Initiate's Trial Read online

  Janny Wurts

  INITIATE’S TRIAL

  The Wars of Light and Shadow

  VOLUME 9

  FIRST BOOK OF

  SWORD OF THE CANON

  Dedication

  For Abner Stein

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I. Imprisoned

  II. Vagabond

  III. Change

  IV. Dispossessed

  V. Mis-step

  VI. Haunted Wood

  VII. Confrontations

  VIII. Trial

  IX. Throes

  X. Reversals

  XI. Upheaval

  XII. Bind

  XIII. Double Bind

  XIV. Conflagration

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Third Age Year 5922

  Declared Under Interdict:

  THE KINGDOM OF HAVISH

  For crown-sanctioned liaison with Darkness,

  as the iniquitous haven for Old Blood Talent,

  and for armed defense of Heretical Practice.

  Henceforth, no True Sect Faithful shall traffic therein,

  or flout the High Temple’s Trade Embargo.

  —decreed by the Light’s Conclave, Erdane

  3rd Year of the Canon • Third Age 5686

  I. Imprisoned

  All of his days began the same way. He awoke without any memory. Nameless, he knew nothing at all of his past. Search though he might, his thoughts churned in circles. He encountered no sense of self-purpose. Nothing beyond the fact, I exist, that might endow him with a future.

  Eyes opened, he surveyed his featureless surroundings. The place did not appear to have walls. Which deception perhaps prompted his first recollection. He understood that the silvery, reflective enclosure was a prison, woven of impenetrable spells. Colourless, textureless, the barrier enveloped him in a suspended state of neutrality, neither hot nor cold, apparently without a ceiling or floor, as seamlessly sealed as a bubble. Bland, like the clothing he was given to wear: a white shirt and dark breeches stitched from a nondescript fabric, fitted comfortably to his slight frame. His diligent keepers, whoever they were, did not wish him to suffer indignity.

  Unable to view his reflection, and with no outside window to relieve the monotony, he began with a survey of his own hands. Their structure at least prompted the insight that he was individual, with a claim to both history and character. His fingers were refined, almost delicate, the bones cleanly sculpted beneath his lean flesh. The left ones were tipped with calluses. Insight suggested the wear had been caused by repeated deft pressure to stop off taut strings. First epiphany, he recalled the joyful making of music. But not how he had acquired the scars.

  Tentative, uneasy, though he knew not why, he traced the whitened welt, gouged across his right palm and snaked in a half twist up his right forearm, to end at the elbow. The shudder raised by his tentative touch roused an unpleasant recall of searing fire. That burn crossed other weals, surely older. Disturbed, he found that both wrists, and his ankles, bore the chafe marks left ingrained by steel shackles.

  Rage stirred in him then, a formless awakening arisen from a prior trauma. Someone else had taken him captive before this. The visceral remembrance of freedom denied and the resurgent echo of rebellious anger shuddered in recoil through him. Still nameless, he knew he had broken that chain and those manacles.

  Why was he here? Who held him caged, now?

  But his fogged memory refused to unveil the hidden face of his enemy. The record of past violence written into his flesh failed to account for his straits. He remembered no crime, no offence enacted against humanity, to have earned him this punishing state of incarceration.

  His questions chased themselves into holes, stubbornly uninformative. By then, the explosive surge of his fury lashed him onto his feet. He paced. Every day, like the trapped tiger, untamed emotion spurred his frantic steps. The blank, silver prison swallowed up his dire restlessness. Its forces encapsulated his person and absorbed his aggression without a ripple. His ire blazed deeper, an unstoppable torrent that stripped his nerves livid. How he hated the fact he was helpless! He was given no target to savage. No captor appeared on which to salve his ravening grief for the loss of his being. He had no means to wreak vengeance for the outright theft of the person he had been, and rightfully should be, since he was kept living.

