TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

  With the guildsmen and trade factions settled to mollified prosperity, Lysaer s'Ilessid retired to the guarded tower sanctum, where he met with those chosen few. Since the failed schism with s'Brydion had gutted their hopes for a clan war to draw the unpledged eastern cities under the sunwheel standard, talk and rampant speculation had circled like a balked dog pack. Just what the Prince of the Light would do next became the spearhead of every conversation. Until the sabotaged ships were replaced, there could be no expansion. The inexorable bleeding of profits to ease trade deficits would keep the royal treasury hobbled. Trained troops could not be replaced at short notice. Nor would the minions of shadow and sorcery rest through the years of recovery.

  The volatile flood of complaint reached full spate on the instant Lysaer s'Ilessid arrived and assumed his too-long-vacant seat.

  'Save us all!' The realm's seneschal shoved erect in vociferous objection. 'What is the purpose of the Alliance if not to eradicate clan interference with trade and collusion with the Master of Shadow?'

  'What use to pursue practitioners of magecraft if they simply flee over the border to take sanctuary under the High King of Havish?' cried Crown Examiner Vorrice. His full sleeve flapped to his vehement gesture as he shouted down other colleagues. 'Since you've reduced the field companies, all men who are bound to cause evil in the world will simply fly to roost under the protection of Eldir's banner!'

  Lysaer did not answer, but let the talk swell and tangle, even to the concern raised by Lord Mayor Skannt, that the headhunters' guilds were going to balk at hard service if purse strings stayed tight and bounties were halved to save bullion.

  Lord Koshlin accosted in brutal practicality, 'If the barbarians enslaved by crown policy are put to the block, the trade galleys could recover their unobstructed passage through port towns to the south.'

  'Let the scum run to Havish, why care?' Gace Steward dismissed with contentious enjoyment. 'We'll just use the peace to build forces and wealth, then deal with King Eldir through an invasion.'

  Silence, while heads turned and tilted, to measure how Lysaer s'Ilessid would react to a statement that, perhaps, might have gone too far.

  The Prince of the Light gave them back no reaction. His hands remained stilled. Touched by more light than the fluttering flames in the high candelabra seemed to warrant, his pristine white clothing reflected a fine nimbus against the dimmer wool tapestry, sewn with the blazon of Tysan. A drawn minute passed, while the dagged velvet curtains billowed in the sea breeze through the cracked casement. From the yard far below, the whistle of the kennelman mingled with the rattle of chain and the bay of idle tracking hounds, who leaped at their tethers to be fed.

  While the drawn pause extended, and the expectant atmosphere became brittle to cracking with pressure, Prince Lysaer unlaced his fingers to a snapping glitter of rings. His smile was butter as he urged, 'Do go on. Every man present is free to air his opinion.'

  The settled strength of his patience made the yap of his councilmen all of a sudden seem foolish. Given no response and no target, the majority subsided in embarrassment. Red to the wattles, the seneschal cleared his throat. Skannt fingered his knives, flushed with speculation, while others repressed the urge to whisper among themselves. The High Priest of the Light, Cerebeld, was the sole one among them who felt no discomfort, and yet, these chosen few were not fools.

  'Your Grace, we are listening,' noted the Minister of the Royal Treasury, his narrowed, pale eyes most observant. 'If you've already chosen our course for the future, dare I ask what's afoot?'

  A sharp tap at the door interrupted. Lysaer's placating neutrality broke into a piquant smile. 'Raise the latch and accept my invitation to find out.'

  The Minister of the Royal Treasury deferred, since Gace Steward would leap to the task out of jealous intent to be first.

  The door swung wide to reveal Sulfin Evend reversing the pommel of the dagger just used to rap at the panel. Beyond the pebbled gleam of his mail shirt, a silver-haired visitor clad in elegant black: Raiett Raven awaited admittance.

  'What's this!' burst out Vorrice.

  The others rammed straight, declaiming, as the presence of an unsworn stranger threatened to ignite a fresh round of clamor.

  'Protection,' said Lysaer, then bade his Lord Commander and the Mayor of Hanshire's former advisor to make free and enter with his welcome. 'Proceed as we planned,' he added to Raiett, who carried a coffer set with inlay and gold studs tucked into the crook of his elbow.

