’re starved out, with no ready source to replenish themselves!’

Tarens endured, teeth clamped through the jostle as men goaded the balky ox backwards, then shouldered it into a clumsy turn. When the vehicle slewed at the rim of the ditch, more lancers were obliged to vacate their saddles and brace lest the wheels slide farther and mire hub-deep. Splashed muck stained their surcoats. Stung pride shortened tempers as they bent their backs to brute work beneath their lofty station. Jolted and bashed by the slide of the poultry crates as the muscled cart jerked and tilted, Tarens snatched only a fitful view through the side slats as the fire suddenly exploded. The busy dedicates who manoeuvred the ox had no other warning when the shouts down the roadway changed pitch to alarm.

Already, the fiends sowed their vehement havoc. Gouts of flame and pin-wheeling logs whistled air-borne. Mule-teams bolted. Incensed carters screamed as their startled teams scrambled, entangled, and crashed into their neighbours. The lancers caught amid the irrupted blaze flung their borrowed shovels and scattered, while the berserk draught beasts shied hither and yon, and bashed their handlers aside like thrown rag dolls. The rampage of panic set off the ox, which plunged and jarred Tarens to further torment. Pelted by rolled baskets, and winded half-senseless, he cried out in the turmoil, voice drowned out by the racketing thunder of the other stampeded harness teams. Crazed livestock and smashed wagons caromed down the roadway, chased mad by fiends irresistibly baited to feed on the effervescence of chaos.

The few lancers assigned to the prisoner’s oxcart sweated and swore, hard-pressed to curb their bucking mounts. If they missed getting trampled, that triumph lasted only until the iyats streamed within range of the talismans sewn to their horses’ head-stalls. Temple-wrought, the banes did their exemplary work: the sprites in possession of the fiery debris became forcibly stripped from their air-borne loads. The result hurled down a storm of scalding ash, flaming bark, and burning sticks over them and their milling bunch of riderless horses. Swept into the vortex of screams and confusion, gadded and singed by the maelstrom of embers, the escort for the prisoner collapsed. Silk surcoats ignited. Routed men dropped and rolled on the ground to snuff out the errant blazes, or else found themselves mown down in the melee.

The cart jockeyed clear of the ditch fared no better. A dropped log whooshed earthward and struck the yoked ox. It whuffed, plunged, and bolted. Eyes rolled white, tail curled over its bristled, humped back, it rampaged through the held knot of horses and ripped them free. Swept along as they galloped, the bucketing oxcart swayed and careened like a storm-tossed shallop. The jounced corpse fetched up against Tarens’s strapped frame. Flaming twigs pelted into the overset crates and spilled straw, and flurried sparks lit the wrack incandescent.

The devout driver, who bravely wrestled the reins, abandoned his post, before roasting. He dived for the ditch, beating flames from his beard, while the untended ox and its bucketing wagon hurtled off with the chained prisoner and the slaughtered diviner, streaming a comet-trail wake of torched basketry.

Trounced helpless, Tarens laboured to breathe. Scorched, coughing smoke, he reeled from the knifing pain of his broken ribs. The stout rope that lashed his chains became singed, while the heat transferred through the metal shackles blistered his fastened wrists. He could not thrash off the smouldering tarp or escape the threat of immolation as the burning crates bounced against the spread mantle that shrouded the corpse.

Suffocation and fear rendered him nearly senseless when someone’s urgent presence tore away the blazing fabric. A living hand bare of gauntlets snatched the pearl-handled eating knife sheathed at the dead diviner’s belt and sawed through the knots that secured Tarens’s ankles. A tug parted the charred ties that restrained his arms and yanked him clear of disaster. Then a sharp whistle pierced the crackle of fire that raced in red-gold sheets across the wagon-bed. The fluted note shocked a resonant vibration through Tarens’s chains, reached crescendo, then snicked open the locks on his manacles.

The release came too late. His traumatized limbs failed to move. Tarens whimpered, curled up in wracked pain, undone despite the continuous prods that insistently bullied him upright. When his stupor persisted, the forceful grasp rolled him up like dead meat in the singed tarp. Another heave pitched him belly down, with his head dangled over the side of the cart.

