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Early Winter 5922

IV. Dispossessed

The driver of the cart-load of fleeces proved to be a man in love with his wine-skin. Between rapturous guzzling, he sang off-key, or mumbled obscenities in tones of encouragement to the back-turned ears of his draught mules. Stopped by the Light’s lancers for questioning, he told raucous jokes. Oblivious to rolled eyes and glares of annoyance, he folded double and whooped himself breathless with laughter at his own cleverness.

The exasperated sergeant propped him back upright with distaste. Since nothing witnessed by a drunken sot could be counted reliable, the dedicates slapped the rumps of his team and sent him on his merry way. Better that, than risk being saddled with him when he flopped into a stupor and snored off his binge amid his rancid cargo. The minion of Darkness sought by the temple examiners moved over the land without tracks. Such a fell power would not need to skulk, far less stow away where the pungency of shearling wool left the hand that inspected it reeking of sheep.

Therefore, Tarens slept undisturbed, comfortably nestled amid the grease stink of lanolin. When the tipsy driver succumbed to his spree down the road, a small, black-haired man cloaked in a horse-blanket emerged from the fleeces, took over the mules’ reins, and steered the cart southward at a brisk pace.

Hours later, the driver awoke, moaning with a bilious hangover. Naught seemed the worse for his bout of unconsciousness, except that his strayed mules had meandered off course down a derelict side lane and snagged their bridles in the rank overgrowth. The wind was rising. Lowered sun filtered through the bare trees, and a pewter scud of cloud from the north threatened to bring a fresh snowfall. Grumbling over his tender head, the carter extricated his team, muscled his stalled wagon right way around, and back-tracked towards the main trade-road.

He never saw hide nor hair of the fugitives inadvertently given safe transport. An hour gone, the pair pressed forward on foot down the unused by-way. The weedy wheel-ruts devolved to a path, embroidered with dense thickets of burdock and flanked by a leafless coppice. The wood opened at length where the tumble-down ruin of a settlement bordered the river’s edge.

The rotted lathe-walls, broken fences, and moss-capped chimney stones had lain abandoned for years, roofless crofts and a caved-in forge overtaken by bitter-sweet vine. Likely the land’s bounty had gone to neglect when the resident families fell to a virulent outbreak of fever. Tarens allowed that Efflin’s case had been lucky. More often, those stricken succumbed and died. A village might be wiped out in a season, with the hale survivors too few to maintain the legacy left by misfortune.

The fallen beams stood open to sky. Nothing moved but the secretive pheasant, flushed squawking from the weedy straggle of stems left by kitchen gardens gone wild. Where there had been children and laughter and industry, only the rustles of drab little birds foraged amid the snarled briar.

Tarens ached, dispirited. ‘What are you looking for? We won’t find a haven, here.’

Head cocked to one side, his dark-haired friend continued to listen as if hope had not gone with the vanished inhabitants. Shortly, in the yard of a tumble-down cottage, he unearthed a dry root-cellar in decent repair. The nearby well had not fallen in. Though the rusted crank-shaft had frozen, the chain stayed intact enough to replace the rotted bucket with a discarded preserves jar. The drawn water stayed sweet. Plentiful hare grazed in the overgrown pastures. Summer-fat on the unmown hay, they were easily snared with a string noose. By nightfall, before the first snow blew in earnest, the vagabond’s foraging provided a tasty leek stew, stirred with a peeled stick in a dented pot.

The frugal cookfire he built amid a cracked hearth vented almost no smoke, a detail not lost upon Tarens, who crouched in the lee of the collapsed foundation, bruised and pained by every drawn breath. At each turn, his friend’s resourcefulness displayed a flagrant proficiency.

‘You’ve done this before,’ he broached at a hitched whisper.

The beggarman returned a luminous smile, unapologetic as he dished out two savoury servings into his scavenged jam crocks. Carmine-lit by the embers, he was raffish again, his dark hair in tangles and his sharp-cut features blurred over by several days’ stubble.

Tarens accepted his portion, moved to trepidation by the messy prospect of eating while strapped in the dressing that splinted his nose. A touch on his wrist dispelled that apprehension: he was offered a wooden spoon, crudely whittled. Not by the artifact blade from the diviner but with a plain harness knife, too likely filched from the inn’s cranky stableman.

‘Thank you,’ he rasped, grateful in spite of the suspect case of petty theft. ‘You must have a name?’

The question incited a glance, with raised eyebrows. The vagabond set down his meal. He retrieved the stick implement from the emptied pot and scraped three antique Paravian characters on the slate apron. A pause followed. After a frown of intense concentration, he surrendered his effort, left a gap, and inscribed a last cipher with an irritable flourish.

‘I can’t read the old runes,’ Tarens pressed gently.

The stick moved again, the inscription redone in the common characters used by town commerce. ‘ARI,’ the string began, followed by the same annoyed space, then the dangling character ‘N,’ finished off with a flick.

‘Arin will do, then,’ Tarens declared, tactful enough not to stir the frustration behind the peevish omission. ‘Unless you wish otherwise?’

