TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

  Her touch firmed, then melted him, crossing the threshold that entwined self-awareness with its dense-form housing of flesh. On a breath, she was there, unshielded spirit limned in a light his mage-blindness could never see. Yet her presence enveloped him, a tide of limitless tenderness that made him ache to the bone for a partnership snatched short of the exalted fulfillment of reunion.

  His voice could not be kept separate from the tempest. Dark, minor harmonics described burning longing, until air itself lit like a brand for his sorrow.

  Elaira touched him back in shared consolation. This time, unlike Merior, her resilience was the force that bolstered his strength to refocus his mind and reclaim the dropped thread of his purpose.

  Time bent, stretched, became limpid, the anomaly sustained by the demand of high mystery, and a song that matched and held its true pitch through its shining edge of sharp temper. The spell seals rekindled, though the forge-fire forces that knit their waking were too refined for the mind to endure. Gifted the borrowed lens of Elaira's trained insight, Arithon extended his talent. He reached past the veil and recaptured the unseen, highest frequencies of electromagnetics that bound energy into form and substance. Then he downscaled that tapestry, remade its pattern in sound with a focused expectancy that, in turn, re-created the upper-range harmonics. Form followed function; the traumatized tissues stitched under the sigils had no choice but to refigure through the spelled template of regeneration.

  Fionn Areth never noticed the precise moment when the pain dissolved from his torn leg. Immersed in the fabric of Arithon's singing, he felt the ache of enforced separation; of the shimmering dichotomy of transcendent love held earthbound by a restraint that must endure, deathless, a stripped nerve of killed hope and agony.

  The flame-scarred lady who shared the performance was aware of the last sigil's closing. Sight-blind, but attuned to the low speech of stone, she sensed the descent, the slow, spiraled recontainment of forces as tonal harmonies were singly collapsed and dispersed. Although no light had impressed her maimed senses for a span that encompassed five decades, she dreamed. Her inner mind showed her, in flash-point-clear vision, a woman wearing a Koriani mantle reach out to touch her beloved's dark hair where he knelt.

  Then the insight fled, the apparition erased like a gale-blown candle. The bard's last line ended. Crippled eyesight locked down, plunging her back into the irremediable prison of darkness the fires had left her.

  Unwitnessed by any but the eyes of his double, the singer lowered his hands. His closing note quavered silent. Stillness returned to the heated, close chamber with the opacity of poured lead. All things seemed duller, the fine ivories and gold leaf somehow clogged in the spent tang of incense and the wan flutter of the single candle. The grand chords of high mystery faded and fled; the musician whose art had brought fleeting command was reduced to the framework of his humanity. The moment robbed him of trapping or title. He was no prince, no Sorcerer, no masterbard. Just a man, kneeling, burdened by a desolation of spirit no living being might lift from bowed shoulders. Fate's cruelty remained, written into his naked expression, and stamped on the forced, tired lines of his carriage.

  * * *

  For Elaira, the gradual, spiraling fall must end in the dusty, chill dimness of the vintner's shed. The transit plunged her through an ice bath of ink. Much like her past experience in Merior, her senses returned to her piecemeal. Hearing resurged first, snapped back into sharp, unpleasant immediacy by voices clashing in argument across the unseen space over her head.

  The sluggish thought followed, not funny at all, that she had likely broken Lirenda's directive not to stray from her perch on the wine tun. By logical extension, she must have overbalanced in trance and fallen prone on the floor.

  A patchwork of unhinged impressions confirmed: she lay sprawled on the fusty, damp cold of packed earth. Her left shoulder throbbed, most likely bruised in the limp tumble that resulted when she enacted her rash decision to spiritwalk. Her head ached as well, no less than she deserved for flitting out of body without making the most basic, sensible preparations.

  Lirenda was screaming in unintelligible rage. A calmer voice answered, then rose on a fractured note of distress.

  Whoever spoke for her, the protest gained nothing. The floor where the debated enchantress lay prone seemed to buckle and move with a violence that negated the staid, grounding properties of earth.

