Destiny’s Conflict: Book Two of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts

with force, and he jeopardized three thousand lives. The humane statesman might treat for the greater good: yield in the hope that rabid, blind faith could be cajoled into a compromise. Hope and sanity died if inflamed zeal spurned reason and The Hatchet refused to stand down. Once the archers unleashed their staged volley, the blood-bath would be joined. The temple must answer the insolent threat served on the Canon by its tarnished avatar.

      Apostate defiance had to be crushed, no matter whether the man on the horse wielded the direct might of an elemental power.

      Dace charged his gelding over rough ground in a race that stared down futility. The heritage of s’Ilessid sprang from the royal fibre to treat with the Paravians, never to compromise inborn principle. The Hatchet’s companies should have quailed, set at brash risk of the intractable fires and fell fury that had broken their comrades at Lanshire.

      Martial orders ought not to smother survival before such a threat.

      Yet not a man in the hostile host cracked. The ranks held, enthralled dedicates headed for sanctimonious martyrdom.

      The grey galloped, reckless strides thudded against the baked earth, to the rake of green thorn in the tinder-dry brush. Dace lashed the reins and drove the animal’s pace faster. Chaff and winnowed dust raised a plume at his back, while ahead, the lucent view etched a confrontation too distant to curb.

      Dace groaned for the heart-ache. He could not arrest the spin of Fate’s Wheel; could not belabour more speed from his mount. Through sight whipped by wind, then blurred through tears, he watched the glittering, gold-embroidered glove as his liege dropped his grasp on his destrier’s rein. Hurtled towards the breach, too late to matter, the faithful valet saw the fingers close into a forewarning fist.

      Sunlight limned the vista like nicked brass, as though cast in the relief of a monument. Lysaer, on the horse, raised his arm overhead.

      As one, the ranked archers nocked arrows. Their varnished shafts winked like needles as they bent their bows to full draw.

      Dace’s oblique approach, still bearing down, sighted the single odd movement amid the massed war host that did not fit: across the sweltering shimmer of air, a tin-toy, squat figure upright in a war chariot lifted a cocked crossbow and took aim from the shoulder.

      Lysaer s’Ilessid had no cause to fear. Placed at front and centre, always, his gift of light had flash-charred hostile arrows and steel into carbon and dust. Upon this same heath, two hundred and eleven years ago, a barbarian marksman had sought his death. The levin bolt that sowed his claim to divinity had reduced that killer’s shaft in mid-flight. For two centuries since, command of the wild elements had dispatched volleys en masse without casualties.

      Yet history seemed poised to overturn this time. Warning tingled from the Sorcerer’s mark on Dace’s breast, then that caustic sensation joined the uncanny pressure where a hidden, spelled bracelet circled his wrist.

      Another yard closer, almost near enough, Dace unclenched his grip on the grey’s mane. He flinched as the bow-strings released, cringing under the deadly whine of the arrows as he launched his fly-weight in midstride from the saddle. Whether he meant to drop Lysaer out of harm’s way, or if he offered his body as shield, none who beheld ever knew.

      The flat whap of The Hatchet’s poised weapon launched the quarrel beyond intervention.

      The light-bolt crackled off Lysaer’s poised fist. Air screamed under the volatile blast as feathered shafts and their lethal freight of forged broadheads winnowed to ash. Except for one missile, sped onwards amid the sheen of an uncanny counter ward. The deadly spin of a sigil sliced through the applied might of the elements. That fateful quarrel sheared onwards, not flared to a smoke-puff of carbon, but untouched on its whistling passage through the gusty recoil of white-heated air.

      Impact struck the avatar in the right eye, a split second before the next levin bolt kindled, and just as Dace’s flung weight cannoned into his stricken liege.

      Collision knocked the breath from them both. Entangled, servant and master crashed to the ground.

      Dace coughed on live sparks, wind-borne where the back-flash had kindled a grass fire. The nearby crackle of flame scarcely registered. Under his hands, back arched and mouth gaped, Lysaer thrashed in wounded agony. Dace fought his convulsions.