An open-hand gesture gave resigned assent. Then hunger eclipsed the token exchange. Both men ate quickly. Before darkness fell, their coal-fire was doused, the swept ashes flung into the river. Arin smothered the blackened hearthstone under mouldered leaves, cleaned the jam-jars, and removed the one rigged to the well chain. Satisfied that no trace of their presence remained, he chased Tarens into the root-cellar. Huddled amid the chill influx of draughts and blind in the dank, cobwebbed darkness, the injured man wrapped up in the moth-eaten horse-blanket.

Nothing spoke but the outside whine of the wind, and the fitful scrape as dry leaves scratched across the overgrown entrance. Denied simple conversation, the crofter wondered what trauma incited his companion’s reluctance to talk.

The elusive answer remained unsolved since Arin slipped back outdoors in pursuit of unspecified business. Nocturnal by habit, he might stay abroad until after the storm broke. Tarens was left stranded with his own thoughts, wakeful and alone for the first time since the fraught peril of his deliverance.

Crops had failed here. The awareness tingled through skin, bone, and nerve, from the finger-tips pressed to cold earth with intent to detect the drummed vibration of hoof-beats. But no patrol of white lancers pursued his battered friend. Not yet; the certainty that such searchers would come cranked a relentless tension through his viscera. The man who failed to recall his true name, for convenience addressed as Arin, expelled a vexed breath and stood up.

He could not have explained how he sensed the imprinted presence of subtle disharmony. Only that, between the snow scent on the wind and the rustled chatter of frosted grasses, a lingering blight threaded through the innate fabric of this remote patch of farmland. Like dissonance, some long-past event spun a kink in the natural currents that nourished the life in his surroundings.

He had no memory and yet, he knew. Once, long ago, he may have spun music to remedy such an imbalance. But not here: the pulse of this place did not rise in his blood though he could trace the stagnated eddies and define where ragged constrictions marred the rhythmic flow of its melody.

The upset was an entrenched affliction. Through the whine of the wind and the pressure of pending storm, he noted the absence of owls and the scarcity of the field-mice. The plentiful hare bespoke sparse herds of deer, which should have browsed on the unmown pastures in their drab winter coats. These fields were not, and never had been home to him. Still, if he let his attentive pause lengthen, the subtle symphony of deeper nuances gradually would be unveiled.

He shrank from the prospect. The stretch to access such uncanny awareness bristled him to instinctive recoil. Who knew what other dread fact might emerge? What firm assurance did he possess, that some ugly circumstance from his blank past might not resurface and shatter his equilibrium? Someone had chained him, once. He bore the scars. Trauma from an incorrigible imprisonment made him flinch, until the evidence haunted him: that somehow he might be a danger to others, and the cruelty of his past shackles might prove to be justified.

Fires never burned without smoke. The placid country-side was being swept to flush out a sorcerer maligned for foul practice. Frightened talk between the travellers on the thoroughfare had shared the same terrorized undertones overheard at the inn-yard. Worse, he had tended the hideous injuries inflicted upon Tarens by the brunt of hysterical consequence.

The inner dread had to be faced: his unknown past might hold criminal acts. If so, he deferred the crippling horror of digging for self-discovery. His gifted talent could not be denied. The evident power he carried, untapped, burned like molten flame under the skin. Scruple kept that frightful well-spring untested. He would not sound those depths. Never, until the kind-hearted crofter could be delivered to safety. That feat must be done on his upright human merits, if only to bear out an honest man’s faith in him.

Therefore, his finely tuned senses searched only for warning of inbound lancers. No such intrusion disrupted the night. Pending snow whetted the air to shaved ice, and stiffened gusts clattered the branches. He moved through the ruin softly as a wraith, while the promised storm stole in like snipped lace and paled the darkness with flurries. Content for the nonce to wear Arin’s identity, he combed through the graveyard ruin of the village for anything useful. He finished fast, stripped off his jacket, and wrapped up his picked stash of oddities. He returned to his chosen bolt-hole before the dusted ground showed his tracks.

The shelter enfolded him, pitch-black and silent, but not peaceful, as he expected. Instead his companion’s inconsolable grief pounded with breaking force against his unshuttered empathic awareness.

Arin dropped his wrapped cache. Reeled as though struck by a mortal blow, he could not move, could not breathe, could not think. Only feel, quite helpless to stem the flash-point shock of the other man’s raging emotion.

