TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

  'Hindsight, of course,' the portly shade grumbled. 'I should've thought first, and suggested that onerous burden should fall to Kharadmon.'

  'He wouldn't be weaned from the construct warding the star tracks, not under any circumstance.' Already on course for the stairwell, Sethvir shook off sharp chills. The remnant wraiths still at large on the splinter world of Marak yet posed an incalculable peril. Kharadmon's extreme anxiety would be justified. He alone had observed that decimated civilization firsthand. Nothing else in Athera's unsettled history had hardened his piquant character to such rabid dedication.

  Nor had his Fellowship peers dismissed the grave danger he stood vigil to avert. On Kharadmon's warning, Asandir had bound Arithon s'Ffalenn under blood oath to survive. The star construct now standing guard for Athera had taken over a year's labor to dedicate. Even for the purpose of a Fellowship convocation, the wards must not stand unattended; if the wraiths left rootless and moiling on Marak ever crossed over to launch an attack, the odds they might spring the penultimate disaster became unthinkably final.

  All living things on a green, breathing world would wither and perish.

  'Avert all ill,' Luhaine breathed as he drifted through the casement.

  Sethvir had no platitude to ease his departure. He passed from the library and descended the spiral stairwell, arms folded to his chest in vain hope the gesture might wring the cold dread from his heart.

  * * *

  Summer solstice shimmered heat waves on the thin spit of land that extended south of the Salt Fens. Sky lidded the savage, untenanted landscape like sheet-fired enamel, and baked the beleaguered shingle under relentless, diamond-bright sunlight. There, the earth's granite bones broke the dunes like dull knives. Seabirds stitched through the moan of the winds that scoured in off the ocean. Word held that the haunts from Second Age history walked over that damascened ribbon of shingle.

  In stark fact, the unrest stamped into the site held origins far older. Sere stone and stripped dunes had endured their uneasy siege with the sea since the Age of Dragons, when past duels between drakes had raged in fell fire that remade the coast's western shoreline. The bay at the mouth of River Shonian in Falwood had been formed when the earth's crust collapsed, riven into a molten caldera by two packs locked in mortal conflict. There also lay the bones of Eckracken Challenger, king among drakes, who had fallen to earth, downed by cinder-burned wings. The tortured landscape itself had been carved as his mighty, scaled hulk writhed in the fatal throes of his agony. Legend held that the Salt Fens were formed on the breath of his death wish, as a balm for his terrible burns.

  Although Althain Tower kept no record of myths, the first centaur guardians sent by Ath Creator to walk the land and bring healing had never gainsaid the tales of the peninsula's origins. Certainly Eckracken's bones rested still, wreathed in bog mists, the raging, angry dreams of his haunt surrounded and sealed by the spells of a Paravian grimward.

  Nor had time erased the trace remnants of drake magic that resounded and whined through the wracked strata of the headland. The resonance of a wanton destruction lay imprinted in the broken stone. The left residue thrummed a subliminal ache through warm flesh where the silted sands mantled the roadside. Echoes still rang through the bedrock spine of feldspar and quartz-veined granite.

  As spirit, less constrained to linear space, Luhaine sensed the burn of past forces as well. The sensation ranged like flaying steel through his etheric awareness. By preference he would have shunned this desolate tract; yet unpleasantly as the site could wear on pure spirit, how much worse for the colleague who had trodden these shores to deny Desh-thiere's access through South Gate. Traithe had survived the affray with his life, but at crippling cost to his mage powers.

  Few places in Athera held the bitter brew of history ascribed to the strands of West Shand.

  The ruin at Earle proved no exception in the annals of legend and lore. Once the fortress had held the first line of resistance against the Mistwraith's assault. The defenders who had shed blood and lost lives were a sorrow too lengthy to list; nor were their memories forgotten. At solstice dawn in Third Age 5654, the sky lay mantled and weeping.

  Arrived to a fine drizzle smudged against louring cloud, Luhaine paused. Ahead stretched a sere landscape, with the ancient causeway a tumbled rut, and the puddles poured glass in the hollows. He surveyed the dark, notched profile of the fortress, its sea-broken walls strung with wild briar, and its landward rampart of shark-toothed crenels still whole between the closed fists of the watch keeps.

