summary judgement against him. No written account included the words he had babbled in prophetic trance.
Since a more active scrying could snag the attention of the Light’s pesky diviner, Dakar abandoned the fruitless thrust to recoup the content of his blind prophecy.
Softly, he extended his probe past the ivied walls of the magistrate’s hall. Beyond the cramped wing that housed Lorn’s guild ministry, harbour office, and ramshackle customs shack, he paused where the gulls roosted with heads under wings, beneath the roof peaks and carved cornices. The dark streets below were deserted, except for a drunk who staggered homeward between two companions.
Dakar girded himself in transparent calm, then traced the by-lanes and shut houses, with their slate roofs and dormers smudged in smoke from banked fires. Patience showed him the warded calyx of sigils that shadowed his greater enemy. The Koriathain regrouped, poised to help the Light’s priests fulfill their intent on the scaffold.
Dakar lacked the innate power to thwart them. A second attempt at diversion would spring an attack past his resource to counter. Since the sisterhood’s amplified spells of coercion failed to recognize the Law of the Major Balance, he evoked his knowledge of natural order and melded at one with all things. As frosted air and chill stone, sleeping bird, and even the dark coil of enemy sigils, he slid his merged awareness into, then past their hostile boundaries without impediment. He widened his range: combed through the straggle of the fishermen’s shacks, where honest families slept in their beds. Among them, the particular captain he sought sat awake, puffing a late pipe beside a lit candle.
Relief pushed Dakar’s scrying outward again. He encompassed the pier at the harbour-side: ran with the cold surge of the tide, and splashed as the wavelets that necklaced white foam against the slimed rocks of the breakwater. He became the breast of the salty sea, rocking luggers tied up at their moorings. If each boat had similar clinker-built planks and workaday piles of fish tackle, only one wore the seal of safe passage bestowed by a grateful Fellowship Sorcerer. There lay the spellbinder’s hope of release if he could contrive the means to make a rendezvous.
Dakar stilled the expansion set into motion. Centred within the known sphere he encompassed, he gently loosened his ties to the manifest present.
Adrift in the shadowy realm of on-coming futures, his seer’s talent sorted the overlapped images of what could be, and what might become. Trained focus breasted the ephemeral morass, and with consummate skill, traced the singular threads that concerned him.
Dakar saw the dawn, hard-edged with certainty; then a bled corpse on a scaffold of fish barrels, torched into flame. The alternate view, superimposed and much fainter, showed the unoccupied post and piled billets abandoned. He chose that branch, and from thence, viewed the fisherman of his acquaintance arise and eat breakfast, kiss his wife and three children, and stroll to the docks. Soon after, his boat with the Fellowship’s blessing raised sail and scudded from the harbour. Dakar re-ran that sequence and noted which alley-ways held posted guards, and where the Light’s lancers were quartered. He forecast at what hour the streets would become impassibly jammed with fanatical spectators.
Adept at his craft, he sifted the multiplied twists of event. As the probable thinned into the wisp of the possible, and the views of overlaid futures dispersed into fog, hazed over the glare of infinity, Dakar tested his choices. Through each posited frame of consequence, he selectively chose his best course. Then he woke to ground out his strained senses and reorient. Nerves steeled, he gathered his natural strength. Before the Light’s guardsmen arrived to collect him, the condemned paid his earnest respects to the rats, who had forborne to gnaw at his finger-tips.
Then the hour drew nigh. The ephemeral shift that occurred before sunrise prickled through mage-sense as the flux reached the neap in the lane tide. Dakar slipped into trance once again. Not for an innocuous spiritwalk this time, but to garner the requisite permissions he needed to open his bid for escape. His arrangement began with such subtle stealth, just one aware mind on Athera took notice.
Early Winter 5922
Kingbreaker
Winter travel and the fever-pitch tension of crisis saw Asandir in his habitual element. En route to the defended clan enclave tucked high in the mountains near the Pass of Orlan, he had left Althain Tower by transit to Isaer’s Great Circle, then ridden fast and hard down the westward trade-road for seven days. He rented no post-horses when his mount tired. Bred to bear him as a cherished companion, the black stallion was a wonder among the world’s mystical graces, too devoted to be put aside. The Sorcerer snatched sleep while the animal rested. Starry nights bedded both of them down in dry leaves, Asandir wrapped up in his cloak and reclined against his mount’s side for shared warmth.
But even a Sorcerer’s familiar could not travel at speed in the thin air of high altitude. The whipped drifts piled by the last blizzard bogged the pace where the old road narrowed down to a track folded into the buckled ramparts between the iced cliffs, and the high cornices swathed in white threatened the avalanches that broke away with a roar at the sound of a whip-crack. Experienced masters of caravans with their pack-trains of sure-footed mules never ventured the pass, facing winter.
Asandir went where Fellowship business took him, bold beyond care for the season. Yet this time, his iron strength and determined purpose laboured under the sorrowful heart-ache: that Arithon’s plight had compelled the terms of Dakar’s brutal dismissal. As a bone tossed into the shark’s teeth of fate, the initiate prophet could stand with heroic grace, or else fall, wasted utterly, to the murderous wiles of the Fellowship’s bitterest enemies.
Which painfully overdue word from Sethvir reached Asandir swift and straight as the flight of an arrow: ‘Our wild-card cast-off is safely away from the ambush set for him at Lorn. He’s escaped execution by the Light’s doctrine and eluded pursuit by eight Koriathain.’
The black horse stopped four-square in the road, though the rider’s hand had not moved to rein in. The Fellowship’s field Sorcerer bent his bare head. Stiff breeze tangled his silver hair through a moment of poignant humility. ‘Show me.’
As he wished, images relayed from Sethvir’s earth-sense unveiled the particulars from the morning’s hair-raising triumph: several dozy Lorn guardsmen had roused from a snooze to find they no longer warded the Light’s condemned minion. Worse, the fell creature’s evasion left every bit of forged steel in their dungeon, from locks and shackles to the grille on the cell, reverted back into crystallized carbon and raw clumps of unsmelted ore.
Asandir might have laughed, had the True Sect’s officious audacity not galled him to redoubled rage.
The next view showed the plump fugitive abroad in the dock-side streets in the icy darkness before dawn. By no coincidence, the spellbinder slunk down empty alleys and crossed by-ways while the town’s watchmen found their eyes turned elsewhere. Like a hot knife through butter, Dakar reached the wharf by the simplest artifice: a neat scrying told him where to be and when, down to which of the tied dories to filch from the cluster tied at the stone jetty. Black-cloaked and unseen amid blacker air, he rowed out to the sole lugger in port whose fisherman would grant him free passage.
Day broke under clouds, with no staged execution to requite the Light’s thwarted diviner. The vessel with her furtive passenger already had cast off her mooring and sailed. She clove through the bay’s open water, while more quietly, the covert circle of Koriathain cursed the salt waves that eroded their quartz-wrought enchantments…
Rinsed in fleeting gilt sunlight as a veil of cloud shredded against the obsidian spires of the Thaldein peaks, Asandir drew a cold breath of relief.
Sethvir’s laconic summary confirmed an outcome not fallen too disastrously wide of the
