TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

  'I thank your indulgence,' Luhaine addressed in closing his audience with the raised minds of the elements. 'Be sure my Fellowship will not waste your gift, nor use what we learn to alter fate's course through prime influence.'

  * * *

  By sundown, the other Fellowship Sorcerers converged at the focus at Earle. Luhaine's wraith presence was joined first by Traithe, whose leggings and boots still wore the pong of black mud and crushed fern gained crossing the Salt Fens. His raven hunched, ruffled with wet, on the shoulder of a sun-faded oilskin cloak, bought used from the hay shearers at Waterfork. The hands that slung off his wayfarer's pack seemed too thin and worn for the season.

  'How many street beggars did you feed back in Shandor?' Luhaine accosted, concerned.

  'All of them.' Traithe's coffee eyes crinkled to his sudden smile. 'Chide all you like, you won't find me regretful.'

  He peeled off his cloak, scattering moisture over the silken sheen of the marble. For that, he tilted his silvered head in apology toward the grotto two flights upstairs, where the fountain cascaded its continuous spray of arpeggios. 'Ama'idan, Water Sisters, I'm sorry. Forgive the small puddles, and receive instead my sincere thanks for your bounty.'

  The weather had closed in with the advent of nightfall. Hard rain rinsed the headlands outside in black torrents, yet the drumming cascade could not be heard in the sealed vaults beneath Earle fortress.

  Traithe warmed his stiff fingers over a wax taper scrounged from the dry depths of his pack. His colleague exchanged news. Between small conversation, and sharing a supper of raisins and jerked venison with the raven, the focus circle patterned in the stone floor awakened to crackling life.

  Asandir stepped out of the glare. Sun-browned and scratched from some rugged errand pursued amid summer briar, he brought in the aromatic scents of mountain fir and long nights spent next to birch campfires. He spoke a sharp word, dispersing the lane forces, and to Luhaine's voiced greeting, replied, 'Bad hunting indeed.'

  Lips turned to distaste, he unburdened himself of a horn bow and a quiver of steel-tipped arrows, then the meticulously kept blade of his hunting knife. 'At least where I came from, the weather was clear.' He folded lean legs and joined Traithe on the marble step that rimmed the focus, then proceeded to pick thorns and burrs from his tunic with unhurried, large-jointed fingers.

  Luhaine looked on, grumbling and anxious to begin proceedings.

  'We can't start without waiting for Sethvir anyway,' Traithe said, one scarred hand soothing the raven, who grew snappish as the unseen shade riffled cold through its feathers once again. When Luhaine refused answer, he plied Asandir for the latest word out of Shand.

  The Sorcerer who shouldered most of the Fellowship's field work glanced up, his eyes the silver of filled rain pools. 'I traveled from the crystal veins in the Tiriacs, and haven't seen a city in six weeks. But the kites believe the autumn storms will be harsh, which could increase the shale slides in Vastmark.'

  Luhaine broke in then, destroying the illusion of small talk. 'You were abroad in the Tiriacs? Then you certainly weren't bow hunting for deer.'

  'No.' Asandir sighed. 'Trouble again, from the mires of Mirthlvain. Last season's frosts caused a break in the second Paravian retaining wall. Eighteen broods of methspawn escaped in the foothills, but they maraud there no longer.' Which explained the grain of weariness in his voice and the bramble rips in his clothing. Before Luhaine could lecture, the Sorcerer qualified, 'The predators chose not to answer to Name. Verrain had already exhausted that chance when I got there. Next time, you can try for yourself, and before you insist we can't continue without Kharadmon's backing, the simple fact is, we must.'

  'I was going to ask which strain of methspawn escaped,' Luhaine corrected, miffed.

  But his question was left to hang on the air as the concave depression of the focus flared into crackling luminescence again.

  A bothered oath arose amid the white sparks. Then the Warden of Althain emerged from the scintillance of roused lane force, arms overburdened with rolls of blank parchment, and pens, and an ink-dark length of plain velvet.

  Asandir lunged upright and rescued those items in imminent danger of falling.

  'I should've brought a satchel,' Sethvir lamented, his face eclipsed by his teetering load. 'The problem was, all of them were full.'

  'If you plan to inscribe a formal record, we're lacking a chair or a table,' informed Luhaine.

