Free The Ships of Merior by Janny Wurts Page B

the lead horses, which were also black, and matched like images in mirror glass with smart blazes and white stockings. A footman dispatched from the driver’s box strolled over to the carter, even yet hopping back to escape the gelding’s thrashing first effort to rise.
    There is some difficulty?’ the footman opened coldly. The gold braid and blazon of the authority he represented glittered through the smoke of the torches.
    Speechless, the carter stabbed a skinned finger at the gelding, which gathered its fantastic assemblage of joints and surged, snorting, to its feet.
    A woman’s voice called from the carriage. The footman nodded deference, then turned his chin stiffly over his pearl-buttoned collar and inquired, ‘May I ask, in the name of my Lord Mayor, what you have done with the new crown moulding?’
    The carter straightened his ripped britches, sweat sliding slick down his temples. ‘I? Vengeance of Dharkaron, that horse!’
    Faery-toes curled an insouciant lip and shook like a dog amid a tempest of flapping reins and stirrups. The footman’s regard turned sceptical before he swung back to the carter. ‘I doubt if that bundle of incompetence is able to move four feet in consecutive order.’
    ‘Well, that says it all in a nutshell,’ cried the carter in exasperation.
    ‘Who owns the beast?’ The glance of the mayor’s footman ranged loftily over the bystanders, flickered past the pony cart and its pair of frozen figures, then lowered inexorably to the last, still wheezing on the pavement. ‘Who?’
    Dakar’s disordered features snapped sober. ‘I just donated him to the city almshouse.’
    The carriage door opened and slammed. The footman gave way before a robed secretary with overbred hands. Mincing like a rooster with hackles raised for combat, the official bore down upon the unkempt fat man who, like his horse, belatedly scrambled upright.
    ‘You will be chained and held in custody until tomorrow, when this matter will be settled in the court hall of Jaelot to my Lord Mayor’s satisfaction. I suggest until then that somebody competent puts that creature away. At least have it removed from the streets before it can cause further mischief.’ To the carter, he added without sympathy, ‘The guard will help clear your debris. If you wish to claim settlement for damages, attend the hearing and make your plea to the mayor’s justice.’
    While the watch captain’s men closed in armed force to take the Mad Prophet into custody, and the retinue of the Jaelot’s mayor retired back to the carriage and whisked off on gilded wheels, Halliron pressed mittened hands over streaming eyes and groaned through the muffling fur. ‘Ath, I knew, I just
knew!
We should never have come into Jaelot.’
Trial
    His Lordship the Mayor of Jaelot was not disposed to rise early. In his courts of law, appointments by hour were unheard of; the city alderman sent his list daily to the watch captain, who detailed men at arms to the dungeons. The accused were fetched out without breakfast and escorted to the annex chamber, a window-less, black-panelled vault with groined ceilings built into a cellar beneath the council hall. There, cuffed in manacles that made it difficult to scratch accumulated flea bites, Dakar the Mad Prophet was obliged to wait with two other men and a woman, whose crimes ranged from public brawling to theft and bloody murder.
    Through the course of an uncomfortable night, he bad cursed his careless learning. A brass lock or latch, he could have opened with spells,- and had, many times, in egress from the bedchambers of willing wives whose husbands had come home untimely. But the fetters and bars of Jaelot’s dungeons were never fashioned for decor in castings of soft, refined metals. Chilled yet from lying huddled on dank straw, Dakar ground his teeth over dilatory habits that had let him drift through his centuries ofFellowship apprenticeship without fully mastering the contrary properties of alloys