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 and which slouched at their desks as their quills scratched out copies of the 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