  Though no Fellowship Sorcerer had witnessed the First Age, when Paravian heroes marched and perished to subdue the ravages of Eckracken's haunt, to mage-sight, those events stayed immediate. The infinite sadness scribed into stone transcended all barriers of time. Within recent memory, these sands had staged the hard-fought conflict begun with the Mistwraith's invasion. Here, five ruling high kings, endowed with the activated powers of their crown jewels, had stood their ground for the weal of the land. Shoulder to shoulder with Paravians, they died, to be replaced by grown heirs, who did likewise.

  Luhaine gave homage to the past he had witnessed, his chosen expression a masterbard's requiem, and his voice as one with the wind, that hurled spume in raked sheets shoreward . . .

  While four seasons turn under moon and sun,

  and the unicorns' springtide migration runs;

  while dancers leap to the solstice paeans,

  remember the names of the fallen sons.

  This life, the paid gift of their sacrifice -

  our brilliance of days their eternal night,

  forevermore. Oh, forever mourn them!

  Nor were all the mighty powers from those times faded, or dead, or silenced. One keep in the ruin remained pristine, unmarred by old wars and wild elements. Its fastness yet guarded a brooding awareness still primed for Athera's defense. Through the power focus at Earle, the centaur guardian, Seannory, had thrice laid his claim, and bound the four elements into service for need of the world's protection. The ritual release had not been enacted since the hour of the Mistwraith's confinement. Desh-thiere's ills were imprisoned, not undone. The threat to sunlight lay subdued, but not conquered; and there rested the reason for a Fellowship presence since Lysaer s'Ilessid's inner cabal had convened under the shadow of a dragon-skull ward.

  To Luhaine fell the task of unkeying the locks which held the old fortress inviolate. His, the burden of subtlety and care, that the work he enacted disturb none of the primal seals of stasis that checked and balanced the forces within. Burdened by the gravity of the trials ahead, he descended to Earle Keep.

  Where Seannory's guarding wards still reigned, the pale granite blocks wore a glassine finish. No mortar fastened their setting. Each face had been raised by centaur masons, mortise and tenon cut to a precision past the skills of human artisans. True mark of Ilitharis Paravian craftsmen, stone sang to stone in linked balance, each fitted block matched and meshed with its neighbors in harmonic resonance. The rampart arose, each buttress anchored through its aggregate minerals, a bonding fashioned in sound and light beyond range of mortal awareness.

  Mage-sight unveiled that ephemeral splendor as a strength tuned to outlast the ages. Amid the grand spectrum that framed Ath's creation, this structure resounded and sang, a signature chord of achievement that perhaps might never be equaled. Luhaine beheld the fortress of Earle and mourned the loss of an artistry vanished with the Paravians.

  The entry was a sweeping, half-circular arch, chisel-punched from a slab of gneiss granite. A massive boulder plugged the opening, moss-grown and weathered, and possessed of no visible mechanism. The spirit who sought access must win through by means beyond force. The decorative border carved into the archway itself held the key, endowed by Davien the Betrayer. His piquant ingenuity had patterned the geometry beyond the grasp of reason. Those interlocked spirals could tumble a man's mind into madness, as each loop and line unraveled eyesight into dizzy, ecstatic confusion.

&n
bsp; No perception bound by substance could decipher that tangle of paradox.

  As pure spirit, Luhaine was spared the first challenge; he need not engage the esoteric discipline to lift his consciousness free of dense flesh. From his vantage of subtle awareness, the opening point shone as a blue spike of light from the high curve of the arch. To cross the ward, the aspirant must send his naked spirit within to thread the riddle of the maze.

  This pattern would not yield its mysteries freely. Possessed of a questioning, combative nature, Davien had crafted this maze to test character and wisdom, with no crossing ever the same.

  Luhaine drifted upward and flowed through the lit access point, well cognizant of peril as he crossed the initial threshold. The first grand turning presented him with a choice between an object that shimmered with limitless desire and a small, gray pebble of no distinction. Luhaine picked the stone. By experience, he knew the vast secrets of matter were recorded in the structure of minerals. The moment he claimed his unassuming acquisition, the pebble sheared into halves. One portion became a shimmering mirror, and the other, a gateway into darkness.