  Elaira mumbled a fishwife's curse on the fool who was trying to move her. Raked through by nausea for that thoughtless unkindness, she curled into a protective knot on her side. Eyes open, she could discern nothing as yet but the star-punched black of the void. The tormentor she reviled clamped a grip on her shoulder. Fingers bit painfully into her collarbone, shaking and worrying as though the shock of harsh handling might speed her recovery into full consciousness.

  The rage in her burned. Her crystal-bonded oath to the Koriani Order all but choked her, life and breath. Now, even now, she was not left her peace. No moment was given to cherish and sort what small memories she retained of her recent contact with Arithon. That, more than anything, tore out her heart, that she had seen and touched him outside of the veil, and could not snatch the chance to reflect and savor the bittersweet gift of the experience.

  Then the mind reconnected to outward events, and hearing regained its lost linkage to reason. Lirenda's ranting came clear as a flask dropped on ice, spewing vitriolic frustration. 'Time is the one option we don't have left! She'll wake up if it kills her, and speak what she knows. If not, you'll be more sorry than tears. Morriel Prime won't be sanguine. Dare you send our Matriarch word that we had both Fionn Areth and the Shadow Master in hand and, through inept fumbling, have lost them?'

  Elaira dragged in a breath. The effort fanned a dull ache that seeped down to the lead-weighted marrow of her bones. 'You can all stop fighting like starved dogs on a carcass. I'm awake, if about to be sick.' She shuddered. Her chilled hands broke into slick sweat as another cramp knifed through her stomach.

  'She should have peppermint tisane and a warm bed to recover from your callous mishandling,' Cadgia scolded in undaunted sympathy.

  What Elaira received instead was Lirenda's nailed finger, prodded into her exposed ribs. 'You were with him, weren't you?' Then, in whiplash interrogation she could not safely ignore by feigning fogged wits or vagueness, 'Where is Arithon s'Ffalenn?'

  Shaking, torn by a misery beyond the simple discomfort of nausea, Elaira shook her head. 'He's inside of a house. In a room with one candle.' Tears pricked her eyelids, born out of hopelessness. If only her talents could answer self-will, she raged in a desperate black wish. But she lacked the schooled strength to annihilate the disloyal, strong beat of her heart. She used words as she could to buy time, all the while enraged by the deficit: there was not enough rhetoric in the compass of human language to stall long enough to save anything. 'If there were windows, they were covered, or else masked by thick tapestries.'

  The detail cut with unmerciful, cruel force, that Elaira remembered the sweet tang of used incense and citrus, but could not recover even the subliminal texture of the black hair she had touched as the song that had called her had faded.

  'You were with him,' Lirenda persisted. The hems of her skirts slapped Elaira's turned cheek as she whirled and paced out her agitation. 'His mind and yours, they were paired. Our seeress captured the event as it happened. Deny what she saw at your peril.'

  Elaira said nothing, caught as she was between ripping cramps and the knot in her throat caused by a desperately held urge to weep.

  'How does Prince Arithon plan to leave Jaelot?' Lirenda pressed, inexorable. 'Don't pretend you can't access his intent.'

  Elaira's voice as she answered was scarcely her own. Her outright betrayal of Arithon's trust was made worse by the fact he had known, and had forgiven in advance, the inevitable surrender she must make to the demands of her order. The exigencies of her oath were not mutable, nor his status as Morriel's mortal enemy.

>   Since the agony could only be pointlessly prolonged, Elaira made the distasteful task the brutal, brief work of one sentence. 'He plans to leave by way of the wall, through a small postern gate behind the back courtyard of a merchant whose fourth-generation grandfather made his family fortune by smuggling.'

  Lirenda clasped hands to a triumphant clash of gold bracelets. 'There I will finally corner him.' Her jabbing vindication could have drawn blood as she promised, 'You'll be there, Elaira. You'll see his face when he's taken, and you'll hear his curse as he knows, for all time, that your hand denied him his freedom.'

