beat a sick man? Take that ne’er-do-well snip who shoved his sticky mitt in my coin-purse!’
Buffered amid the pummelling scuffle, with both eyes alert for the Koriani meddler, a short man tussled by a pack of stout locals failed to see the town’s hastily summoned defender: one who gleamed, out of place, in the white-and-gold robes bestowed by the high temple at Erdane.
With the vested Sunwheel diviner came the immaculate armed escort, dispatched for the annual headcount of the Light’s faithful. Dakar’s rude discovery of the surprise entourage met the mailed fist of the dedicate whose righteous clout dropped him unconscious.
Dakar woke behind bars. A connoisseur of dark cells the length and breadth of five kingdoms, his nose broke the news that Lorn’s dungeon outstripped the most noisome. He languished in fishy straw used sometime ago to pack mackerel. The stink threatened to kill him. Worse, clutches of starved rats rustled to feast on the rotted bits of fins and glued fish-heads. The slide of hairless tails and scampering feet tickled over him, while beneath, the floor stirred to an army of questing roaches. His nape throbbed, his eyelids were crusted, and the slob incarcerated before him had mistaken the water pan for a chamber-pot.
Nauseous, Dakar counted his blessings: he was not wracked by a hangover, or pulped by a bed-frolicking woman’s crazed husband, or worse, brothers outraged by a sister’s lost chastity. Expertly versed at survival in duress, the Mad Prophet knew how to upset a gaoler. Just by singing, he could make his presence unpleasant as nails pounded into the brain. Other wardens had thrown him out on his arse for drawing in plagues of iyats.
Lorn’s square-jawed trusty escaped such grief, due to the predation of the Koriathain, and because temple authority left no heretic sorcerer to corrupt their horde of spiff rodents. Lancers in white surcoats collected Dakar by the scruff before his bashed head stopped spinning.
He played uncooperative and weak at the knees. Despite centuries of civilized apprenticeship, the Fellowship’s cast-off spellbinder could belt out insults with dock-side flair. ‘I’m too sick to move,’ he finished off, douce, not faking the fact that the starch had run out of him.
Lethargy forced the hand of his captors. They smutched their white livery, heaved Dakar’s bulk upright, and grunted his dragged heels upstairs, where the predictable jumped-up clerk surely waited to record the sentence.
‘Don’t promise me justice!’ groused Dakar, en route. ‘I’ve seen the facetious performance before. The magistrate’s chamber won’t be a turd-box for rats. No, their two-legged cousins like floors without muck. They’ll expect me to wet myself for a gaggle of buffoons perched on a dais. They’ll wear jewels and prettier robes than you lot, with chins brown as yours, because anyone jostling for a promotion always polishes backsides with puckered lips.’
The warden roared and cocked his mailed fist. Dakar smirked and sagged into a curtsey. While the muscle that propped him upright bowed also, bent over by his unstrung weight, the chap’s armoured knuckles ploughed unimpeded into the stone wall. The screech of steel links made the most stalwart man cringe and caused Dakar to faint into a wad on the landing. The vengeful boots that kicked his larded ribs roused slurred mutters but failed to stiffen his backbone enough to stand up. There forward, he had to be towed by the wrists and ankles like a dead donkey. Onwards up the rough stair, then forcibly skated down a corridor floored with waxed wood, Dakar bemoaned the abuse until his sweated escort flopped him through the doubled doors into the chamber for judgement. Prostrate and panting, he exuded the reek of dead mackerel steeped in rat piss.
The Light’s diviner scarcely blinked at the stench. A bald fellow with translucent skin, he sat enthroned beside candles that lit his livery to eye-stabbing brilliance. The town magistrate and justiciar flanked him like book ends, with a stool set aside for a bothered clerk, and a sparrow-thin orator who plucked up a list and wheezed through the verified accusations.
‘The prisoner will stand for sentencing,’ the temple diviner intoned, his accent from upper-crust Erdani origins.
Dangerous history had roots in that place, where the mayor’s council once had been corrupted by necromancers. Though the cult was defunct, the shady influence still tainted the town’s entrenched factions. Dakar peered through cracked lids and held his tongue. Jammed between two upright guards, unshaven and itching and irritable, he watched the snake in white vestments dispense with all semblance of judgement by trial.
‘For the charge of blasphemy, you will be stripped to suffer ten strokes of the lash, followed by execution without appeal for sorcerous works and dark practice,’ the diviner decreed. ‘May the divine Light cleanse the taint as your wicked heart is pierced by cold steel, and your flesh is consigned to the fire.’
‘Are you done?’ snapped Dakar, revolted to nausea. ‘Better tell your thugs to let me lie down or someone’s sure to regret it.’ Ahead of the officiously outraged recoil, he folded and spewed up his guts. Last night’s sour meal spattered onto the dais and fouled the velvet slippers of his accuser.
Which lapse provoked an ear-splitting screech, and sealed his death at dawn, barely hours away.
‘Break wind and pray all you like!’ Dakar bared his teeth in a snarl. ‘Your lash will not bite. Your sword will not pierce. Worse, the Light you invoke is a shameless fraud! Fire itself should disdain the dry wood you stack to murder the innocent.’
‘Not so innocent.’ Divested of his sullied shoes, one foot raised while the obsequious clerk knelt to remove his splashed hose, the robed diviner pronounced, ‘I have not waived your right to a trial without reason. Before witnesses, you are confirmed as a seer. Not ignorant, but capable of prophetic fits and unimaginably dangerous! Lorn’s warden and two guards overheard quite enough to confirm your damnation. By your own words you named yourself in league with the Spinner of Darkness!’
Dakar sucked a sharp breath, abruptly unnerved. Not by the dire incrimination, but from the nasty surprise that his upset stemmed from no head blow, but in fact arose from the queasy aftermath caused by a bout of tranced prescience.
Worse, the forevisions arisen through a black-out trance became fated. Althain’s Warden himself never found an exception: such events were predestined to happen.
‘This case is sealed!’ The magistrate banged down his gavel and dismissed the guard. ‘See the prisoner secured!’
Too facetious to detail the spurious vision foretold by Dakar’s errant gift, his priestly accusers rushed ahead with their plans for a public roast. Lorn’s dearth of a scaffold meant rousting the hands to nail up a makeshift platform. Lackeys dunned the fish-market smoke-shacks for wood, while the dedicates set the condemned into shackles and flung him back into the dungeon to languish.
There, the novelty packed a collection of gawkers against the cell door with craned necks. But the only Dark minion to face death in Lorn failed to satisfy their curiosity. He moaned on his back in the putrid straw, pathetic as anyone else who suffered the gripe from a crock of spoiled chowder. Eyes shut, he slept and snored like a walrus, which finally drove his nervous wardens to saunter away in disgust.
Dakar continued the racket, the rude noise needful to scare off the rats while he engaged his mage training and spiritwalked.
Immersed in deep trance, he projected his sensitized awareness into his outward surroundings: first into the straw, with its resident scavengers, until he could have identified every noisome rodent, cockroach, and louse maggot by Name. Farther, he expanded, through the forged essence of the steel grille, then the dank masonry that imprisoned him. Lightly as breath, he brushed past the two guards and the warden on duty. Dakar eased his boundaries wider still. Soon, he knew which clerks were diligent
