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. Annoyed that Lorn’s inept constable was tar-slow to collect blatant malefactors, Dakar ducked a swung fist. ‘Why 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