  Winter Solstice Afternoon

  Last Rites

  High on the slopes of the Skyshiel Mountains, the circle of twelve seniors who survived the night's conjury undertook the last rites for the departed. Mourning began for the Koriani Prime Matriarch and the one seeress left dead when her crystal sphere shattered under the stresses of uncontained backlash. The burden was shouldered despite rugged terrain and the louring threat of a storm front. The gravity of the matter allowed little choice. When ranking enchantresses passed the Wheel of Fate, their remains were inevitably riddled with spellcraft. Imposed sigils and bindings of longevity were entwined with entangling ties to a personal crystal, its imprinted matrix yet entrained to the signature Name of the departed. The seals which contained those disparate energies always became breached upon death; their concentric, layered circles would gradually erode as the fading charge of the life aura slowly trickled off and dispersed.

  Worse, both elderly women had died unattended. Before their sad state was discovered by servants, the hazed phosphor of leaked spell force had winnowed and fanned through the forest. The circle of seniors had been immediately faced with the painstaking task of reeling in those questing tendrils and settling them into containment.

  Their toil had extended past the hour of noon, with exacting work still to follow. Not only were the shades of the dead not released until each tie became cut by a banishment; here, in the open, beneath unwarded sky, each damaged link in those refined chains of conjury must be ritually dispersed. If the precautions were not complete before sundown, such uncoiling forces became as a magnet for stray iyats, or else bled off on the winds of high altitude to magnify discord elsewhere.

  While the young initiate, Selidie, remained tucked in her pallet in the oblivious throes of drugged sleep, the bodies of the departed were removed from the palanquin. Warded circles were woven around the site, held and guarded by half the Senior Circle.

  The oldest women, wise with experience, implemented the requisite next steps. From inside, they burned herbs and copal in a ceremony far older than man's inhabitancy on Athera. A blood ritual regrounded the ephemeral essence to earth, and a raising of fire consumed the last, lingering threads that might hamper the spirit's passage across the veil. By Koriani custom, eight levels of cleansing were enacted before the last, which nullified the patterned resonance from personal quartz crystals recovered from the hands of the dead. In the late afternoon, meticulously thorough, the sisters wrapped the bodies in silk bound with silver cord. They placed the bundled forms upon litters and began the arduous, uphill journey to an isolate ledge past the timberline.

  There, on a windswept outcrop, the twelve Koriani joined hands in a circle and raised their thin voices against the bitter gusts and chanted the incantation of parting for each name. Throughout the hour of recitation, the palanquin's bearers cut deadfalls and cedar boughs and stacked the dry wood for two pyres.

  As the hour of solstice sundown drew nigh, thin snowfall cast a milky veil over the fir-clad valleys. The peaks overhead were lost in torn cloud, the leeside ledges chalked in glare ice and a pillowed upholstery of drifts. Young Selidie still slept. Cocooned in her blankets, she breathed without stirring.

  While the ripping blasts from the north snapped the palanquin's curtains and cracked the red-banded hems of the twelve sisters' mantles, the funeral rite proceeded without her. A gray silhouette in the premature gloom, the sixth-rank enchantress sprinkled the wrapped corpses in aromatic oil, then touched them alight with a pine torch. Sparks whirled and flew, chased through shredding rags of black smoke. The tormented flames flared and flattened. In silence, the mourners observed while the pyres were consumed, a drawn-out interval made brutal by the thin air and knifing cold.

  At due length, the last sigil of closure was sealed. The twelve seniors shivered from chill and exhaustion. The storm closed around them with shrieking, wild force, lidding the mountains into false twilight and erasing the notch of the valley as worsening snow pelted the upper slopes in stinging, horizontal fury. The hour seemed a sorry, inauspicious time to turn weary thoughts to the future.

  Yet time would not pause for the crisis that faced them.

  'We must choose who will assay the burden of prime power,' said the sixth-rank elder, helped down the slippery slope on the arm of a spryer sister. Her wise, lined eyes were pinched with strain as she voiced her doubt in trepidation. 'Morriel's long illness seeded too much dissent. An abyss of peril will yawn at our feet if any opening is claimed for debate.'

  'Who among us is qualified?' the third-rank seeress despaired. The facts in past record supported her grim outlook: forty-two hopeful candidates had failed to survive the last initiation, and they had been exhaustively trained to master the rigorous trial. 'Whoever we appoint could be facing a virtual death sentence.'

  Yet whether or not Morriel's passing had upset the chain of succession, the order could not languish, leaderless. On the sundown lane surge, the seeresses on watch at each sisterhouse would learn of the late Prime's unexpected demise.

