scream overpowered the stricken man’s grunt of agony. Those lancers still astride roared in black rage and raked spurs to their idle mounts, while their foot-bound comrades charged to retaliate. Tarens moved faster, grabbed the speared victim, and hauled his collapsed frame upright by the collar.
‘Spying scum!’ The crofter jerked out the impaled barb of the poker and flung the gored implement end over end. The tumbling length of iron spun into the forelegs of the inbound horses. Half of the beasts shied, which broke and unravelled the concerted attack. Exposed, made the target of two dozen swords, Tarens dumped his grisly trophy into a sprawling heap at the feet of the horrified temple examiner. While the corpse writhed in the throes of fatality, the brazen crofter dropped to his knees in surrender.
Arms outflung, head up, Tarens’s burly form invited the vengeful lance, or the punitive blade to strike downwards and finish him.
‘No!’ pealed the command of a ranked authority. ‘Take the murderer alive!’ Emerged to the fore, the speaker wore the hooded regalia of the True Sect’s temple. ‘He shall die for his crime. But the execution will take place in public as a moral example!’
Life dedicates trained to unquestioned obedience, the men pulled their steel. En masse, they slammed into Tarens and wrestled him prostrate on the frosted ground. Their captain attended the savaged diviner, whose blessed talent would track no more minions of Shadow for the faith.
While the men on the porch pinioned Kerelie’s struggle to rush down the stair to her brother, Tarens cried, ‘I’m the only one guilty! The others knew nothing.’
‘I’ll be the one to determine the charges,’ declared the Light’s Lord Examiner. A vigorous official, ablaze in white cloth and the rippling glitter of diamond-set appointments, he gestured. ‘Set the criminal in manacles. He must face the scaffold, but all in due time. His kinsfolk will stand trial on their own merits. My official inquiry begins immediately.’
‘You’ll find nothing!’ yelled Tarens.
A mailed fist cuffed him silent. Hardened to Kerelie’s weeping, and roughshod before Efflin’s mortified weakness, the dedicates invaded the cozy croft cottage with their hobnailed boots and pine-torches. They tore through each room, upended the furnishings, and bashed over the plate cupboard. Smashed porcelain became ground into the braided rug as they raked kettles and ladles from their rowed hooks and slashed into the flour-sacks hoarded for winter until the puffed contents emptied. Against Efflin’s desperate, sensible pleas, they demolished the larder. Jars of preserves were smashed to the floor, and the waxed cheeses pulped underfoot. When the exhaustive search found no artifacts of dark practice amid the litter of wreckage, men rifled the wood bin and barreled upstairs to kick through the contents of clothes-chests and closets. Room by room, the desecration proceeded, cloth goods and belongings savaged to destruction, and floor-boards mauled into splinters.
When the invasion burst into the sick-room, Kerelie’s outraged language met deafened ears. ‘Where is mercy? Have you no care for illness?’
Efflin’s blanketed form was thrust into a chair. When his tattered bedding yielded no hidden cache of arcane talismans, he was forced to endure the further brutality as the lancers secured Tarens by stringing him up by chained wrists from the rafters.
There he swung, bashed and bleeding, worried by the point of the sergeant’s sword at his throat.
He railed, nonetheless. ‘Leave my family be! They’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Clap a lid on your noise!’ the sergeant cracked.
Tarens spat, which earned a back-handed blow to the face that pulped his nose and set Kerelie shrieking.
‘Silence that bitch!’ snapped the captain, annoyed. His sideward glance cut through the turpentine taint of the torch smoke. ‘There’s a dish-rag? Then gag her.’
But Kerelie quieted, before being forced. Against the shocked quiet, Tarens unclenched his bruised jaw. Shaking, he spoke through the slur of split lips and the jet of streamed blood from crushed nostrils. ‘My sister and brother are innocent! Until tonight, they had no knowledge I sheltered a fellow who trifled with sorcery!’
But his confession brought his siblings no exoneration.
Too haughty to soil his temple finery, the Lord Examiner served his rebuke from the cottage doorway. ‘The Light’s justice acts with infallible equity. Punishment only follows due cause, and mercy rests upon no one’s insolent claim or false testament! Before you burn for a liaison with evil, you will bear truthful witness! Divine law also must vouchsafe the fates of your brother and sister. They will be condemned or set free only under the burden of proof.’
To the dedicate lancers, the Lord Examiner said, ‘Bind the pair of them with their wrists at their backs. I will verify whether the works of a sorcerer were made welcome under this roof!’
‘Don’t fight them!’ begged Tarens. ‘Just give what they ask!’ Shivering now, sick and cold and in pain, his voice cracked at last under punishment.
Efflin slumped, wrung limp, the glisten of tears dammed behind his shut lashes. He could not speak for the horror, that his younger brother had tried such a desperate measure to take the blame as their scapegoat. The croft would be lost. Westlands land law adhered to the True Sect Canon. But the fragile hope to spare the rest of the family from the fires of heresy might yet be raised from the ashes of a brave brother’s sacrifice.
All their fates rested under the provenance of the Light’s Lord Examiner. A fleshy man with sandy hair and cream skin, he minced across the breached threshold in his rich robes and jewelled insignia. Even in the dimmed kitchen, he glittered. Wrists tied, tongue stilled behind his locked teeth, Efflin winced at the heavy-set tread that chinked the sadly smashed fragments of Saffie’s glass honey jars and painted plates. He reeled, wrung faint, unable to watch as the dedicate who had just clouted his brother moved in and vised Kerelie’s face between bloodied gauntlets.
Tarens thrashed in trussed rage. His irate howls raised chilling indifference as the examiner’s pitiless eyes locked onto his sister’s pinned features. No matter whether she shrank in shame, supremely unconcerned as her bound body arched backwards in fear, the examiner bore in with the conviction of a man possessed. Cold rings flashed as he aligned his pink finger-tips against her pale forehead. A pause ensued while he intoned a prayer, ‘Oh omnipotent Light, may the powers of goodness prevail. Grant my faithful service the humility to rise above all mortal frailty.’
Lips curved, but not smiling, he focused his talent. His temple mission to eradicate Darkness invoked the trained reach of a power enhanced far beyond the empathy of the born healer. The inquisitor’s probe he unleashed lanced into Kerelie’s personal memories. The raw violation made her cry out as shocked nerves exploded to sparkling pain.
He dug deeper, thrust past her vulnerable, raced thoughts and pulled apart layer on layer of her natural resistance. Deaf to her screams, he ripped through and dismembered the emotional tissue of her family loyalty. The relentless ordeal gouged up every nuanced scrap of experience her shrinking terror strove to keep hidden.
Sharp-tempered she had been, even prudently critical of her brother’s impulsive charity. But nothing amid the shreds of exposed memory unveiled concrete evidence that she had sheltered the foot-loose beggar who dabbled in simples.
‘Innocent!’ the Light’s examiner snapped. ‘This woman has not pretended her ignorance. Her consent was not given; neither did she welcome the Dark’s practitioner under this roof.’ He lifted his touch. While Kerelie’s