  Luhaine entered the black unknown, too experienced to fall prey to the illusions of manifest self-importance and vanity.

  The void enfolded him, an obsidian bubble that threatened to swallow his solitary presence. The Sorcerer cast away that sense of imprisonment. He upstepped his vibration beyond the realms of formed thought, reaffirming himself in the primal chord that resounded, plane to plane, and imbued the unbroken flow of life to Ath's ever-varied creation.

  Next turning, Luhaine faced the blinding promise of limitless ecstasy, opposed by the bright glyph of power. He opted for bliss, aware as he was that true power sprang out of unbridled joy. The glittering rune framed the lure for those who would dominate, a clear false step for a Sorcerer schooled to abide by the Law of the Major Balance.

  Turning and turning, Luhaine made his way on the tenets of mage wisdom, his surety born of truesight and compassion where the dictates of experience fell short. Should his discipline and training prove unequal to the test, he would suffer an ignominious return, for the puzzle crossed outside of dimension and time, and stitched through the planes beyond substance. Davien's puzzle would winnow the foolish. His spiraling noose of conundrums and traps well defended the keep's inner sanctum. None but the accomplished adept could win through and attempt the command of the elemental forces still raised to awareness within.

  Each fork in the maze marked a step toward high mystery, until form and substance fell away into streams of pure energy. Here, where naked will could rearrange manifest reality, the uncontrolled mind might forfeit the whole trial on the chance-slipped force of one thought. The last choice, the final step, was always the same. Luhaine knew his way through the mystery of chaos: he imagined himself back before the arched portal, but outside the patterning of knotwork. From that point of power, he spoke the Name of the boulder and asked a polite permission. The heart of the stone would transmute and grant entry, its staid judgment of compassionate character Davien's penultimate obstacle.

  The sentinel stone knew Luhaine well. Hailed by a sonorous bell tone of greeting, the Fellowship shade was given his access to drift through.

  Disgorged from the crystallized geometry of solid mineral, he emerged into what a grand weight of history had dubbed the Hall of Gathering. The air held the pungent tang of electricity. A floor of tessellated marble gleamed like rubbed pearl, the watery reflections of white-marble pillars melted into the upside-down image of the high, groined ceiling. Had there been a dais, that structure was gone, replaced by a grotto that seemed sculpted from the unfinished strata of a cliff face. At first glimpse, the edifice appeared as a designer's folly, carved with vines and tiered fountains and niches festooned with shell fluting. In fact, the structure was a shrine given over to the play of elemental forces.

  Luhaine drifted, his homage no less for the fact he shared an unfettered existence as spirit. The air where he moved harbored conscious activity and an uncanny, intelligent awareness. Drafts flowed here in capricious disregard that no chink existed to admit them. They spun and braided in on themselves, interlaced with ribbons of intangible light and an endowed grace of sentience. Nor was that awareness sympathetic to the foibles of earthbound humanity.

  A man addressed the wild elements at his peril, ever mindful of nuance and intent. The odd word or concept could cross-link like wildfire. This close to the powers that underpinned solid creation, any wayward outcome might precipitate into reality.

  'Athera has need,' announced the Sorcerer out of respectful silence.

  His fleshless whisper sighed through the incessant song of a fountain raised on a plinth. The splashing fall of the water was self-perpetuating. Mercurial showers of runoff dashed into a pool very like the ones found in the sanctuaries of Ath's adepts. Three massive stones flanked the verge. Their rough-hewn edges were mantled with green moss, and dignity clothed them like royalty. Adjacent to the fountain, fire burned in a niche, whirled and winnowed into firefly spirals by the play of an unseen wind.

  'Athera has need,' Luhaine repeated, this time louder. Then, in the rolling cadences of a language long since forgotten by man, he summoned four Names, by vowel and syntax shaping the primal resonance that defined the four elemental spirits.

  At first, no change; then fleeting expectancy shot a shimmer of light through the air.

  Luhaine waited, stone patient.