Through blurred confusion, all shuddering flame-light and wheeling shadows, he captured the brief impression of spoked wheels churning through rutted mud. Then the tumultuous hooves of a runaway mule-team obscured his view and pelted his broken face with flung clods. He flinched from the sting. Too traumatized to hike his weight backwards, he flopped like a draped rag as the adjacent dray overtook the clumsier oxcart. Swerved together, the vehicles swayed side by side in the maelstrom. Sparks snicked from the bash of their iron-capped wheel hubs. Only the fist entwined into the tarp secured Tarens from maceration. Whooping for air, paralyzed by torment as the wooden slat gouged into his damaged ribs, he battled raw terror and dizziness. Then a sharp push upended his ankles. He pitched out of the oxcart and tumbled, not under the wheels, but into a saving pile of hay as the mule-drawn wain rumbled past.

His agile keeper dived in alongside him and burrowed under the thatch. Strangled on dust and poked by the tickle of straw, Tarens moaned. The sneeze he failed to contain ripped his chest. A callused palm swiftly muffled his scream, as his bashed ribs erupted to agony. The relentless hold gagged his noise, then let go as his abused stomach revolted. Limbs strapped in the tarp and torqued double by nausea, Tarens retched. The harsh spasms savaged him past all reprieve as the mule-cart jounced and clattered down the rutted road, with its team harried senseless by iyats. The haystack that cushioned him failed to stave off the sucking plunge towards unconsciousness.

Through dimmed awareness, dazed by the pain as the gushed blood from his fractured nose became blotted up with a twist of rough cloth, Tarens realized that no temple guard would have granted the kindness. Reassured that he lay in the hands of a friend, he let go and allowed the merciful darkness to swallow him.

Tarens surfaced again through a bright scald of agony, as if whole patches of skin had been flayed and exposed every quivering nerve end. A strip torn from the tarp crudely bound his bashed ribs. If the jacket and shirt overtop remained clammy, nestled hay and the warmth of the body beside him at least eased his desperate shivering. His crushed nose ached, stuffed tight with swelling. Both eyes had puffed to throbbing slits, and he breathed in shuddered gulps through split lips. Matted hair crusted his brutalized scalp, and everything else the Light’s faithful had kicked felt bludgeoned to grape pulp.

Through ringing ears, he overheard a brisk conversation, conducted in masculine voices. The words stitched together the alarming discovery the mule-cart had stopped for inspection. Tarens froze. Before his frightened gasp made him choke on loose chaff, a friendly clasp squeezed his wrist. The assurance did nothing to quell his dread. He would be retaken: a thin cover of hay would never thwart searchers commanded by a temple mandate. Worse, the fugitive talent who bade for his rescue would share his trial as a murderer’s accomplice. The brave ploy that had unfastened locked chains must condemn them both to a sorcerer’s death. Boots scraped, close by. A shadow raked across the chinks of filtered daylight, and the clipped phrases acquired coherency.

‘No bribes today, scoundrel!’ An authority’s tread took pause by the stack in the wagon-bed. ‘We’re placed on tight watch. Can’t risk an exception. A chained heretic’s escaped. Oh yes! Priests claim he’s got a minion of Darkness as a collaborator. The pair’s on the run somewhere in the district. Dawn this morning, we’re told. Uncanny for sure, if they’ve outfoxed the best of the league trackers. Three temple diviners are combing the country-side to flush them out while we’re saddled with manning this road block.’

The mule-driver lodged a fretful complaint.

Another official dismissed him, annoyed. ‘Just a stray storm of iyats, you say? Well maybe that’s true. High on a fresh charge, a fiend storm might spring a steel lock by chance. But a full set of manacles amid a live fire? That’s much more than random mischief.’

Another protest, then, ‘Well, yes! We’d rather be settled inside over mulled wine and breakfast. Except that some pious lance captain’s pegged us to salvage his blunder.’

The mule’s driver argued, hotly incredulous. ‘If a felon dodged justice through a sorcerer’s havoc, you wouldn’t be likely to find such as them holed up in a wain-load of hay.’