  When the edged intensity of his temper peaked, the old woman always appeared. She came, swathed head to foot in a violet mantle, sewn with nine scarlet bands upon her full sleeves. He never observed her arrival, had no way to detect the means or the moment that permitted her soundless entry. The primal urge to close his grip on her throat always died when she offered him the lyranthe.

  The instrument consumed his attention. Seductive snare, its promise bewitched him. Fourteen silver-wound strings and polished wood woke an ache, unrequited, that glimmered with love beyond hatred and freedoms untouched by captivity. Music, he knew. The structure of melody, cadence, and song framed a power instinctive as breath. Magnetic attraction broke his resist­ance. He succumbed, every time, and accepted the gift although, beyond question, it came from the hand that abused him. Though such acquiescence should seal his downfall, his innate desire won out. No other choice existed, for him, shut in the unending horror of isolation, except to die without the courage of harmony, bereft of his last human grace.

  Imperative instinct silenced his questions as he took the instrument into his arms. His trembling hands caressed lacquered wood. Beyond words, he stroked shining strings with the desperation of the addicted. The brilliance of their sound endowed him with solace. Music opened the channel for healing and lent his last foothold on sanity. Or perhaps the cold stir of true memory served warning: if he failed to ply his art without flaw, he could fall to mortal danger.

  Sweet longing transformed into shocking need. Now hurried, he tuned the strings quickly. Shaken, all but undone by foreboding, he broke into a sudden sweat. A prickle lifted the hair at his nape. Then a ranging, unpleasant chill chased his spine.

  He remembered, now: thousands upon thousands of days just like this one, each filled by terrors that flitted, unseen, and challenged his innate survival.

  His struck notes had seeded a perilous change. As though a tossed stone had crashed through a pool, the ripple broke the stilled tension. His prison was no longer seamless, or safe. An uncanny rift opened up underfoot, letting in an inchoate void that now stirred with purposeful movement. Dread lurked in its shadow. Though the eye could discern neither form nor shape, an unseen invader was stalking him.

  He recoiled a step. Fingers flying, he plucked a spray of harmonics, then cranked the drone strings into stinging, true pitch.

  Sight still showed him nothing. Warned onto his guard, he trusted the inner panic, that he was not secure, or alone.

  Something uncanny had been let inside, though it ranged beyond reach of his senses. The intrusion flicked him as a breath of cold, then jabbed in pure malice and tested his stance, prying to thrust its way into him. The first tingle of etheric assault laced his skin, sharp as the teeth of a starved predator. Anything that possessed life-force was prey, and in this place, he offered the only available source of nourishment. The old woman had gone the same way she had entered, and left him to his own devices.

  Sometime, somewhere, he had gained a master’s initiate discipline. Those trained faculties responded to primal fear. Bristled into a state of reflexive defense, he needed no trappings of lost personality to recognize the opening throes of a fatal conflict.

  A free wraith battled him for possession. Countless mi
llions of others had done the same, prior to his encounter with this one. He knew what to expect. As its ungoverned whirlwind of hatred sought to unbalance him, his own fervid terror would break him. The entity could feed on his leaked strength and vitality. To sate ravening hunger, it would wring him until exhaustion drained his resistance. Then its ferocity would sap his will and supplant his natural awareness. Against the invasive threat of possession, the only weapon he had was the lyranthe and the empowered expression of music.

  Peerless talent, he plied his command over fret and string and unleashed a blazing cascade of bright harmony. Jigs and sprightly reels burst from the suppressed well of his deepest longing, first driving him to stamp in madcap rhythm, then lifting his heart to let go and soar. He played music that cried out for laughter, a consummate fusion of tone and bright artistry woven into boundless exaltation. No intrusive attack might swerve his rapt focus. His fingers carried the dance without stumbling. Aggressive oppression must bow to such banishment. He let no hostile thrust of vicious dissonance raze through his exacting discipline. Dread and ruin could not mar the deathless flame he rekindled from inspiration and hope.