Entangled, Arin lost the wits to recoil. He had spent too many traumatic years pitched to the razor’s edge, his survival pressured to split-second response through the soul-naked handling of free wraiths. His ingrained, urgent reflex sorted the wrack, already driven to seek the needful pattern to uplift and heal…

Images of family burst through in a flood, stamped with the loss of unbearable parting: a thousand desolate imprints of love wrenched into abrupt separation. Some faces he recognized. Beside Efflin and Kerelie, he picked out the two deceased children whose spirits once spoke through a borrowed flute. The sad barrage also encompassed lost parents: a boy’s eyes watched a father leave home, conscripted to arms by a temple muster; this triggered a spinning, prescient rush into an unformed future, which showed Kerelie, convulsed with laughter while sewing a rich lady’s ruffled silk dress. Then that image faded into another, of Efflin bent over an open account book. Both scenes yet-to-be stretched like gauze across the torched biers that had consumed the wrapped casualties of summer’s fever. Amid the crackle of flames from past pyres, other layers of charred bones whispered through the endemic malignment that wracked the country-side to disharmony…

The paroxysm of visions flayed through as a rip tide that broke, ebbed, and stranded him. Arin came back to himself, his eyes streaming the tears of fierce heart-ache. He tasted the tang of death and despair, and ached for the bleak damage yet to occur. Once while caged in crystal, assuaging a wraith, he had translated such findings to music, then lifted the tissue of pain to a gentle requital through resonant melody. But Tarens was a being of flesh, prisoned inside the range of his cognizant senses. Lacking an instrument, speech only remained: and the stark terror of sounded words left the musician wretchedly paralyzed.

If he spoke, Arin dreaded the crushing discovery, that the singer perceived by his inner awareness might be just a wishful figment. To shatter a dream of such exquisite purity surely might wound his spirit deeply enough to destroy him. More than silence, he dreaded his flawed human voice might be found lacking in range and tonality.

Perhaps vicious uncertainty ripped a sound from him.

‘Are you all right?’ Tarens cried, from the dark. ‘Arin? Save us both! Are you injured?’

‘No.’ The word burst from his lips, half gasp, half whisper, a cork unleashed by a torrent. Arin’s concern could do nothing else. Only stem Tarens’s poisoned depression before sorrow blighted the man’s open heart and stunted his generosity.

‘Listen to me!’ Forced past reserve, the phrases burst free in a crisp, antique accent. ‘Your sister was never content as a crofter! She will serve out her year’s term at the temple, embroidering vestments and altar-cloths. Her fine needlework will bring her a skilled job at a quality dress shop. Your brother will never return to a farm. His loss of the boys cannot rest in that setting. He will find a new life as a clerk, enjoy songs with a circle of erudite friends, and marry a good woman for comfort.’

Tarens’s staggered amazement was palpable. ‘Arin! My friend, whoever you are, how can you claim to know this?’

The question floundered into tense quiet. The uneasy answer was not safe to broach since the truth implied seer’s gift. Such had happened before: prescient visions also had forecast the inquiry of the Light’s diviner. Which suggested a faculty that out-stripped intuition. Content to stay Arin, beyond fearful of Tarens’s right­eous distrust if such talent branded him with the wickedness of proscribed sorcery, he retrieved his jacket and rifled through its bundled contents. The flint striker and bronze clip were too easily found: more damning evidence of a breadth of vision unimpaired in the dark. Frantic to salvage the man’s benign faith in him, Arin fashioned a rushlight.

He hoped that the wavering flame unveiled an innocuous presence: of a lean fellow with tousled black hair and green eyes, earnest with care and uncertainty. ‘Friend,’ Arin said gently, ‘by all that I am, whatever that is, I promise I won’t ever harm you.’

His assurance was not rough, or grating, or flat, but instead possessed a mellifluous lilt that all but unmanned him with gratitude. The elusive remembrance of a bard’s ability might not be a delusion, after all.

The rushlight steadied. Its honest exposure should reveal the terror that shadowed his unknown origins.

Tarens returned an unruffled regard from a hideously battered face. He saw no reason yet to shy from the fearful thorns of uncertainty. Crofter, he had been. But his fighter’s temperament sprang from a loyalty solid as bone. He said carefully, ‘We found you where the old lane leads to the ruin of the ancient earl’s court south of Kelsing. The Koriathain sometimes make use of that place for their private rituals. Have you an active connection to them?’

‘If I did,’ Arin answered, stung to leashed rage, ‘I was held as their captive, most likely for an unclean purpose.’ He shuddered, hesitant to broach the nightmares that troubled his sleep. ‘By no means would I let them retake me.’ Shown Tarens’s appalled consternation, he added, ‘Your question is forthright! But if I don’t remember, I can’t guarantee you don’t walk in dangerous company.’

The awkward moment spun out to the hiss of the fluttered flame. How to account, that no recall existed? Or explain an experience that lurked outside reason, formlessly venomed by the latent horrors of a term of helpless entrapment?

While Arin struggled for tactful language, Tarens eased the tense pause with the innocence of human decency.

‘Since you don’t know what set you to flight, let’s not rush to press judgement. You may be the marked quarry, but I’ve been condemned. Survival has joined our fate.’ Before that recrimination could wound, Tarens added, ‘I regret nothing, do you understand? In your own way, you took risks for my family. All of your acts have done right by them.’

Last gesture, the crofter snuffed out the rush lamp. In patent reassurance, he settled and slept, deliberately vulnerable to the busy works of his mage-sighted companion. Surely he heard, as he nodded off, the purposeful strokes of edged steel being honed across a scrounged whetstone.