‘All goods get examined. No use crying foul.’ A sheared ring bespoke steel withdrawn from a scabbard. ‘One mewling yap from a True Sect dedicate, and it’s hop, skip, and jump for us field-troops. They’ve rousted the garrison out in the cold, too, poking pig crates and tossing through farm-carts!’

A rustle of cloth, then a metallic whine as the weapon stabbed into the haystack behind the tail-gate. The point sank a span deep and thunked hollow wood, to a tell-tale gurgle of fluid. ‘Contraband, is it? Grain whiskey, perhaps?’ The foot-soldier laughed, while his fellows closed in and burrowed to expose the illicit cache.

‘He’s got barrels, sir. Ones without tax brands or seals on the bungs.’

‘Too bad,’ said the officer, unsympathetic. ‘Looks like you’re faced with detainment for smuggling.’

The mule-driver scarcely bemoaned his bad luck, but offered a bribe to evade the penalty.

‘One barrel? Kiss my rosy arse! You’ll donate thrice that number and grin. Count on it, my captain insists on his share. Not to mention the filthy provost’s men skim. That’s only sound business, to gag their stickler’s consciences.’

The brazen bout of dickering finished with the busy slide of raised pins, then the creak as the tail-gate was lowered. A dog growled, caught up by the scruff and tossed into the haystack to satisfy duty. Its honest nose snuffled for fugitives, while the men collected their sweetening share with unrestrained greed.

Tarens cowered, too injured to stir, and petrified to bated breath. He recalled the knife stolen from the diviner and braced for the futility of desperate action. But the vagabond hidden beside him did not spring into tensioned sweat. His stilled clasp on the crofter’s wrist stayed collected, even as the diligent hound whined and rooted. When the crofter finally inhaled, he nearly choked, membranes singed by the sharp sting of wintergreen. A genius stroke, as the industrious hound sucked the astringent herb into its snout the next moment.

Its explosive sneeze flurried the hay. Then it yelped and shot backwards onto its haunches, where it shivered and licked its nose, whimpering. No one took notice. The last unloaded cask thunked into the ground to someone’s snap of impatience. The dog was seized by routine and dragged off the wagon to speed the smug rush to sequester the dunned casks. The mule-driver slammed closed his tail-gate and secured the pins. Released on his way, he clambered back onto the buckboard and shook up his mules.

Tarens lay trembling under the tarp. Limp with relief, he placed no innocent faith in coincidence: surely his clever friend had not fallen into a corrupt drayman’s wagon at random. Neither was the skilled penchant for skulking the habit of an upright man. Yet the puzzle could not be pondered under the misery of black-out faintness. Too shaken to think, Tarens let the rattletrap wain bear him southbound through the chill morning.

Noon came. More mounted lancers swept past, first one troop, then another, noisy with the martial jingle of steel and the snap of streamed pennons. A third, larger company of dedicates followed. The horn blasts of their advance guard warned other traffic clear of the roadway, and drove the lumbering dray to stop at the verge. Hay stalks whispered and winnowed to the backwash of breeze as the cavalcade clattered past at a canter. The muleteer and his load stayed at the side, unmolested. Whether the temple’s elite lancers disdained to sully their snow-white surcoats to conduct a search, or if their officious captain avoided the bother of the delay, no rider dismounted to trifle with a farm vehicle passed through the earlier check-point.

The next batch at their heels reined in, but apparently only to breathe their hot mounts. The multiplied clop of shod destriers woke Tarens. Through febrile pain, he overheard the excitable gossip exchanged in response to a bystander’s query. ‘The hunt’s out for the renegade sorcerer, yes. A practitioner in league with Darkness who unkeyed the locks on cold iron with spells. He’s absconded with the confirmed murderer the Lord Examiner arrested just before dawn.’

‘Oh, he left no prints to clue the league’s trackers! There’s truth,’ a second speaker chimed in. ‘Head-hunters’ hounds so far have drawn a blank field, as if there’s no scent to nose out.’

‘Maybe he flew like a bird in the night. Shapechanged to a beast? Never saw such, myself. But that’s what the priesthood is saying.’

‘Claptrap!’ another man added, and laughed. ‘If yon skulker’s that powerful, we’re wasting our time. Such a paragon wouldn’t stoop to a runaway’s game, chased off like a thief through the country-side.