  As though he were not made the target of jealous resentment from men who guarded their predatory ambitions, Raiett advanced. His tread made no sound on the chill flagstone floors. His sable clothing seemed to swallow the candlelight and knit his slender frame into the outlying shadows. Against the soft dark, his lean hands stood out, each motion distinct as he set down his burden and unlocked the top with a key that hung from a chain at his neck. The lid opened with the same oiled ease of precise workmanship. Raiett drew out a padded silk bag and deftly loosened the drawstrings.

  All eyes in the chamber stayed fixed upon him, yet his features showed nerveless detachment. He reached inside and drew out a fist-sized item that gleamed with the ocher patina of old bone.

  The tower had niches built into the brick walls, inset with high arches for candles. Raiett placed the first object on the brick sill, and the flare of wax flame roused the heart's blood sparkle of a jewel. The artifact was a skull the size of a cat's, but elongated and set with fangs and tearing incisors. The crown was inlaid with a circle of jet, and inside that, crimped in a timeworn copper bezel, glimmered a cabochon ruby.

  Vorrice stirred upright in alarm. 'In the Name of the Light, what is that?'

  "The skull from an unborn dragon.' Matter-of-fact to the point of cold arrogance, Raiett rounded the table and moved on to the west wall, where he reached into the coffer and removed another silk bag, then a relic as unsettling as the first. The sockets of the eyes slanted, filled with shifting shadow, as though the creature's dead mind still flickered, watching from inner caverns of cold bone.

  'Wards?' The Minister of the Royal Treasury chafed bony wrists to mask his creeping rush of gooseflesh.

  'Just that.' Raiett's progress had carried him to the north wall. Soon a third skull grinned at its fellow to the east, the jewel in its crown a glittering ember. 'These are very ancient, extracted alive from the egg before hatching imprinted their self-awareness. Taken so, they are tools, their arcane qualities enslaved to the will of humanity.' On the last wall, he laid the fourth in the set. 'They watch. The consciousness of dragons is immortal, and the skulls keep a resonance of their awareness, even long after death.' He added, folding the now empty silk, "This set was mislaid by a Koriani senior five hundred years ago, when a sisterhouse burned in the uprising.'

  'Heresy!' Vorrice snapped. His vulture's profile swung and jutted toward Lysaer. 'What witchery is this? You've reduced the loyal war host. Are you also turned by evil to embrace the very powers of darkness?'

  A lingering chill seemed to lace through the room, as if unseen currents of draft played from the locked gazes of four pairs of empty eye sockets; and yet, no such airs winnowed the candles. The flames stood up stark and still from their wicks, while the men in their velvets shrank and startled.

  Into that uneasy discomfort, Lysaer s'Ilessid gave measured opinion. 'How else to avert the gaze of a Sorcerer than to use powers of spellcraft against him? A dragon-skull ward bends outside time and space. We'll need such protection. We cannot thwart shadow, or break the absolute tyranny of the Fellowship of Seven without long-range intentions. Henceforward, I would rather the Warden of Althain was not made privy to our talk.' White silk defied the encroachment of night as Lysaer rose to his feet. 'We are gathered here, in strict secrecy, for the purpose of arranging how the word and the light will be made to span all five kingdoms on this continent. . .'

  Spring 5654

  Schism

  At Althain Tower, caught in a rare nap, Sethvir
springs bolt upright as a numbing, unnatural needle of cold pricks through the fabric of his earth-sense; within the same instant, the broad span of his awareness pinpoints the location of the event to a high tower chamber in Avenor, and the expletive he chooses to vent his annoyance singes nap off his age-worn velvet . . .

  As the annihilating thread of drake magic slices into Athera's existence, an adept in the white robes of Ath's Brotherhood cries out in a hostel in Shaddorn; Morriel Prime snaps awake from a dream of fell darkness; a mage in a cavern stands immersed in conjecture; and a centaur guardian lifts his horned head and trembles, eyes liquid and wide with what could be grave sorrow, or a rage to seed fear in the wild heart of the four elements . . .

