up with Kerelie’s precious steel pins.
The insectile prick gadded the sullen bull to a maniacal fit. Its capped horns raked wood and gouged up furrowed splinters, while showered slaver and dust sifted through the sturdy slats of the manger. If the nose-ring and chain kept the maddened beast tethered, the violent force as it plunged amok rattled and bowed the stout planks of the stall and dissuaded the bravest fellows from entry. Someone helpful fetched the bull’s owner, who also balked, however the lancers waved weapons and threatened.
‘So arrest me!’ he shouted, ‘Whose dimwit blunder upset the beast, anyway? Send that man in, first. No way I’ll risk myself to smashed bones while that bullock’s enraged.’
The hostler agreed, persuasively reasonable. ‘That brute’s certain to cripple anyone foolish enough to challenge its viciousness.’ He added, insistent, ‘Don’t think we’d have napped through yon dreadful noise! More, if your fugitives molested that bull, they’d be mangled meat, beyond question.’
The lance captain bristled, to no avail. His blustering effort to overturn sense met defeat upon the breathless discovery of the contraband stashed in the hay-cart outside. The bull’s tantrum was dropped for the spicier prospect of nailing the errant smuggler. After the culprit was smoked out and arrested, the bother of splitting grain sacks and pitching more harness out of the tack room lost out to the prospect of stirrup-cups filched from the casks. The lancers confiscated the spirits and retired to wet their gullets and lounge in warm comfort inside the tavern.
The grooms were left to set the stable to rights and quench the hot gleam of the torches. Tarens lay wakeful long after the last chattering horse-boy retired to the loft. The dust settled also, once the rampaging bullock ceased goring the wooden manger. Suspended between rattled nerves and drugged torpor, he lay troubled, under the cover of darkness. The distanced carousing as the drunken dedicates burst into boisterous song did not quite mask the stealthy stir as the fugitive next to him slipped out of hiding. Quietly calm, with no fuss at all, the man plucked the stuck pin from the bull. The animal gusted one last surly snort. Horned boss lowered, it munched hay with supreme unconcern for the penalty served upon creatures who consorted with minions of Shadow.
But bovine simplicity failed to quiet the more vicious quandary of human uncertainty. Tarens never felt more alone in his life. Grief resurged, inconsolable. He missed the family irrevocably left behind. Savaged by loss and tormented by hope, he might never know if his rash intervention had saved their wrecked lives. All of his former choices were forfeit. He could not return. Whether he rued his impulsive strike against the temple’s authority, his fate was sealed. He had bound his destiny to a stranger with a questionable past, and a future that followed a frightening course of unfathomable motivation.
Early Winter 5922
Afterclap
Dawn came in a pallid wash of grey light, to the scratch of straw brooms and excitable chatter. The stable-lads swept piled snow from the cobbles and whisked the last of the spilled grain and debris the past night’s searchers had strewn in the aisle. That industry brought the ominous bent of fresh gossip to the ears of the fugitives hidden beneath the bull’s manger. The beast had not been collected at daybreak. Because Shadow’s rogue minion had not been found, nor any trace of the accomplice murderer, a True Sect decree extended the curfew that locked down the surrounding country-side. Only the head-hunters’ league moved abroad, out in force to beat the brush along with their mute packs of hounds, their trap-setters, and their skilled trackers.
The failed man-hunt whetted the unresolved air of menace, all the more since the new snowfall yielded the searchers no trace of a human footprint.
‘Uncanny, that,’ the head hostler declared, ducked in to throw butcher’s scraps to the mastiff. The horse-boys chewed over the scared round of talk overheard from the stranded travellers, or else fretted through their chores with naked unease. The curfew stultified the unsettled mood, with the Light’s lance captain stationed in wait, his hard-bitten company poised under the grim instructions to ride down any person who left the premises.
Within the white chill of the stable-yard, or huddled indoors around a roaring hearth, the whisperers spoke in haunted dread of the Darkness and revisited horrors from the ancient massacres; the grisly atrocities at Tal Quorin, or the grim battlefield at Dier Kenton Vale that had seen thirty thousand brave spirits struck dead in a day.
The war hosts slaughtered at Minderl Bay and Daon Ramon perished again, recounted in heroic ballads sung by itinerant minstrels. Past evils received the lurid embellishments of bar-keepers and wrinkled elders, until hearsay carried the stature of myth, and wilder fancy described the Master of Shadow as a vile being with raven skin and monstrous features.
Others claimed his fell presence passed over the land as a wind, reduced over centuries to a bodiless haunt. A resurgence would turn the untrustworthy mageborn to minions and sow all manner of savage destruction. The riveting stories claimed Darkness himself snatched newborns from their cradles and leached their heartsblood in hideous rites of live sacrifice. If no one actually had lost a child, true relics remained from the campaigns fought against the servant of evil. Rusted swords were still kept enshrined, or sheaves of browned letters bundled in string, which told of the Light’s standard raised for divine cause under the avatar, Lysaer s’Ilessid. Everyone honoured a forebear who had marched and died in heroic defense of the Light.
Woven into the fabric of folk-tales, or indoctrinated by the temple canon, the factual events that drove past and present had become lost in the welter.
But not everywhere. As morning brightened, both the frenzied stress of the leagues’ stymied dedicates and the crippling discomfort endured by their cornered quarry drew the concern of another formidable power.
The Sorcerer who bore title as Warden of Althain might have appeared drifty and daft, immured in his tower eyrie amid the remote dales of Atainia. Yet his owlish stare masked a stature that soared. Sethvir had served as Athera’s archivist for close to nine hundred years. Ink stains on his spare knuckles and the frayed shine on his cuffs bespoke tireless days spent inscribing quaint script onto parchment.
But the hour did not find him sunk in rapt industry, among the emptied tea-mugs nestled between the detritus of leather-bound journals and dog-eared old books. Instead, burdened with the world’s most intractable problems, Sethvir had tossed aside his quill pen with fierce intent to tidy his cupboards.
Cobweb smudged his creased cheek where he knelt, swamped in clutter: tatters of silk ribbon and ancient strap buckles, the variegate egg-shells of song-birds, a grey wasp’s nest, and a jam crock inhabited by a live spider lay heaped with a clutch of old river stones, boxes of corks misplaced from his ink flasks, two hawk feathers, and a flagon with a cracked crystal stopper. The Sorcerer regarded the shelf just raked clean, apparently lost in bemusement.
That innocuous vagary was deceptive. Sethvir’s piercing acuity remained without peer the length and breadth of five kingdoms.
All events on Athera crossed the lens of his subtle awareness: from the doings of snails, to the hatreds of men, to perilous marvels unfurled like the pleats of a fan by the dreaming of dragons, both living and dead. Sethvir sensed the footsteps of the enchantress, Elaira, descending from the frozen heights of the Storlains by way of the white-water gorge which thrashed into the port town of Redburn. He knew the Queen of Havish was dying. Her frail breaths reached him, as his colleague, Traithe, kept the vigil to ease her final passage. Alongside the hibernation of bats, and the first rickle of ice that closed Northstrait, he also followed the tracks of the desert-folk, erased by the winds from the volcanic sands of the black dunes of Sanpashir. He heard even the gibbers of Desh-thiere’s captive wraiths, sequestered within the enspelled deeps of Rockfell Pit.
The