At due length, three broken kitchen knives were refurbished as daggers. Arin’s cut-leather belt wrapped the grips, with his oversized breeches retied at the waist with a braid made from scavenged string.

Stretched out to rest, tensioned yet by unease, Arin listened as the gusts winnowed the thickened snowfall outside. Musty air filled his nostrils. He could not shake off the haunted impression of another prior experience: that somewhere before, the hitched breaths of an injured friend had been sealed by a blizzard inside of a root-cellar. The cramped ambience spun him a gruesome dream, stark with the memory of desperate straits, and more vivid than uncontrolled prescience…

Then, the reiving cohort of lancers had worn black-and-gold surcoats blazoned with entwined snakes and lions. The innocent’s cottage just put to the torch crackled in red conflagration, whipped under a white-out blizzard. In that day’s frigid air, amid drifts trampled pink, sprawled the large, honest man their knives had tortured to find him. Heart-sore, he strove with his healer’s skills to stem bleeding and bind riven flesh. The damage lay beyond any remedy. Even so, he rejected the dying man’s plea for abandonment: ‘For your gift of feal duty, my charge of protection; for your loyalty, my spirit shall answer, unto my last drop of blood, and until my final living breath, Dharkaron witness.’

He finished the dressing for honour alone. ‘You didn’t betray me,’ he told that wounded man, whose agony, suffered in his behalf, came to refuge in the comfortless chill of a root-cellar.

Amid winter’s freeze, sheltered in earth-bound quiet, the reliving carried the same fetid smells: of breathed air and wrapped wounds, congealed blood, and the hounding dread of uncertainty.

That man’s fatal anguish had wrung him to voice the bitter extent of his sorrow: ‘You failed nothing and no one. I could name you hero, gild a plaque in your memory that proclaims the cornerstone for a crown that will stand on the strength of your sacrifice. But the truth casts down rhetoric. A man who holds hospitality sacred is worth much more to the land than a king.’

‘Long life, and my blessing,’ said the ghost in his nightmare. ‘The Fellowship Sorcerers are right to restore you.’

Arin wrenched awake with a gasp, shuddered by the throes of after-shock. Somebody’s callused hand gripped his arm, and another muffled his screaming.

‘Arin?’ The concern was Tarens’s, not some long-dead trapper. ‘You shouted in your sleep.’

Carefully tactful, the crofter released him. Respect did not rush to ask probing questions. Yet the fabric of pretence had shredded. As fugitives roped together by destiny, one man understood that he was the sole cause of his fellow’s hapless endangerment.

Worse, the relentless peril that stalked them trafficked in blood-letting stakes. Arin sat up. Arms wrapped over tucked knees, he rested his forehead against his crossed wrists.

Tonight’s outbreak of recall suggested a history his spirit cried out to disown: chased as quarry before, he had survived because a strong man with great heart had died for him. More, his own peal of sorrow restated the lines of a prince’s oath to a feal liegeman. Incontrovertibly, he had a past and a name: dangerous facts all but certain to drive the committed factions that hunted him. Though to the last fibre, he viewed such a royal legacy as abhorrent, for the worse, Tarens was already ensnared in the weave of that intractable heritage.

Scalded, Arin reaffirmed the past vow hurled into the teeth of his enemies. ‘I don’t leave them my wounded.’

If the selfless kindness that brought Tarens to shelter a destitute stranger was not to share a dog’s end, the misery of their cooped quarters must be sustained throughout days to come. Just as before, the diligent searchers would leave no stone unturned, and no weedy field untrampled in their manic furor. Therefore, no quarry’s tracks must be found in the pristine drifts. With luck, under snow, the temple dedicates would overlook the buried depression at the root-cellar’s entrance. For safety, the fugitives holed up inside must stay immured until the next thaw. The bare ground would have to be frosted iron-hard before they dared emerge, first to forage, then to move on.

As wretchedly plagued by the capricious onset of an early winter, only one person alive stayed at liberty to illuminate Arin’s veiled past. Dakar the Mad Prophet sulked in shadow beneath the bleak spire of Althain Tower, buffeted by the cruel north wind. He needed no seer’s gift to forecast the squeeze of the crisis: beyond doubt, his accursed role in Prince Arithon’s past would run him afoul of the Koriathain.

Dakar had crossed their filthy agenda before, even quashed the wily gamut of their probes in his time as a crown heir’s appointed protector. Under Fellowship auspices, in lawful standing as Asandir’s agent, he had been the target of their baneful plots often enough to wring him to cold sweats. The fresh prospect woke the spectre of nightmare, since the thankless quittance of his apprenticeship stripped him of the Sorcerers’ backing.

At loose ends, three days later, Dakar reeled yet. From outraged denial, to obstinate dragged heels, to packing his tinker’s haul of possessions, he loitered outside the tower’s shut gates, abandoned to his own devices. The warded locks were fastened, behind him. Ahead, the worn spur of the north trade-road seamed the barren wilds of Atainia; daunting, inhospitable terrain for a traveller stranded afoot.