  'The floor has always served well enough.' Sethvir flashed his pixie's grin to Asandir, whose fast reflex next fielded the horn box with the ink flask before it slithered and smashed underfoot. 'Thank you. At least this time Luhaine won't be the one carping over stiffened joints and sore knees.'

  Luhaine returned a windy harrumph, spinning ahead through the newel posts of the balustrade some fanciful mason had carved with stylized dolphins. The raven flew, and Traithe followed, as ever too proud to resort to a staff, though his lame leg dragged on the risers. In sympathy with his silent suffering, Asandir pressed at his heels, prepared to offer his tacit support if the grace of opportunity presented. Sethvir came last, still barefoot, since he had found no spare moment to send a clan trapper to find him another black wolf pelt.

  Earle Keep had been built on a grand scale, and two landings passed before the party of Sorcerers reached the Hall of Gathering. While the recent arrivals paid the four elementals their respectful greeting, the raven soared upward, to cavort in the eddies stirred by the sylphs dancing under the groins of the ceiling.

  'None of that,' Traithe chided, laughing. 'The hour is late. Were we outside, you'd be roosting.' He held up his wrist.

  The raven swooped down and alighted, croaking an avian epithet.

  'And the same for the egg that hatched you,' Traithe retorted.

  By then, Sethvir had shed his goose quills and parchments. Embedded amid the disorderly bundles were a moth-eaten cushion and collapsible camp stool for Traithe.

  The crippled Sorcerer raised surprised eyebrows, then whispered his heartfelt thanks. He claimed the stool and took brisk charge of its assembly until Asandir stopped hovering out of misplaced pity and helped Sethvir spread the square of dark velvet over the marble flooring.

  Then the Warden of Althain dug through the scrip at his belt and produced two worn stubs of chalk. One he handed to Asandir. In wordless, paired concert, the two Sorcerers inscribed the grand circles to invoke an elemental conjury.

  Traithe sat with a quartz crystal in hand, immersed in communion with his raven. The bird was no stranger to ceremonial spellcraft. It launched and soared spiraling patterns overhead, a living shuttle cast upon the unseen loom of the air. The etheric filaments of its master's will trailed white streamers of light off its obsidian primaries.

  Luhaine to all appearance had vanished, his being engaged beyond range of mortal senses. His perfectionist touch set the boundaries and wards for a conjury that would extend across time and space. If he missed Kharadmon's acerbic wit, or the counterbalance of a partnered spirit, like Traithe, he withheld complaint.

  By sundown, preparations inside the vault stood complete. Although none of the day's dying light pierced Earle Keep's sealed fastness, every Fellowship Sorcerer in the Hall of Gathering sensed the pending hour of twilight. They assumed their position. Silent, prepared, Sethvir took the north, to invoke the grounding heart of the earth. Asandir ranged southward, and opposite, to call fire. In the absence of Kharadmon, Luhaine held the east, and Traithe, in worn black, stood for west. The raven descended and perched on its master's shoulder, eyes like shiny beads that perceived far more than an avian intelligence. For one tensioned instant, the air waited, mute, imprinted by the melodies of water, falling, and the voracious percussion of burst sparks.

  'Alt,' Sethvir stated, the rune for beginning.

  Unseen but for the stir of wild energies that prickled the hair at the nape, the elemental forces Luhaine had petitioned now joined with the Sorcerers' stilled focus. The workings of invisible powers re
knit the veil of the mysteries, and subtly, silently, transcended the boundaries that anchored the root of the world.

  An electrical current swept the core of the circles, spiked with the sheered tang of ozone. The water cavorting in the fountain sublimated away into nothing, and the sparks in the fire pan whirled up in a crackling vortex and vanished. Blackness claimed the sealed chamber, more dense than the vacuum between stars.

  Against that unwritten scrim of poised force, Sethvir spoke again, a lyric line phrased in ancient Paravian that granted an unconditional consent.

  A snap just past the limits of sound grazed through bone, flesh, and sinew. Time broke from the present. The air outside the conjured circles went unutterably still, its essence beyond animate concept of dark: lightless, empty as the void of potential that preceded the solidity of creation. Inside the circles, on an islet of chill stone, the square of dark velvet lost contour and form, until it became a primordial extension of the same formless energy. This conjury was no mere seeing, no illusion or reflection, but a perilous unmaking of all bonds to matter by the primal forces of the four elements. By their dire cooperation, the scrying within would go forward outside the frame that maintained the world's form and function.