  Unaware of the precedent loosed in Avenor, Lord Maenol, caithdein of the realm, briefs a clan messenger bound on to his counterpart in Rathain: 'You will say to Earl Jieret that his liege has fulfilled the debt of alliance he swore on my grandmother Maenalle's death. Our clan bloodlines are safely secured under Havish's sanctuary. In Caithwood, we are guarded by the wakened awareness of trees, and with ships to offset the s'Ilessid threat of slavery, we expect to endure through the next generation . . .'

  Spring 5654

  VIII. Strands

  The vortex punched a hole through the world's quickened fabric, a canker of interference inflicted at Avenor

  by Raiett's use of the dragon-skull wards. Its influence raised a darkness that seared, an aberrant field of chaos that skewed the grand chord of Ath's creation. Sethvir reeled from the shock. Bent double as a stab like hot steel lanced the tuned sensitivity of the earth link, he snatched the desperate presence of mind to engage a spontaneous defense. Still shaken, wrung to wax pallor from the reserves just expended to shut out those deranging vibrations, he gasped a clipped epithet maligning the invention of wraith-cursed s'Ilessid royalty. Then he raked down his snarls of disarranged hair. His next thought sent Luhaine an immediate summons to appear at Althain Tower.

  Though darkness had fallen, no candles burned in Sethvir's private quarters. The Sorcerer required none. Each object sang from the velvety gloom, a ribboned chorus of light and sound that underpinned all form and matter. Barefoot since the demise of his buskins, he padded, unerring, through his obstacle course of antiquities; the unending array of worn bridles and waxed twine threaded onto curved needles; the chess table with its carved ivory pieces left set in an ongoing match against Traithe; the candle molds and wicking string, jumbled alongside a Second Age dagger that had once been Cianor Sunlord's. Despite his rank haste, Sethvir took no wrong step. He reached the door running and scaled three flights of stairs to the tower's top-floor library.

  His discorporate colleague awaited by then, a pool of dense cold in the corner by an aumbry overburdened with a clutch of smoothed river stones.

  'We need a grand scrying,' Sethvir opened without pause. 'Fresh trouble at Avenor. Lysaer's just set a dragon-skull ward to mask a meeting with his high priest and inner cabal.'

  Shocked by the dangerous ramifications, Luhaine whirled into motion. 'Where's Arithon?' he demanded point-blank. His unsettled passage riffled the opened books stacked in tipsy piles on the tabletop.

  'Far out in the Cildein Ocean, and so far as I know, safe for the foreseeable future.' Sethvir's brow furrowed before the daunting task of clearing a space for his work.

  A disturbed sheet of rice paper fluttered to the floor. Luhaine froze, his irritation a palpable tingle as his colleague recovered the scattered leaf, then scooped up an armload of pens and parchments and wedged them beneath the clawed stand of an armillary. 'Really, someone should summon a djinn to attend your housekeeping for you.'

  Sethvir glanced up, miffed. 'That's sheerest folly. I'd never be able to find anything.'

  Since a discorporate spirit made inefficient help with the physical task of tidying, Luhaine grumbled, 'Save us all, you're a creature born without logic.'

  'I need no one's plodding, unnecessary logic! Certainly not to recall what's kept where.' Sethvir sneezed at the dust that puffed from the leather-bound tomes he thumped to rest on a stool seat. 'Bless me.' A touch of one finger and a sigil of stasis anchored the pile as it teetered. 'As if the glorious invention of the natural world could be sorted in record lists anyway.'

  He brushed off his hands and plowed into a heap of scrolls. His ink-stained cuffs flapped around wrists chiseled by strain to a framework of bone and laced sinew.

  'You're thin,' Luhaine snapped in concerned exasperation. 'Have you run out of butter again?'

  'It went rancid because I ran out of time, a problem not likely to roost elsewhere.' Once the table's obsidian surface was swept clean, Sethvir delved into the depths of a store chest and recovered a square of black velvet. This, he spread over the mirror-polished stone to damp out misleading reflections.

  'Strands?' Luhaine cried. 'You want to cast strands? Shouldn't the others be called to stand witness?'

  The Warden of Althain hooked a chair with his ankle and sat. 'They should.' His acerbity frayed into worry. 'Except for the problem that Tysan's crown examiners have grown unpleasantly vigilant.'