Southward, the ancient track flanked the iced current of the Isaer, passed the massive node that harnessed the lane force at the Great Circle, then met the cross-roads at the crumbled Second Age ruin, where the river’s head-waters welled from an underground cavern. Asandir’s journey lay that way, en route to the mountain outpost that sheltered a persecuted clan enclave.

Fed to the teeth with the hazardous affairs of his former master, and festered to a grudge like a canker, Dakar turned his back and set off for the nearest town habitation. Weeds snagged at his boots. Too short-strided for the rough ground, he stumbled across stony gullies washed through the wheel-ruts. Few wagons ventured this desolate land, laid waste since the tumult of a First Age battle, with bleak, scoured hill-tops whipped to thin dust, and vales that whispered of keening ghosts, slagged yet by the glassine pits of past drakefire.

Solitude gave Dakar too much time to brood. Independence did not leave him care-free. His tuned awareness picked up the warped flow of the lane flux, unbalanced still by the echo of ruin a wrathful dragon had unleashed at Avenor. Disharmony and disease still choked the realm of Tysan, a condition unlikely to find a reprieve under the True Sect’s doctrine. If such weighty matters correctly belonged under Fellowship oversight, Dakar had suffered the Sorcerers’ company too long to stay blinded by ignorance. Aggravated, each step, he vented and kicked a loose pebble.

The spiteful impulse injured only his toe. While the missile cracked off a boulder and bounced, the Mad Prophet hopped on one foot and let fly. ‘May Dharkaron Avenger’s immortal black horses drop steaming dung over Asandir’s field boots!’

The Sorcerer’s footwear, likely as not, would walk scatheless through the encounter. Worse, the maligned gravel would imprint the curse, since the Athlien singers had vanished. The Mad Prophet yanked his flapping cloak tight and sullenly shut down his mage-sense.

If he must blister his tender soles and spend brutal nights in the open, he would endure the unpleasantness without the bother of a refined connection. More, if the crux of Fellowship need pressured him to volunteer to safeguard Rathain’s hunted prince, he was older, and finally wise to the fact the position was star-crossed! Riddled with pernicious pitfalls and foes, with the man himself given to powers and strengths unimaginably dangerous.

‘Damn all to Sethvir’s manipulative maundering!’ Dakar swore. The Warden’s almighty earth-sense knew how keeping that post had wrecked the last footing for a friend’s trust. Dakar could not weep. Not anymore. His recriminations were long since spent for an anguish that could not, in life, be erased. His unsavoury duty in Halwythwood, and again, after warning, at Athir, had unequivocally served Fellowship interests through the betrayal of Arithon’s personal integrity.

If the royal victim ever discovered the secret price paid then to win his survival, Dakar understood what his hide would be worth! In his shoes, the guilty party would run, never to shoulder the lash of reprisal from the infamous s’Ffalenn temper.

‘Murder would be kinder,’ Dakar muttered, and pumped on short legs to hike faster.

He reached Lorn three days later, puffing and tired, with chafed heels and both ankles blistered. The town was no place to cheer dismal spirits: little more than a barnacle cluster of dwellings attached to the rocky northcoast, sandwiched between a clouded, pearl sky and the pewter shine of the winter breakers. Dusk had fallen. Under the smeared smoke from the chimney-stacks, the rimed cobbles in the narrow streets sheltered the slink of ­scavenging cats, and the briny miasma of fish guts. The years since the revival of navigation had shrunk the port back to an isolate haven for mackerel boats.

The market lay deserted, where by day the garrulous matrons diced and salted down the dawn catch. The risen, raw wind already had chased their benighted gossip indoors. As eager for comfort, Dakar steered between the bleak, wharf-side warehouses and the netted thatch roof of the chandler’s. The hot glow of lamp-light steamed the roundels of the sole clapboard tavern when he shoved his bulk through the squeaky plank door.

Conversation quieted before him, replaced with the owlish stares by which grizzled, backwater salts measured an outsider. Even the urchin stopped begging for scraps and turned round eyes towards the cloaked stranger.

Dakar surveyed the coarse company, daubed in the thick shadows from the tallow lamps slung from the ceiling beams. Unattached men sprawled at the trestles, flushed with drink as they elbowed to cuddle the barmaids. Others with wives and young children at home downed their pints and hob-nobbed with friends. The widows with black scarves tied over their hair, and the ham-fisted matrons crammed into the corner nooks, while the wizened elderly snoozed by the hearth, too arthritic to haul twine on the luggers.

The acquaintance Dakar sought was not present.

Aware if he ventured abroad that the doors would be closed to late lodgers, he waded inside over mud-brick floors tracked gritty with sand. The taint of wet wool and sweat was ingrained, and the attitude jaundiced as the offal dumped out for the sharks. Lest such contempt be mistaken for welcome, the muscular landlord propped against the bar priced his beer to fleece strangers.

His brew would be sour as pig swill, besides. Dakar might have matched the extortion with coppers spell-burnished to gleam like silver, but the clam stew with hard bread he wanted sold for only three pence. He seated himself on an empty bench, ordered supper, and ate. Talk of nets, sails, and weather resumed, pointedly directed around him.