  Presently the fall of the water sang with melodious laughter. A sprite's face emerged from the ripples in the pool, neither woman nor child, but possessed of bewitching ebullience. 'What need shall we answer?' she trilled in a sweet, girlish treble.

  Luhaine responded by providing her with an image. His portly form appeared clothed in a dignitary's robes of gray velvet, his silver beard combed in waves to a waist cinctured in calfskin and fastened with a farmer's wide-tanged brass buckle.

  'We know you, Defender,' said the sprite in the pool, teasing or contemptuous; seductive or scornful: her tone as always a fractured illusion of duality the unwary found madness trying to fathom.

  'Two boons, for my asking,' the Sorcerer replied, staid in his lack of curiosity. 'The Fellowship desires to hold convocation in this place on the night of the summer solstice. First, I require your assistance to admit Traithe. His powers remain crippled since his stand against Desh-thiere, and he cannot undertake the trial of the maze to win right of passage on his own.'

  This time, the voice of the wind sylph answered, skirling echoes from the shadowy recesses. 'His courage was our ally when his act sealed South Gate. Rest assured, we will greet him with welcome.'

  Luhaine's image bowed in grave thanks. 'Your forbearance is generous.'

  He straightened, unsurprised to see that the sentinel stones by the pool had grown gnarled faces, the elemental earth personified in response to his summons by Name. The speech he received as a belling, subsonic vibration reflecting the deep overtones of an earthquake, and magma congealed into bedrock. 'Has Athera's need sprung from the blight that opens a rift like a sore on the northwestern headland of Paravia?'

  'A dragon-skull ward has been raised,' Luhaine answered, respectful of truth, but wishing the archaic tongue he used had gentler words to soften the brunt. 'We know the construct hides the seed of a damaging conspiracy. Sethvir of Althain would cast strands to scry warning. For the sake of that augury, he sends me as emissary. Need I explain?'

  'You need not.' Stone's wisdom encompassed all secrets, all conjuries, all manifestations that spellcraft could bind over matter. Earth element knew in detail how Fellowship conjury could sift the future and sound the patterns of multiple probability.

  'As the makers of form and substance,' Luhaine petitioned, 'we beg permission to access your mastery through the hour we shape our augury. Guesswork is too dangerous. The Mistwraith's curse has stirred the most powerful human factions on Athera to renewed pacts of hatred and violence. Now, the dragon-skull ward blinds Sethvir t
o the consequences. For the sake of our duty to uphold the compact, hear our formal appeal. We ask elemental help to bend time. Allow us to view the true course of events as they come to be manifest.'

  Fire replied, a crackling sibilance of sparks. 'We cannot assist with an act of intervention that would alter the thread of the world's fate. We serve free will; its ordained limits are not ours to cross.'

  'Our Fellowship is bound to the Major Balance, which adheres to the selfsame Law.' Luhaine was too wedded to patience to yield to frustration as he clarified Fellowship intent. 'We do not seek to change destiny, but only to align our dwindled resources to the land we are sworn to guard. Dare we allow the last hope of Paravian survival to fail through some mortal brew of ill fortune? By my sworn word, our defense concerns only the compact, which mankind may transgress at their peril.'

  A moment passed, weighted in silence that made the falling water seem a shout against the etched quiet of the air. The fire flared down to sullen embers, and the faces on the stones folded back into moss. When at due length Luhaine received disposition, the words shimmered with the silvery harmonics of all four of the elements combined. 'Your request is granted, given the grounds of appeal. We will lift the veil of time for the duration of twelve years, but no more. No ward set by man will blind Sethvir's vision, but beware: the foreknowledge you gain must not open temptation to meddle.'

  Luhaine bowed, too wise to argue the limitation set on the strands' augury. Elemental power encompassed all worlds, not just the firm earth of Athera; given the broad-ranging scope of their influence, such beings abided by their own codes of conduct. Only one force ever challenged their place on the loom of Ath's creation: the great drakes had spun energy into matter, then endowed their artistry with renegade consciousness through the gateway of true dreams. For that transgression, the dragons had earned an enmity that reached forward and back, unto the dawning of time.