Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts
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Frozen by dread, Dace hung the singed garment. He poured the warmed wash-water, hoping his trembling would pass unremarked in the flow of routine.
“Ath above, you’re drained white!” Lysaer lowered his hands, wet from rinsing his face in the basin.
“A man comes to care,” murmured Dace without blinking. “Should that cause astonishment?”
Lysaer regarded him, blue eyes level with frightening honesty. “No. As well as I, you must be aware I’ve been courting the leap to disaster.”
Dace proffered the towel. “What use to speak out of turn?” A single mis-step could upset the game, either through a zealot’s public exposure or by the swift back-stab of righteous betrayal.
“A man comes to care,” Lysaer shot back, shoved erect without taking the offering. Blank as a cameo, he added, “By every honourable code, I ought to dismiss you for your own safety.”
Dace’s heart-beat slammed under his ribs. “You would have to use force.”
Lysaer bridled. Paced to a nearby stuffed chair, dangerous as a spread cobra, he matched his valet’s spaniel loyalty with fury. “I expect a betrayal! Have invited the prospect. Why set yourself up as a pawn in the path of near-certain destruction?”
“Because,” Dace demurred, moved by deferent steps to resume his lapsed duties. Instinct prompted him to risk everything. “After the spying of East Bransing’s priests, I’m convinced the servant behind you cannot be a stranger.”
Under his applied towel, Lysaer’s alarmed start verified every foreboding. Dace blotted his master’s chin fast enough to stifle an argument. S’Ilessid justice demanded the uncompromised move in redress: against reason, against odds, his liege planned to challenge the might that enforced the True Sect Canon.
Against desperate stakes, Dace seized the initiative. “All I ask is sufficient notice and coin for the quiet purchase of two decent horses.” Which meek request floundered into a strained silence.
When Lysaer retired and the lamp had been snuffed, Dace sought his cot in the darkness, terrified he had overstepped.
Then only, his liege relented. “You’ll have five days. A week at the most, before my rogue dedicates defy the High-Temple and march against Erdane. I’ll give you the silver for adequate mounts in the morning.”
Late Summer 5923
Vicissitudes
Having thwarted Rathain’s clan trackers by boarding the Daenfal ferry before dusk, the Mad Prophet slips into a tavern, where, cornered, he delivers his ultimatum to Tarens, “No! I won’t safeguard your foray to Ettin. Not before I’ve contacted his Grace’s handfasted enchantress, Elaira. Tell Cosach and his henchmen the same, or burn in Sithaer and suffer the consequence …”
At Telmandir, under Fellowship guidance, High Queen Ceftwinn of Havish prepares to access the crown jewels’ heritage for the first time: “Will I meet the same end as my brother?” she asks, aggrieved for the irony, that Gestry had seemed transported by the attunement; and Asandir’s iron integrity cannot in honesty ease her concern …
On the hour The Hatchet’s primary assault draws blood to scour the clan presence entrenched in the Thaldeins, a messenger pigeon flown across Camris breaks the explosive news: the rogue avatar marches from Miralt with a company of suborned dedicates, intent on upsetting the High Temple’s decree and denouncing the True Sect Canon …
Late Summer–Early Autumn 5923
The scout runner who carried word of the catastrophe reached the outpost in the Thaldeins, reeling on exhausted feet. Winded beyond speech, he choked on stirred dust, forced to shoulder a path through the chaos that met his arrival.
Wailing children, foot-sore women seated upon bulky bundles, and dazed-looking elderly men crammed the inner bailey from wall to wall. The messenger cut through their heaving misery, toned in ochre and shade, with the fallow gold of full sunlight stamped against the black loom of the portal to the inner sanctuary. The noisy sprawl of refugee families choked every available cranny: still living, still safe, the heart-core of the ancient clan lineages, though immediate threat to Tysan’s blood heritage was more urgent than anyone realized.
The messenger dodged a crying toddler, clinging to a tow-headed brother’s grubby hand. The flashed recall resurged: of another child grotesquely gutted, alongside a sister no older than three. Nauseated, the scout runner pushed past, nostrils clogged still by the stench of the recently slaughtered. His anxious survey swept the moil for one angular form.
Even through turbid haze and the seethe of uprooted humanity, Saroic s’Gannley stood out. Too thin for his height, his gangling form was crowned by flaxen hair the day’s crisis left no time to braid. A young man to be charged with the outpost’s main garrison, his preferred reticence a lost indulgence, he towered, shouting for someone to unsnarl the activity jammed around the supplies.
Movement shuddered and heaved, shifting the stacked barrels and clearing the jumble of wagons and hand-carts, while another crisp order detailed the caverns to be cleared for communal shelter. Just acceded as caithdein of the realm, and yet unaware of the burden, he turned his head at the runner’s approach.
“News?” he demanded, one hand raised to defer a healer’s concern for the risk of disease under crowding.
The scout slid to his knees at Saroic’s feet. He gulped the thin air. Spoke, though his hoarse voice scarcely pierced the racket stewed inside the fortified ravine.
“My Lord Steward, ill tidings!” which phrase broached the first word of an appalling disaster. “Your grandfather’s fallen. The war band at his back is lost also, killed outright defending Orlan. Both pickets on the banks of the Valendale crumpled under a surprise attack. They failed to mislead a concerted advance, never had the numbers at hand to hold out for reinforcements. A dedicate war host pours up-country, unchecked. The enemy’s on us as never before, guided by diviners and head-hunter trackers. They have swept the deep vale. Our outlying settlements are destroyed without quarter, the food stores for winter put to the torch.”
“Survivors?” rasped an elder at Saroic’s back.
The scout bowed his head. “The women, the children, and babes – all were butchered by arrows or ridden down and razed by the sword as they fled. We’re facing a scour by a True Sect mandate, organized for extermination.”
Like the splash of a stone in a pool spreading ripples, horrified outbursts settled into aghast silence. Shock reigned, and stark disbelief at the vicious speed of the disaster. A furtive advance by Sunwheel troops into free-wilds territory had called the most vulnerable folk into sanctuary. But no one foresaw a merciless cleanse unleashed on a scale such as this.
Saroic s’Gannley fought shattered composure. Too stressed to question why their seers’ heightened prescience had failed to forecast the ferocity of the assault, he shouted to stem the imminent threat to clanblood survival.
“Round up every straggler still on the trail to the outpost. Hurry them in. Then shut the front gates. Archers! Break out lint and oil! Station yourselves with torch shafts on the battlements. You’ll fire the forest outside.”
Someone shouted a panicky protest. “That’s against charter law!”
“Yes!” Saroic rebutted, bloodlessly pale. “But the flames can’t spread far against a south wind. The blaze will die out at the timberline.” Did no one see? The ruin of Orlan vale was the only tactical choice to wrest a margin for escape. “While the