  Unaware of a mastery that once had commanded the stature of a formal title, the bard tuned his very being to light. Sound gilded his spirit, then forged him, whole, behind an unbreachable bastion. For as long as he played, he could not be tamed. Spirit, raised to an incandescence of joy, could not be caged, or broken to mindless suffering. Remembrance poured back, as phrase upon phrase of melody took wing through the matchless skill of his fingers. He had weathered assaults as perilous as this one; sublime triumph had brought him the victory.

  His safety lay in defining the wraith’s lost identity. He must achieve this before, Name-forsaken, the howling emptiness of its ferocity beat him down into subjugation.

  Cruel desperation guided his tactics. Before he tired, he must find the single, true line of song that could bind the wraith into sympathetic entrancement. Once, before trauma deranged its identity, it had been born enfleshed and human. It had possessed a mother, a father, a family, and a best beloved. More, it also would own the individualized spark of the greater love that sourced its original being. Gently, with tacit tenderness, the musician expanded his range. Poised with single-minded intent, brave enough to extend his most vulnerable sensitivity, he struck the testing, delicate notes to tease out the first flicker of emotional response. Straining, he listened for the pulsed echo that signalled a harmonic confluence.

  He would sound out the wraith’s obscured self, his tune led by the resonance of its genuine being.

  Note for clean note, it would fight his discovery. Blandished by his music, it still would seek to hide, sundered past sanity and shattered by surly fury that rejected the concept of solace. Cut off from reprieve, its hopeless despair perceived no other option, far less understood any balm great enough to ease its deviant existence.

  But the bard possessed a relentless compassion. Cued, measure by measure, he stitched a haunting descant above his foundation of ineffable joy. He formed the darker phrases that whimpered of pain: themes of crippling loss that had cankered, unanswered, amid endless vistas of loneliness. The wraith was affirmed, first of all, as it lived, but without criticism or judgement. Where the deep, questing tones brushed against its true pattern, the musician extended his chord and laid claim. His structured invention raised a forgotten beauty from dissonance and reclothed ancient wounds with love’s purity.

  He refused to recoil from hideous ugliness. The most horrific shriek of torment must not haze his sweet measures into retreat.

  Immersed in a melting sequence of song, the bard let the wraith’s deathless rage become mirrored: gently, terribly, unflinching in honesty, he described the balked need, then the hurt, raw enough to devour all resilience of spirit. Human himself, he acknowledged the hollow agony of separation. Captive as well, but unbroken yet, he encompassed the cry for requital that festered the wraith’s insatiable need.

  His music wept the river of tears that purposeless emptiness forgot how to express. Unreeled as a thread of glittering gold flung downwards into the void, he probed the wrack spun by the wraith’s blinded misery. He sifted, patient, through veils of dread fear, and chipped at the tarnish of desolation. Beneath the bleak chasm of alienation lay the buried gleam of forgotten identity. He must plumb the pit and shape the wraith’s Name, before its crazed torment wore away concentration and turned at the last to consume him.

  Harmonics spiralled into the air and woke other tremors of insight. Touched by echoes of his own buried memories, the bard encountered themes from the essence of his very self. Bright flashes of resonance sprang from strengths he had once expressed in full cognizance. The unconscious awareness shimmered within him, until the aching tremors of stifled experience stormed over his nerves in sweet waves. He had known a forest clearing by night, ringing with cascades of unworldly harmony played upon crystalline flutes. Partnered in matchless love, he had cherished a woman with such bonfire passion that the land’s flux had ignited to burning. His own aroused flesh, ablaze with hers, had scalded them both, incandescent…

  Even the suggested memory of her evoked longing beyond all threat of danger to bridle.

  Loss followed hard on the heels of epiphany. Fast as his fingers spun song to recover her, the gift of her being no longer lived in his mind.