He was not left to mind his anonymous business. Another woman tucked into one corner was equally shunned by the locals. Although she wore the same smock blouse and wool over-dress, her lily-white fingers had never flensed a wet cod. The sigil she pitched against Dakar’s aura flicked his nerves like a scuttling spider.

The Mad Prophet choked. He blotted the chowder broth sprayed through his beard and slurped onwards. Apparently innocuous, stupid, and fat, he measured the execrable nuisance: Prime Selidie’s rapacity wasted no time. Already, he was pinched in a trap laid by the Koriathain. More, the power that hounded him was no trifle. The witch had more sisters stationed nearby, equipped with the force to shred his defenses.

Cornered, alone, he was tacitly warned to accede in quiet surrender.

Dakar spat out a mauled clot of gristle and sopped up the last driblets of gravy. Bedamned if he meant to move before he settled his dinner. The enchantress could fume herself purple meanwhile. Tysan’s dogmatic aversion to sorcery meant a sister reliant upon a quartz focus dared not wield her blatant craft in the open.

Inspired, Dakar belched, clutched his middle, and yowled. ‘This vile soup is tainted! Does the house poison guests? I’ve been gouged before for the price of a bed when bad stew laid me low with a belly-ache!’

A smatter of laughter arose, cut by the inn matron’s roar from the kitchen. ‘Going to spew, are you? The gutter’s outside! No refunds here for a whiner’s gut, nor warm milk for a griped constitution!’

Dakar doubled over and moaned.

Nobody else who consumed the same fare took pity on his distress. The bar-keeper ignored him. While his enemy watched, Dakar ripped off his belt. He tossed the strap onto the trestle hard enough to make the looped coin pouch clash loudly against the brass buckle. Cloak shrugged off to puddle around his ankles, he unlaced and peeled his twill jerkin, then groaned and crumpled arse down on the floor.

Heads turned, hatted and bearded and weathered, amused by his histrionics.

Dakar shuddered and held his breath. When his pouched cheeks flushed to vermilion, he rolled up his eyes and flopped into a faint.

Evidently out cold, he lay like a log. Where a dishonest bumpkin anyplace else would snap up his obvious bait, Lorn’s slack-witted brutes showed no interest. Instead, the burliest onlooker grabbed the suds pail from the tap. While he doused the felled landlubber back to spluttering consciousness, the beggar child finally dived after the abandoned purse. The predictable happened: his disreputable, grimed hand blistered on the spellbinder’s wards as he tried to pilfer the contents.

The treble scream as the boy singed his fingers sheared over the rumbled laughs and snide comments. He was quite unharmed, beyond a few moments of painful sensory illusion.

But where conjury was anathema, the lad’s cry raised a furor of panic.

While the timid backed into the corners and prayed, the brave brandished raised benches and bottles and closed in to trounce the unholy practitioner. The door banged as someone left at a run to fetch the town’s armed authority.

‘That’s your sorry response for a lad caught out, thieving?’ Dakar yelled through the commotion. Soaked to dripping, hunched over with belly-ache, he shoved erect in the jostle. Backed to the wall by a breastwork of benches, he pealed on through the bar-keeper’s bellows and the child’s roaring tantrum. ‘Your snotty brat looks fit for work. Let him earn honest pay washing pots in your scullery and thank me for the sting of a timely correction!’

But instead, the harpy from the inn’s kitchen barreled out with her meat skewer angled for blood. ‘We don’t take interference from upstart sorcerers!’

Dakar dug in his heels. Safe, he hoped, from the underhand wiles of Koriathain, he measured the angry fishermen who crowded to carve him in strips. ‘Damn all to Dharkaron!’ he railed in their teeth. ‘And the same to the Light’s idiot doctrine.’ Only a suicide would blaspheme the True Sect’s Canon by the name of Ath’s Avenging Angel. Annoyed that Lorn’s inept constable was tar-slow to collect blatant malefactors, Dakar ducked a swung fist. ‘Why beat a sick man? Take that ne’er-do-well snip who shoved his sticky mitt in my coin-purse!’

Buffered amid the pummelling scuffle, with both eyes alert for the Koriani meddler, a short man tussled by a pack of stout locals failed to see the town’s hastily summoned defender: one who gleamed, out of place, in the white-and-gold robes bestowed by the high temple at Erdane.

With the vested Sunwheel diviner came the immaculate armed escort, dispatched for the annual headcount of the Light’s faithful. Dakar’s rude discovery of the surprise entourage met the mailed fist of the dedicate whose righteous clout dropped him unconscious.

Dakar woke behind bars. A connoisseur of dark cells the length and breadth of five kingdoms, his nose broke the news that Lorn’s dungeon outstripped the most noisome. He languished in fishy straw used sometime ago to pack mackerel. The stink threatened to kill him. Worse, clutches of starved rats rustled to feast on the rotted bits of fins and glued fish-heads. The slide of hairless tails and scampering feet tickled over him, while beneath, the floor stirred to an army of questing roaches. His nape throbbed, his eyelids were crusted, and the slob incarcerated before him had mistaken the water pan for a chamber-pot.

