sever her bonds. ‘Obstructive defiance is scarcely a crime worthy of death on the scaffold. The temple does not punish fools or set irons on persons not guilty!’
Perhaps angered that his effort disclosed no overt wickedness, the True Sect’s high officer spun and confronted Efflin with a narrowed stare. ‘Your sister’s testimony appears to support the claim that your bedridden illness kept you from involvement.’
‘I submit myself anyhow,’ Efflin demurred. ‘As head of my household, and a man of true faith, I insist that your divine calling ought to make sure.’ Tears streaked his cheeks openly. For grief, he shouldered the practical choice: if the loss of a brother could not be salvaged, reprieve must be secured for the sister who might still be saved.
Tarens acknowledged, with desperate relief, that his ruinous action had not gone for nothing. Through blood and hazed pain, his stolid calm bolstered Efflin’s selfless courage.
The examiner’s search was dismissively cursory, a corroboration less exhaustive than a ceremonial inquiry processed by a formal trial before Kelsing’s temple tribunal. The sentence was read straightaway, the harsh quittance pushed through in the heated rush to bring Tarens’s act of slaughter to punitive justice.
‘This croft will be sold at auction,’ the True Sect official declared. ‘Of the proceeds, one-third share will go to the temple coffers as due forfeit for the guilty party. The other two-thirds stay reserved in trust for the sister and brother surviving, provided they shall be exonerated by the heretic murderer’s sealed proof in confession. They will suffer penance. Let them serve the temple as forced labour for the term of one year and count themselves graced by my leniency. For the fact that their traffic with a suspect herbalist flouted the temple’s authority is a misdemeanour that narrowly skirts the more dangerous charge of complicity with the forces of Darkness.’
As the sergeant bent to free Efflin’s hands, the examiner snapped final orders to his dedicate captain at arms. ‘Hitch up the croft’s bullock. Load our wrapped dead in the cart along with the chained prisoner, and choose eight lancers as escort. A temple processional will meet their arrival at Kelsing’s front gate. By then, I’ll have the diviner’s widow informed and peal the bells to honour her husband’s passing. The murderer’s trial will be held today, with the formal sentence by sundown and execution by fire at dawn tomorrow. This family stays in close custody, meantime. Let them bear witness to their brother’s fate as a lesson against the taint of consorting with Shadow.’
The arms captain saluted. ‘What of the rest of my troop? We still have a renegade sorcerer at large.’
‘Dispatch them for the man-hunt, of course.’ The examiner’s words faded into swished silk and torch light as he made his way out of the cottage door. ‘I will assign you another diviner and also requisition a league tracker with dogs. Quarter the district and find Shadow’s minion. Drag him back dead if his viciousness warrants.’
Kerelie sank to her knees beside Efflin. Shock and terror left her in shreds. Her older brother’s trembling arms closed around her, fever-thin and bereft of comfort. Too easily, their desperate stay of reprieve could lapse back into deadly jeopardy. Tarens had yet to surmount the extraction of his final confession. Sister and brother could do nothing but cling to each other, meantime, helpless except to endure on the chance their lives might be spared in calamity.
Naught could be done to ease their cruel anguish as the dedicates hauled Tarens away.
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?’