  He tasted the cinders of absolute grief, and pain great enough to seduce him. The glass edge of torment nearly made him let go: how easy to embrace the blind ease of oblivion. Surrender beckoned him towards the numb absolution of apathy and promised the end of intolerable sorrow – which was the same lie proffered by the wraith. Almost, he had been lulled to forget the stalking presence of that lethal danger.

  Bare-fisted courage braced the bard’s rocked commitment. He firmed his purpose. Determined to ride out the rip tide of unrequited futility, though the cost left him weeping forever, he unleashed his yearning of spirit until his trained fingers howled his agonized emptiness into grace upon silver-wound strings.

  Too late, he realized his effort went wrong. Unstrung past recovery, self-betrayed by the diabolical mistake that had tripped him, he realized the quickened voice of his past had wakened too many powerful echoes. Taken in, he himself had succumbed to beguilement. The pattern played into structure belonged to no starveling wraith! Waylaid by his own searing mastery, he discovered, stripped naked, the strains of his own Name resounded upon the loom of creation. Left with every guarded boundary undone, he stood shieldless before this antagonist. Of the countless thousands of ravenous entities his talent had peeled down to vulnerability and redeemed with tender compassion, this one did not seize upon his disadvantage. It did not rip hungrily into his essence, hating the blood and the bone of him. Rather than savage him in his defeat, this intelligence met his terror with a gentle pity that steadied his measures to haunted wistfulness. Shocked soul deep, he found his tears streamed for a pain all his own, with himself, the bird caged with clipped wings.

  Immersed, he could not tear his rapt focus away. The net of his true Name surrounded him without struggle, soft as a caul, even as the ringing chords under his hands sealed the framework of his imperative summoning.

  His wily contender was no wraith at all, and on this day, never had been. Enthralled by the gift of his own nature, he beheld the trickster at the last, illumined by the living force of his music, now upraised to the beacon flare of true magecraft. He faced another veiled crone, not the same who had delivered the lyranthe: that one was never his friend.

  This woman wore no shimmering violet mantle. Her cuffs were not banded with scarlet. Instead, a single ribbon of white silk shone moon silver against her plain robe of grey wool.

  Initiate discipline quelled the shocked reflex that urged him to stop off his strings and unspin this illusion of substance. Blind rage could at least seize that destructive outlet, even at risk of unravelling the most vital part of himself. Yet before his lightning reflex forced annihil
ation, she tilted her veiled head and spoke.

  ‘Choose wisely.’ Voice she had, tender enough to wrench his exposed heart-strings.

  Wracked foolish with dread, all but paralyzed by fear of the price he might pay if he dared to listen, he fought the dark pull of his agony. Dispossessed, he owned nothing else but his music. Will defended that talent. Although sorely afraid, he cherished the strings, infallibly striking the notes that refined the connection, strung thin as a cobweb between them.

  ‘You are finished with banishing free wraiths,’ the crone said with ineffable gentleness. ‘That hideous trial is over.’

  But he heard the clear warning she left unspoken, laced through his echoed counterpoint: that his future course of confinement extended without the fierce solace of the lyranthe. The other hag in her purple robes well knew that his gift for song might be turned to forge the key to wrest back his freedom.

  His pealing cry of resentment retorted: repeatedly he had tested the enspelled barrier that hemmed him! Whenever he tried to break through, other forces would answer, bleeding him until he lay helplessly prostrate. The silvery walls of sealed spells locked him down under twisted skeins of revilement. If he ventured too close, he trod a verbal bed of live coals that burned him to humiliation beyond endurance. He crumpled, each time, savaged by accusations that pierced without mercy: ‘You have destroyed the woman you loved, left her forgotten and abandoned. Ruin walks in your footsteps. Behold the days when you trampled down hope. Come forward, only to suffer again! Walk your scarlet-soaked battle-fields and acknowledge your legions of slaughtered dead.’

  The veiled woman wept in sympathy with him. While his music transmitted the relentless sting of his cringing nerves, she did not spurn him with scorn. As if he was not wretched, or defiled beyond bearing, she answered with consolation.