Nauseous, Dakar counted his blessings: he was not wracked by a hangover, or pulped by a bed-frolicking woman’s crazed husband, or worse, brothers outraged by a sister’s lost chastity. Expertly versed at survival in duress, the Mad Prophet knew how to upset a gaoler. Just by singing, he could make his presence unpleasant as nails pounded into the brain. Other wardens had thrown him out on his arse for drawing in plagues of iyats.

Lorn’s square-jawed trusty escaped such grief, due to the predation of the Koriathain, and because temple authority left no heretic sorcerer to corrupt their horde of spiff rodents. Lancers in white surcoats collected Dakar by the scruff before his bashed head stopped spinning.

He played uncooperative and weak at the knees. Despite centuries of civil­ized apprenticeship, the Fellowship’s cast-off spellbinder could belt out insults with dock-side flair. ‘I’m too sick to move,’ he finished off, douce, not faking the fact that the starch had run out of him.

Lethargy forced the hand of his captors. They smutched their white livery, heaved Dakar’s bulk upright, and grunted his dragged heels upstairs, where the predictable jumped-up clerk surely waited to record the sentence.

‘Don’t promise me justice!’ groused Dakar, en route. ‘I’ve seen the facetious performance before. The magistrate’s chamber won’t be a turd-box for rats. No, their two-legged cousins like floors without muck. They’ll expect me to wet myself for a gaggle of buffoons perched on a dais. They’ll wear jewels and prettier robes than you lot, with chins brown as yours, because anyone jostling for a promotion always polishes backsides with puckered lips.’

The warden roared and cocked his mailed fist. Dakar smirked and sagged into a curtsey. While the muscle that propped him upright bowed also, bent over by his unstrung weight, the chap’s armoured knuckles ploughed unimpeded into the stone wall. The screech of steel links made the most stalwart man cringe and caused Dakar to faint into a wad on the landing. The vengeful boots that kicked his larded ribs roused slurred mutters but failed to stiffen his backbone enough to stand up. There forward, he had to be towed by the wrists and ankles like a dead donkey. Onwards up the rough stair, then forcibly skated down a corridor floored with waxed wood, Dakar bemoaned the abuse until his sweated escort flopped him through the doubled doors into the chamber for judgement. Prostrate and panting, he exuded the reek of dead mackerel steeped in rat piss.

The Light’s diviner scarcely blinked at the stench. A bald fellow with translucent skin, he sat enthroned beside candles that lit his livery to eye-stabbing brilliance. The town magistrate and justiciar flanked him like book ends, with a stool set aside for a bothered clerk, and a sparrow-thin orator who plucked up a list and wheezed through the verified accusations.

‘The prisoner will stand for sentencing,’ the temple diviner intoned, his accent from upper-crust Erdani origins.

Dangerous history had roots in that place, where the mayor’s council once had been corrupted by necromancers. Though the cult was defunct, the shady influence still tainted the town’s entrenched factions. Dakar peered through cracked lids and held his tongue. Jammed between two upright guards, unshaven and itching and irritable, he watched the snake in white vestments dispense with all semblance of judgement by trial.

‘For the charge of blasphemy, you will be stripped to suffer ten strokes of the lash, followed by execution without appeal for sorcerous works and dark practice,’ the diviner decreed. ‘May the divine Light cleanse the taint as your wicked heart is pierced by cold steel, and your flesh is consigned to the fire.’

‘Are you done?’ snapped Dakar, revolted to nausea. ‘Better tell your thugs to let me lie down or someone’s sure to regret it.’ Ahead of the officiously outraged recoil, he folded and spewed up his guts. Last night’s sour meal spattered onto the dais and fouled the velvet slippers of his accuser.

Which lapse provoked an ear-splitting screech, and sealed his death at dawn, barely hours away.

‘Break wind and pray all you like!’ Dakar bared his teeth in a snarl. ‘Your lash will not bite. Your sword will not pierce. Worse, the Light you invoke is a shameless fraud! Fire itself should disdain the dry wood you stack to murder the innocent.’

‘Not so innocent.’ Divested of his sullied shoes, one foot raised while the obsequious clerk knelt to remove his splashed hose, the robed diviner pronounced, ‘I have not waived your right to a trial without reason. Before witnesses, you are confirmed as a seer. Not ignorant, but capable of prophetic fits and unimaginably dangerous! Lorn’s warden and two guards overheard quite enough to confirm your damnation. By your own words you named yourself in league with the Spinner of Darkness!’

Dakar sucked a sharp breath, abruptly unnerved. Not by the dire incrimin­ation, but from the nasty surprise that his upset stemmed from no head blow, but in fact arose from the queasy aftermath caused by a bout of tranced prescience.

Worse, the forevisions arisen through a black-out trance became fated. Althain’s Warden himself never found an exception: such events were predestined to happen.

‘This case is sealed!’ The magistrate banged down his gavel and dismissed the guard. ‘See the prisoner secured!’

