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Janny Wurts
INITIATE’S TRIAL
The Wars of Light and Shadow
VOLUME 9
FIRST BOOK OF
SWORD OF THE CANON
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
Published by HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2011
Copyright © Janny Wurts 2011
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-00-721782-3
Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007384471
Version: 2014-08-15
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Dedication
For Abner Stein
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
I. Imprisoned
II. Vagabond
III. Change
IV. Dispossessed
V. Mis-step
VI. Haunted Wood
VII. Confrontations
VIII. Trial
IX. Throes
X. Reversals
XI. Upheaval
XII. Bind
XIII. Double Bind
XIV. Conflagration
Glossary
Acknowledgments
By the same author
Third Age Year 5922
Declared Under Interdict:
THE KINGDOM OF HAVISH
For crown-sanctioned liaison with Darkness,
as the iniquitous haven for Old Blood Talent,
and for armed defense of Heretical Practice.
Henceforth, no True Sect Faithful shall traffic therein,
or flout the High Temple’s Trade Embargo.
—decreed by the Light’s Conclave, Erdane
3rd Year of the Canon • Third Age 5686
I. Imprisoned
All of his days began the same way. He awoke without any memory. Nameless, he knew nothing at all of his past. Search though he might, his thoughts churned in circles. He encountered no sense of self-purpose. Nothing beyond the fact, I exist, that might endow him with a future.
Eyes opened, he surveyed his featureless surroundings. The place did not appear to have walls. Which deception perhaps prompted his first recollection. He understood that the silvery, reflective enclosure was a prison, woven of impenetrable spells. Colourless, textureless, the barrier enveloped him in a suspended state of neutrality, neither hot nor cold, apparently without a ceiling or floor, as seamlessly sealed as a bubble. Bland, like the clothing he was given to wear: a white shirt and dark breeches stitched from a nondescript fabric, fitted comfortably to his slight frame. His diligent keepers, whoever they were, did not wish him to suffer indignity.
Unable to view his reflection, and with no outside window to relieve the monotony, he began with a survey of his own hands. Their structure at least prompted the insight that he was individual, with a claim to both history and character. His fingers were refined, almost delicate, the bones cleanly sculpted beneath his lean flesh. The left ones were tipped with calluses. Insight suggested the wear had been caused by repeated deft pressure to stop off taut strings. First epiphany, he recalled the joyful making of music. But not how he had acquired the scars.
Tentative, uneasy, though he knew not why, he traced the whitened welt, gouged across his right palm and snaked in a half twist up his right forearm, to end at the elbow. The shudder raised by his tentative touch roused an unpleasant recall of searing fire. That burn crossed other weals, surely older. Disturbed, he found that both wrists, and his ankles, bore the chafe marks left ingrained by steel shackles.
Rage stirred in him then, a formless awakening arisen from a prior trauma. Someone else had taken him captive before this. The visceral remembrance