  'Designate,' Sethvir murmured.

  The stiletto point of force that was Luhaine's awareness carved yet another ring of protection around the black template on the floor. A melding of four wills set specific intent for the area within to stand proxy for Athera's place in the cosmos. Two seals were laid over the circled square: one for protection and one to admit the boundless grace of Ath's blessing.

  'Triad,' Sethvir whispered. He raised a hand gloved in raw power and inscribed three lines of living light upon the air.

  Asandir touched those blank energies and Named them, one for the matter which formed solid existence, one for the spirit which quickened life, and lastly, the word for the stream of consciousness which linked those two poles and governed their spin and direction.

  The rods of light imprinted. The prime pattern that first sourced Ath's limitless creation formed against the dark field of the velvet.

  The Sorcerers spun more filaments of light, then invited the powers of the elements to imbue them. The pattern branched, an exponential expansion that formed the ciphers that comprised Athera and its intricate, teeming web of life. The construct grew in beauty and complexity, a microcosm reflection of geometry and line whose meaning could be read through the analysis of proportion and numbers. Against the loomed light that reflected the world's tapestry, Sethvir tapped the expanded awareness of the earth link and Named the individuals who now lived, whose myriad choices and acts wove the disparate threads of existence into the etheric links which tied destiny.

  Here shone the glimmering arc of possibility, last remnant of Paravian influence; there, laid over the phosphor imprint of a reef in the tropics, the searing, pinpoint tangle of light that was Arithon's fleet in search of the vanished old races. The strands shimmered and settled their display, their tight-woven patterns a formed footprint of the world's landmasses. Their nexuses crossed, convoluted, and burned, complex as the life force which quickened the web of creation. Nor was that analog display all brilliance and straightforward movement: at Rockfell, still Nameless, Desh-thiere's wraiths brooded, their intent unknowable except by the impact recorded on passing events. Then, at Avenor, the ugly new threat: the sinister gap torn by the dragon-skull ward.

  Sethvir cleared his throat. Into that ranging hole into nothing, he pronounced the Names of Lysaer's inner cabal. Earth-sense had shown who had entered that chamber in secret, and reconfirmed those who had left. As the Sorcerer's designation seeded each individual's imprint, the unraveled pattern regained a spectral suggestion of movement. Bright ripples shot length and breadth through the tapestry as root cause became linked to effect.

  'Proceed,' Sethvir requested the poised forces of the elements standing in stilled attendance. 'Show us the progression of the future.'

  A shock like unseen lightning ghost-rippled over the senses. Traithe's raven ruffled black feathers and croaked, while Asandir gripped his wrists with taut hands, raked by a frisson of chill. All eyes trained on the configured strands, Sethvir to every outward appearance immersed in the throes of a daydream. To those who knew him, that inattentive, soft gaze was sure mark of his rapt concentration.

  The energized pattern shifted balance and flowed forward, reflecting the fixed path of augury.

  From the unseen heart of Lysaer's inner circle, decisions churned vortices into hard lines which arced outward into causation. Where they crossed the world's spread design, they touched off cascading change. The strands mapped each sequence, and exposed how the cabal's conspiracy would deflect the analog course of world destiny.

  'Galleys, how ingenious,' Luhaine noted, his musing spiked irony as he perused the shifts in power and trade that flowed inland from the seacoast. 'Those vessels with chained slaves will carry state dispatches, but only within Tysan. The ones sent abroad into foreign waters will have sunwheel guardsmen on the benches.' Those, entangled in branches of ramification, would extend a far-reaching net of eyes and ears to the distant ports of the Cildein. 'That's damnable.' A mouse would not raid a state larder in Melhalla, that Avenor would not hear of the shortfall. 'Arithon's line of supply for his fleet will be made increasingly difficult.'

  'He's up to the challenge, for the moment, anyway,' Sethvir observed, as contraband from clan raids moved by roundabout routes and found their way through Fiark's ledgers, to be doucely redistributed on trade runs made by Feylind's brig, Evenstar.