  'You're worried for Traithe?' Luhaine's horrified presence shrank to a fixed point that scribed frost crystals on the fogged casement.

  'Traithe,' Sethvir concurred. Sorrow oppressed his cragged features. 'Our hopes since the Mistwraith's defeat have borne bitter fruit, have they not? The affray over Caithwood last autumn has seeded redoubled unease. Lysaer's sunwheel patrols have grown vengefully diligent. Given fresh license by the prevailing fears, they're scouring the villages to rout out the practice of small magecraft.'

  Silence, filled by a stark truth as ominous as a circling vulture. Traithe's crippled powers could not shake an armed troop without using the lesser practice of ceremonial magic. That exposure, in crossing Tysan alone, could send him to trial and arraignment; no idle threat with the Fellowship itself too overburdened to effect a reliable rescue.

  'A telling victory for Lysaer, if one of our number was found to be mortally vulnerable.' Luhaine's distress snapped static from each bitten consonant. 'How did you break those ugly tidings to Traithe?'

  Sethvir sighed. 'I told him point-blank: stay well clear of Tysan. Since Shand and Rathain are becoming as dangerous, I urged that he should avoid them. If he was called to the wilds of Melhalla, he should travel with extreme caution.'

  Another lapse, while the two Fellowship colleagues strove not to dwell on the grief of Traithe's impaired freedom. Nor could they find aught but outright discomfort in the projected array of possibility. Lysaer s'Ilessid had begun the unthinkable next step in his Alliance campaign to quell magecraft. The facts were not kindly. If he revived the lapsed practice of drake magic, the warping fields set off by such spells posed a dire threat to those Sorcerers who were stripped of their flesh.

  'The quandary sets barbs in every direction,' Sethvir agreed at due length.

  Outside the latched casement, the spring constellations rode a sky like carpeted indigo. The library, by contrast, was a well of deep shadow, musked with dry ink and cured leather. That illusory coziness became sliced across by the point of sharp cold that was Luhaine, immersed in agitation far removed from his usual rambling remonstrance.

  'If you have a suggestion to make, please speak,' Sethvir prodded. The roving chill discomposed his bare ankles, and the poisonous depth of his colleague's silence rankled him to unease. 'Lysaer's plots unsettle the earth link, and tracking your thought patterns out of clear air can be as bothersome as a Koriani sigil of confusion.'

  'Very well.' Luhaine roved to the casement. 'Traithe's still at Waterfork?' Given Sethvir's clipped affirmation, the discorporate spirit rushed his point. 'I suggest we unkey the ruin at Earle and call a convocation of the Fellowship. Since Lysaer's intended muster in the east has been balked outright by the s'Brydion, we can expect he'll engage s'Ahelas farsight. I much doubt the plot hatched under dragon-skull wards will develop with short-term interests.'

  'Summer solst
ice?' Sethvir asked, brows raised as his thoughts leaped ahead. 'Asandir's in East Halla, traveling south.' The timing meshed nicely. The itinerant Sorcerer had enough time to spare to review the methspawn at Mirthlvain. 'He could transfer directly from Methisle without difficulty. But Earle? That's extreme.'

  'From Earle we can test the fault line through the Skyshiels,' Luhaine argued. "That would eliminate the need to survey the state of the wards on the Mistwraith.' The discorporate Sorcerer revolved in place, as though he ticked each listed item off on the fingers he had lacked for centuries. 'As well, we can sound the far future. Better to see what Morriel Prime plans for that herder's son, Fionn Areth.'

  'Morriel again?' Sethvir's cheeks dimpled into an expression more grimace than smile. 'If I didn't sense your total sincerity, I'd think you were growing obsessed.'

  As Luhaine coalesced with offended fire, the Warden spoke swiftly and quelled him. 'Very well, we shall convene at Earle.' He arose, fingers locked through his beard as his thoughts reached out to his colleagues, then vaulted ahead to particulars. He needed to adjust the guarding wards on Althain Tower, and, of course, he would have to pack tea.

  By default, Luhaine must fare on to West Shand. His work would unkey the protections left in force on the ruin that commanded the southern tip of the peninsula.