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