  Against the burgeoning bounty of harvest, a concentrated stir of activity at Alestron recorded the return of the duke's state galley. Among the signature energies presented to Bransian s'Brydion were his two brothers, Mearn and Parrien, the master shipwright, Cattrick, and a blind old splicer whose evil tongue reveled in gossip. After them came others whose faces in wax effigy had been sunk in the Westlands' dark waves. Yet the thread of their destiny was not unsnagged; a faint tie of cognizance still remained, strung to the null void at Avenor.

  'Lysaer knows that those shipwrights survived.' Sethvir strung his hands through his tangled white hair. 'If I had to guess, I'd say he'll bide his time to spring the trap and expose them.'

  And yet, no war happened. The insidious calm settled into a peace that saw Tysan's merchants recoup their losses. The high council at Avenor maintained the marked change in policy that acceded to all trade demands. No new recruits were levied to replace the Etarran companies. Armed patrols were maintained to safeguard the roads, and to arrest the mage-talented identified by Lysaer's Crown Examiner. A star of white brilliance amid a couched web of guildsmen and fawning, affluent courtiers, the prince who made claim as Ath's chosen avatar stayed suspiciously content to husband the fruits of his kingdom. His charm felled the reserve of the ranking ladies at the celebration feast that honored the conception of his heir, while his young bride looked wan in spangled brocade. Her low spirits and quiet were naturally attributed to the stresses of a first pregnancy. No one took pause as the princess retired early, attended by a train of handmaids who came from cities far distant from Erdane.

  'She isn't done fighting yet.' Traithe raised a hand to quell the raven, who perched, rapt and restless, at his shoulder. 'Nor can her staunch spirit win aught but grief for an outcome.'

  The strands tracked that relentless, small tragedy as the slight, sullen spark of Lady Ellaine's imprint flickered and faded, then resurged as the passing months brought her confinement.

  Her son's birth in spring, then sharp confrontation as Gace Steward's block on her efforts to rule the royal household flushed brightened lines over the more shadowy influence of Raiett Raven's collaboration at court. While Lysaer played the role of indulgent regent, and merchant traders fattened to complacency, his new master statesman engineered politics with the stealth of a man laying bird snares. South Tysan had borne witness to the terrors of sorcery. That impetus
became rooted doctrine. A groundswell of distrust was nurtured into tinderbox unease that one spark might ignite into mass conflagration.

  A man to be feared, and closely watched,' Sethvir said of Raiett Raven, while the strained silence deepened with shared foreboding. Asandir had no words, chin set on his fist, and a glint in gray eyes like the filings sheared off smelted steel.

  The strands burned out the inexorable course of the future, each sequential pattern more grim than the last as Avenor's Lord Examiner was invited abroad by a contingent of eastshore mayors. In the city of Ship's Port, a herbalist burned, the first healer arraigned for malpractice of sorcery inside Melhalla's borders. Sethvir stuffed his knuckles into his beard, heartsick as the old fear and prejudice embraced an inexorable course of violence. The odd contrast widened between the trade guilds' building prosperity and the deeper current of unease underlying Tysan's burgeoning coffers.

  'Such dichotomy troubles me,' Luhaine observed, as Lysaer's congenial pandering levered that state of imbalance still wider. 'I sense a designed effort to foster a false sense of security. Imagine the reaction if events should arise to threaten such hoarded wealth. The s'Ilessid gift of farsight might cause Lysaer to aspire toward that end.'

  Asandir looked up, bleak, and tapped a strong finger on the ominous tendril of connection that persistently dogged Cattrick's new life at Alestron. 'The s'Brydion should pay heed. They remain the most likely target to be used as an Alliance catalyst.'

  The subtle dance of the strands unveiled the tortuous implications underlying Lysaer s'Ilessid's long-range strategy: years that stitched a congealed course of change, from the obvious intentions of ceremonial delegations sent to Etarra to establish a standing war host, to the more insidious, shadowy rage of a mob, incited to throw stones at the walls of a sanctuary where Ath's adepts had lived in gentle seclusion for over four thousand years.

  'At least Asandir's intervention in Caithwood will spare the forests,' Traithe pointed out to relieve the unremitting grim forecast. Indeed, no town interests inclined toward extreme measures to expunge age-old enmities. A guarded clan presence held out in Taerlin. Eastward, in Rathain, the survivors of Tal Quorin kept one wily step ahead of the Etarran headhunters. Jieret Redbeard looked likely to become the first steward of Rathain to raise sons and daughters to maturity after six less fortunate generations.