‘They’ll run him down through the use of diviners,’ a fellow in the rear-guard assured. ‘A wee knife was stolen from one of their own. If the object’s still in the creature’s possession, their blessed talent will use that to find him. If not, the next crafted spell he attempts will alert the temple’s trained sensitives. Once they have him placed, we’ll close in for the capture. If the twisted criminal isn’t killed outright, rest easy. He’ll be dragged to Erdane and put to ritual death by the sword and the fire.’

To that end, lance troops had been deployed from all points of the compass, with each dedicate captain primed for his chance to seize glory.

‘We’ll have eighty companies deployed before nightfall. No way the Dark’s minion is going to slip through. Sleep soundly tonight, man, and thank the Light for the grace of the temple’s protection.’

The mule drover mumbled an unctuous blessing, his gratitude more likely due to the contraband he slipped under the troop’s righteous noses.

Then the horn blast sounded to signal the trot. Bits chinked as the lancers gave on their reins and spurred on their way. ‘I do suggest that you roll straight through,’ the last man in the column called over his shoulder. ‘A curfew’s been imposed after nightfall for safety’s sake. Don’t pause until you’re snugged down inside the stone walls of an inn.’

The mule-cart ground onwards through late afternoon, with Tarens sunk deeper in misery. For each black-out moment he catnapped, the rude jolts of the hay-cart awoke him, gasping in pain from the grate of his damaged ribs. His untended gashes swelled into a throbbing crescendo of aches. Terror stifled his moans. He bit his split lip and endured without respite until the cold, clouded sunset brought the hay-wagon to its scheduled delivery. The heavy wheels rumbled to a stop on the cobbles behind the stable at a traveller’s inn.

A changeable wind blew in from the north, salted with early snow. The hostler’s boys who caught the team’s bridles carped and blew on numb fingers. The driver flung them two coppers to unhitch his mules, then chased them off with the laconic assurance he would fork the hay into the loft in due time. The boys pocketed the coins, content to scarper without asking bothersome questions. The inclement weather defrayed any suspicion since a carter hunched at his reins with cold feet might well crave whiskey and a hot meal before he tended his load.

The cart stayed unobtrusively parked, removed from the torch-lit bustle that ebbed and flowed through the crowded front inn-yard. The dusk shadows rapidly deepened to felt. By night, someone was bound to come on the sly to collect the black-market kegs. Before then, the stowed fugitives must make themselves scarce, a pressing urgency that Tarens grasped even while beset by relentless discomfort. His companion helped free him from the wrapped tarp. The crofter forced his battered body to move, shoved off through the loose hay, blundered over the casks, and clumsily crashed against the fastened tail-gate. He struggled to hoist his stiff frame overtop. The effort went badly. He dropped, his feet jolted into the ground, and crashed heavily to his knees. Light-headed dizziness crumpled him there, shuddering with his forehead pressed against the frigid cobbles.

‘You may have to leave me,’ he groaned in despair.

The sound of his voice raised a fearsome, low growl from the back of the stable. Apparently the inn kept a mastiff to forestall sneak thieves and chase off any freebooters who sought to bed down in the hayloft. One bark of alarm, and a heavy-set bloke with a cudgel would be drawn at a run to investigate.

The vagabond forsook Tarens’s side. The charmed touch that once mollified scrawny hens also settled the dog, which presently leaped on him, nuzzling. He scratched beneath its studded collar, then left it wagging its stub tail. He collected the furled tarp. A patience that did not seem hurried steadied Tarens’s tormented effort to stand. Unbalanced, the large man leaned on the smaller. Together, they managed the agonized shuffle towards the rear door of the stable. No one challenged their entry. The bustle at day’s end busied the staff, with the arrival of the public coach out of Cainford flooding the front yard with pitch torches and noise. A shrill woman scolded a crying child, while the head hostler’s roaring invective chased laggards to unstrap the guests’ baggage. Every groom not hot-walking outriders’ mounts became chewed over for laziness. Amid the commotion to unhitch the harness team, no slackers sidled off into the unlit crannies to loiter.

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.