Too facetious to detail the spurious vision foretold by Dakar’s errant gift, his priestly accusers rushed ahead with their plans for a public roast. Lorn’s dearth of a scaffold meant rousting the hands to nail up a makeshift platform. Lackeys dunned the fish-market smoke-shacks for wood, while the dedicates set the condemned into shackles and flung him back into the dungeon to languish.

There, the novelty packed a collection of gawkers against the cell door with craned necks. But the only Dark minion to face death in Lorn failed to satisfy their curiosity. He moaned on his back in the putrid straw, pathetic as anyone else who suffered the gripe from a crock of spoiled chowder. Eyes shut, he slept and snored like a walrus, which finally drove his nervous wardens to saunter away in disgust.

Dakar continued the racket, the rude noise needful to scare off the rats while he engaged his mage training and spiritwalked.

Immersed in deep trance, he projected his sensitized awareness into his outward surroundings: first into the straw, with its resident scavengers, until he could have identified every noisome rodent, cockroach, and louse maggot by Name. Farther, he expanded, through the forged essence of the steel grille, then the dank masonry that imprisoned him. Lightly as breath, he brushed past the two guards and the warden on duty. Dakar eased his boundaries wider still. Soon, he knew which clerks were diligent and which slouched at their desks as their quills scratched out copies of the summary judgement against him. No written account included the words he had babbled in prophetic trance.

Since a more active scrying could snag the attention of the Light’s pesky diviner, Dakar abandoned the fruitless thrust to recoup the content of his blind prophecy.

Softly, he extended his probe past the ivied walls of the magistrate’s hall. Beyond the cramped wing that housed Lorn’s guild ministry, harbour office, and ramshackle customs shack, he paused where the gulls roosted with heads under wings, beneath the roof peaks and carved cornices. The dark streets below were deserted, except for a drunk who staggered homeward between two companions.

Dakar girded himself in transparent calm, then traced the by-lanes and shut houses, with their slate roofs and dormers smudged in smoke from banked fires. Patience showed him the warded calyx of sigils that shadowed his greater enemy. The Koriathain regrouped, poised to help the Light’s priests fulfill their intent on the scaffold.

Dakar lacked the innate power to thwart them. A second attempt at diversion would spring an attack past his resource to counter. Since the sisterhood’s amplified spells of coercion failed to recognize the Law of the Major Balance, he evoked his knowledge of natural order and melded at one with all things. As frosted air and chill stone, sleeping bird, and even the dark coil of enemy sigils, he slid his merged awareness into, then past their hostile boundaries without impediment. He widened his range: combed through the straggle of the fishermen’s shacks, where honest families slept in their beds. Among them, the particular captain he sought sat awake, puffing a late pipe beside a lit candle.

Relief pushed Dakar’s scrying outward again. He encompassed the pier at the harbour-side: ran with the cold surge of the tide, and splashed as the wavelets that necklaced white foam against the slimed rocks of the breakwater. He became the breast of the salty sea, rocking luggers tied up at their moorings. If each boat had similar clinker-built planks and workaday piles of fish tackle, only one wore the seal of safe passage bestowed by a grateful Fellowship Sorcerer. There lay the spellbinder’s hope of release if he could contrive the means to make a rendezvous.

Dakar stilled the expansion set into motion. Centred within the known sphere he encompassed, he gently loosened his ties to the manifest present.

Adrift in the shadowy realm of on-coming futures, his seer’s talent sorted the overlapped images of what could be, and what might become. Trained focus breasted the ephemeral morass, and with consummate skill, traced the singular threads that concerned him.

Dakar saw the dawn, hard-edged with certainty; then a bled corpse on a scaffold of fish barrels, torched into flame. The alternate view, superimposed and much fainter, showed the unoccupied post and piled billets abandoned. He chose that branch, and from thence, viewed the fisherman of his acquaintance arise and eat breakfast, kiss his wife and three children, and stroll to the docks. Soon after, his boat with the Fellowship’s blessing raised sail and scudded from the harbour. Dakar re-ran that sequence and noted which alley-ways held posted guards, and where the Light’s lancers were quartered. He forecast at what hour the streets would become impassibly jammed with fanatical spectators.

Adept at his craft, he sifted the multiplied twists of event. As the probable thinned into the wisp of the possible, and the views of overlaid futures dispersed into fog, hazed over the glare of infinity, Dakar tested his choices. Through each posited frame of consequence, he selectively chose his best course. Then he woke to ground out his strained senses and reorient. Nerves steeled, he gathered his natural strength. Before the Light’s guardsmen arrived to collect him, the condemned paid his earnest respects to the rats, who had forborne to gnaw at his finger-tips.

Then the hour drew nigh. The ephemeral shift that occurred before sunrise prickled through mage-sense as the flux reached the neap in the lane tide. Dakar slipped into trance once again. Not for an innocuous spiritwalk this time, but to garner the requisite permissions he needed to open his bid for escape. His arrangement began with such subtle stealth, just one aware mind on Athera took notice.