  'Qualified or not, one of us must stand forward.' The raw-boned speaker blotted her damp nose, her weary shrug fatalistic. 'Too late to wish differently. The torch has already been passed.'

  Resettled in a hollow beneath gale-blasted firs, the enchantresses of the order's seniormost circle huddled around the thrashed flames of a campfire the servants had kindled in their absence. Faces burnished red by the terrible cold, the women pressed close for warmth and examined their critical predicament. Opinion differed over which enchantress should be named to undertake the perilous initiation.

  Beyond any question, all agreed on one point: the Prime's untried young candidate was in no way prepared. Selidie had not yet achieved second rank, nor matured her self-control to harness deep access to the focus of a small crystal pendant.

  Since no such green novice could survive the ordeal, or master command of the Waystone, the talk turned to Lirenda, who had borne the title of First Senior for decades, and who was the order's only verified eighth-rank.

  Supporters were quick to argue her case. 'Despite the misdeed which caused her to fall from favor, the terms of her penance will shortly be settled in Jaelot.'

  The crabbed, older seeress agreed. 'If Lirenda achieves Prince Arithon's captivity, we'll have proper grounds to reinstate her. Those terms were set by the late Prime herself.' She paused, while the snowfall cast a veiling pall over the firelit ring of hooded faces. 'As well, Lirenda's already mastered the Skyron aquamarine. Who else has the strength and experience to shoulder the test to subdue the Great Waystone?'

  Yet other, respected voices disagreed. 'She's the only confirmed eighth-rank we have. If she dies, too much advanced knowledge will be lost.'

  'A council of Peeresses should be called to deliberate.' The sixth-ranked senior jabbed the earth with her bone-handled walking stick, irritable from the effects of high altitude, which settled pain in her aged joints. 'The sisters at Whitehold have a seventh-rank initiate whose name isn't tarnished by disgrace.'

  'The initiate at Whitehold would be doomed on the moment she opened her mind to grapple for control of the Great Waystone.' That incisive observation arose outside the circle, from a blanket-wrapped figure, emerged without sound from the shelter of the palanquin.

  Heads turned in surprise. Selidie had listened in on their sensitive discussion, unnoticed until she spoke. The young woman had
not troubled to dress. Under the gale-whipped fringe of wool blankets, her ivory shins were naked. She walked on rosy, bare feet in the snow, supremely untroubled by the buffeting punishment dealt by the winter elements. Her pale hair blew also, tangled and loose, flung by the howling, ice-barbed gusts across the cream skin of her features.

  'Sister, are you daft?' The kindly old seeress offered her mantle in genuine consternation. 'Put on warm clothes before you catch cold or blacken your toes with frostbite!'

  The sixth-rank senior, less tolerant, added, 'What gives you the right to criticize your betters? Morriel has died with your training incomplete. Every one of us here outranks you.'

  'Morriel has died,' the young woman agreed. She paid no heed to rebuke, but came on, arms cradled around something bulky clutched under the folded blankets. She stood with raised chin and bright-eyed defiance just outside the perimeter of the circle. 'And I beg to differ. I outrank you all. The late Prime named me her successor.'

  'What! You? Assume the Prime's powers?' The sixth-rank enchantress all but laughed, her finger stabbing in censure. 'The very idea is preposterous! Just yesterday, you scarcely managed to imprint a basic spell template in a cleared quartz!'

  'Be silent!' Selidie snapped a second phrase in guttural, harsh syllables, then invoked the prime sigil of command.

  The elderly senior fell quiet by force, compelled beyond will by the bindings laid down with her oath of initiation. Her pale face, and her gasping, choked fear lent the shocking declaration of rank a thread of convincing evidence.

  'Further, I've had contact with Cadgia in Jaelot.' Selidie measured the Senior Circle's sudden, wary reserve, her lips turned in a settled, acidic smile too worldly for her unmarked features. 'You need not look stupefied. The wards guarding the city from outside prying by the Fellowship in fact remain sealed at full strength.'

  Which implied she had scried through that barrier by wielding full command of the Prime's ciphers of prerogative.