If he must blister his tender soles and spend brutal nights in the open, he would endure the unpleasantness without the bother of a refined connection. More, if the crux of Fellowship need pressured him to volunteer to safeguard Rathain’s hunted prince, he was older, and finally wise to the fact the position was star-crossed! Riddled with pernicious pitfalls and foes, with the man himself given to powers and strengths unimaginably dangerous.
‘Damn all to Sethvir’s manipulative maundering!’ Dakar swore. The Warden’s almighty earth-sense knew how keeping that post had wrecked the last footing for a friend’s trust. Dakar could not weep. Not anymore. His recriminations were long since spent for an anguish that could not, in life, be erased. His unsavoury duty in Halwythwood, and again, after warning, at Athir, had unequivocally served Fellowship interests through the betrayal of Arithon’s personal integrity.
If the royal victim ever discovered the secret price paid then to win his survival, Dakar understood what his hide would be worth! In his shoes, the guilty party would run, never to shoulder the lash of reprisal from the infamous s’Ffalenn temper.
‘Murder would be kinder,’ Dakar muttered, and pumped on short legs to hike faster.
He reached Lorn three days later, puffing and tired, with chafed heels and both ankles blistered. The town was no place to cheer dismal spirits: little more than a barnacle cluster of dwellings attached to the rocky northcoast, sandwiched between a clouded, pearl sky and the pewter shine of the winter breakers. Dusk had fallen. Under the smeared smoke from the chimney-stacks, the rimed cobbles in the narrow streets sheltered the slink of scavenging cats, and the briny miasma of fish guts. The years since the revival of navigation had shrunk the port back to an isolate haven for mackerel boats.
The market lay deserted, where by day the garrulous matrons diced and salted down the dawn catch. The risen, raw wind already had chased their benighted gossip indoors. As eager for comfort, Dakar steered between the bleak, wharf-side warehouses and the netted thatch roof of the chandler’s. The hot glow of lamp-light steamed the roundels of the sole clapboard tavern when he shoved his bulk through the squeaky plank door.
Conversation quieted before him, replaced with the owlish stares by which grizzled, backwater salts measured an outsider. Even the urchin stopped begging for scraps and turned round eyes towards the cloaked stranger.
Dakar surveyed the coarse company, daubed in the thick shadows from the tallow lamps slung from the ceiling beams. Unattached men sprawled at the trestles, flushed with drink as they elbowed to cuddle the barmaids. Others with wives and young children at home downed their pints and hob-nobbed with friends. The widows with black scarves tied over their hair, and the ham-fisted matrons crammed into the corner nooks, while the wizened elderly snoozed by the hearth, too arthritic to haul twine on the luggers.
The acquaintance Dakar sought was not present.
Aware if he ventured abroad that the doors would be closed to late lodgers, he waded inside over mud-brick floors tracked gritty with sand. The taint of wet wool and sweat was ingrained, and the attitude jaundiced as the offal dumped out for the sharks. Lest such contempt be mistaken for welcome, the muscular landlord propped against the bar priced his beer to fleece strangers.
His brew would be sour as pig swill, besides. Dakar might have matched the extortion with coppers spell-burnished to gleam like silver, but the clam stew with hard bread he wanted sold for only three pence. He seated himself on an empty bench, ordered supper, and ate. Talk of nets, sails, and weather resumed, pointedly directed around him.
He was not left to mind his anonymous business. Another woman tucked into one corner was equally shunned by the locals. Although she wore the same smock blouse and wool over-dress, her lily-white fingers had never flensed a wet cod. The sigil she pitched against Dakar’s aura flicked his nerves like a scuttling spider.
The Mad Prophet choked. He blotted the chowder broth sprayed through his beard and slurped onwards. Apparently innocuous, stupid, and fat, he measured the execrable nuisance: Prime Selidie’s rapacity wasted no time. Already, he was pinched in a trap laid by the Koriathain. More, the power that hounded him was no trifle. The witch had more sisters stationed nearby, equipped with the force to shred his defenses.
Cornered, alone, he was tacitly warned to accede in quiet surrender.
Dakar spat out a mauled clot of gristle and sopped up the last driblets of gravy. Bedamned if he meant to move before he settled his dinner. The enchantress could fume herself purple meanwhile. Tysan’s dogmatic aversion to sorcery meant a sister reliant upon a quartz focus dared not wield her blatant craft in the open.
Inspired, Dakar belched, clutched his middle, and yowled. ‘This vile soup is tainted! Does the house poison guests? I’ve been gouged before for the price of a bed when bad stew laid me low with a belly-ache!’
A smatter of laughter arose, cut by the inn matron’s roar from the kitchen. ‘Going to spew, are you? The gutter’s outside! No refunds here for a whiner’s gut, nor warm milk for a griped constitution!’
Dakar doubled over and moaned.
Nobody else who consumed the same fare took pity on his distress. The bar-keeper ignored him. While his enemy watched, Dakar ripped off his belt. He tossed the strap onto the trestle hard enough to make the looped coin pouch clash loudly against the brass buckle. Cloak shrugged off to puddle around his ankles, he unlaced and peeled his twill jerkin, then groaned and crumpled arse down on the floor.
Heads turned, hatted and bearded and weathered, amused by his histrionics.
Dakar shuddered and held his breath. When his pouched cheeks flushed to vermilion, he rolled up his eyes and flopped into a faint.
Evidently out cold, he lay like a log. Where a dishonest bumpkin anyplace else would snap up his obvious bait, Lorn’s slack-witted brutes showed no interest. Instead, the burliest onlooker grabbed the suds pail from the tap. While he doused the felled landlubber back to spluttering consciousness, the beggar child finally dived after the abandoned purse. The predictable happened: his disreputable, grimed hand blistered on the spellbinder’s wards as he tried to pilfer the contents.
The treble scream as the boy singed his fingers sheared over the rumbled laughs and snide comments. He was quite unharmed, beyond a few moments of painful sensory illusion.
But where conjury was anathema, the lad’s cry raised a furor of panic.
While the timid backed into the corners and prayed, the brave brandished raised benches and bottles and closed in to trounce the unholy practitioner. The door banged as someone left at a run to fetch the town’s armed authority.
‘That’s your sorry response for a lad caught out, thieving?’ Dakar yelled through the commotion. Soaked to dripping, hunched over with belly-ache, he shoved erect in the jostle. Backed to the wall by a breastwork of benches, he pealed on through the bar-keeper’s bellows and the child’s roaring tantrum. ‘Your snotty brat looks fit for work. Let him earn honest pay washing pots in your scullery and thank me for the sting of a timely correction!’
But instead, the harpy from the inn’s kitchen barreled out with her meat skewer angled for blood. ‘We don’t take interference from upstart sorcerers!’
Dakar dug in his heels. Safe, he hoped, from the underhand wiles of Koriathain, he measured the angry fishermen who crowded to carve him in strips. ‘Damn all to Dharkaron!’ he railed in their teeth. ‘And the same to the Light’s idiot doctrine.’ Only a suicide would blaspheme the True Sect’s Canon by the name of Ath’s Avenging Angel.
