TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

  Only Lirenda's supporter clung to her staunch disbelief. 'Show us proof.'

  Selidie said nothing, but shifted the blankets. The hidden object in her clasped hands proved to be the Great Waystone, raised from its cradle and wrapping. Its focal matrix already blazed with the actualized forces of tuned power none held the hard-core experience to tap, except the former Prime Matriarch.

  'Save us all!' cried one senior above the gasped murmurs of her peers. 'How has this miracle come to pass?'

  The succession was fact. First-level novice to ninth-rank initiation, Selidie had survived and assumed the high office of Koriani Matriarch. Through her ran the knowledge and memories of every one of her predecessors, preserved to be accessed at need.

  Though the precedence solved a desperate quandary, the circumstances raised dire questions which no voice among them dared ask. No senior alive had ever borne witness to a successful transfer of prime power. Morriel had been by lengths the oldest sister in the order, and the nature of such mysteries had remained her most guarded secret. Nor was her heir inclined to waste words explaining her mercuric rise to supreme authority.

  'The conspiracy against Rathain's prince is still in play inside Jaelot. As we speak, Lirenda has taken charge and ventured into the streets. She's presently laying the final trap to take Arithon s'Ffalenn as our captive.' Her eyes as impenetrable as turquoise enamel, Selidie surveyed the circle of twelve left at her immediate disposal. 'I would know if her trial meets with success. Afterward, the rest of the order must be told of the change in our chain of command.'

  'Your will, Matriarch.' The old seeress was first to open the circle and give due obeisance, as Selidie Prime stepped inside.

  Winter Solstice Twilight 5670

  Trap

  Light snow changed to sleet as the afternoon waned. Glaze ice rimed the cobbles and pebbled the scalloped slate of Jaelot's gabled rooftrees. Inside town walls, the mansions of the rich quarter rose to high peaks that notched the wan sky like knifed pewter. The shadowed, closed shops and the steep slopes of back byways had emptied of citizens since a curfew enforced by the mayor's sealed writ called a halt to workaday commerce.

  Set under enforced peace, the city was not calm, nor settled into complacency. The morning's raw turmoil had merely reshaped into a distressed and brooding expectation. Dogs barked in the lanes and the courtyards, upset by the shouting of officers. The ongoing hue and cry showed no sign of letup as compulsory searches were conducted house to house, with small regard for nuisance or propriety. The occasional ripe language of overstressed landlords stewed through lidded quiet, scored by the clang of the destriers' hooves as squads of lancers swept through the cleared streets.

  Arithon and Fionn Areth began their harried passage to the walls in that ice-burnished climate of danger. Their presence, the only furtive shadows, crunching prints through the courtyard trellises. The windows of the mansions were tight shut and barred. No welcoming glow from interior candles leaked through to save two hunted fugitives from chance missteps. Yet the Master of Shadow showed no hesitation in the deepening twilight. He found his way through the blackest covered archway by touch. The chained mastiffs, he soothed with his bard's gifted voice; where needed, he used masking shadow to blend their presence with their surroundings. The pair moved, swift and silent, their survival dependent on the stark simplicity of logic: that the mayor's guards would sweep last through the private gardens of the rich, who relied on fierce dogs or kept hired men-at-arms for security.

  There were no forgiving havens to recoup from mistakes, no kindly benefactors who owned the rare grace of the lady's understanding. This was Jaelot's rich quarter, where grudges and distrust had inbred for generations, fermented to an ingrained intolerance. No blueblood family had forgotten the injury of Halliron's long-ago satire. Hounded by the sword, and by Morriel Prime's contorted conspiracy to dismantle the Fellowship's compact, Arithon and Fionn Areth eased through the wrought-iron gate of yet another sprawling mansion. The sleet fell straight down in the windless air, tapping an incessant, white noise tattoo. Against gathering gloom, the evergreen yew wore its red berries like pert buttons on mantles of spangles and frost.

  Despite every care, there were mishaps.

  As Arithon gently eased up the stiff latch, a flock of gray-and-black chickadees took wing and scattered, cheeping their strident alarm. Four pigeons exploded from the eaves of a carriage shed, all but flying in the faces of the mounted troop who jingled past at a vigilant trot.

  The sergeant in charge raised his mailed fist and drew rein, his inquiry ringing against the main street fagade, with its bow windows and pillars, crowned with black ivy and carved cherubs. A grumbling lancer dismounted under orders to investigate the private inner courtyard.

  Arithon snatched the only available shelter, pressed against the dank stone of an ornamental archway set into the mortised wall as a lover's niche. Fionn Areth flattened beside him. For an interval of stopped breath, the pair froze into agonized stillness, while the rider thrashed snow-clad topiary and poked his sword through a winter-stripped arbor twined over with the knotted briar of climbing roses. The stab-and-slash assault of the garden continued, to the accompaniment of swearing, until the man reached the dwarf pear trees planted in rows along the west side of the house. The warmed slates on the roof shed droplets of melt off the gingerbread lip of the eaves. Constant runoff splashed the man's neck and shoulders. The small icicles he snapped off the branches in his blundering inflamed him to bursts of ripe language.

  'No rats lurking here. Whole rotten business is useless as trying to milk the damned tits on a boar.'

  The red-faced sergeant still astride in the avenue called back his nasal disagreement. 'Pigeons don't fly from their roosts for no reason.'

  Sword steel screeled through stripped branches as the guardsman jabbed several more haphazard thrusts into a cranny, then peered behind a stone bench carved from the tails of two spouting dolphins. 'Since when does a scared pigeon's brain count for more than two-legged good sense?'

  'Where a Sorcerer's concerned, good sense won't cut bait.' The sergeant tugged the curb on his restive charger, as fed up with the hours of extended patrol, but committed to the letter of duty. 'A wetting's going to hurt a lot less than docked pay if that sniping little criminal isn't found.'

  The lancer sidestepped the brick rim of an herb bed, grumbling ill-natured obscenities. Another six steps would carry his search as far as the niche in the archway.

  Fionn Areth shrank with stopped breath, his fist welded onto his sword grip. The odds were worse than unfavorable. If the first guard could be dropped by a swift, surprise lunge, Arithon did not carry enough throwing knives to fell the eight lancers still held in reserve. The mortared stone that presently shielded their backs would become a dead-end culvert to trap them. Steered on by fright, Fionn Areth began the inevitable last move, to ease his steel free of the scabbard.

  Arithon's fingers clamped his wrist with bruising force. The curt toss of his head gave the emphatic command to watch and endure in steeled patience.

  Caught short of brash panic, Fionn Areth surveyed the oncoming threat with fresh outlook.

  The lancer advanced, oddly sidetracked by a gardener's handcart rimed with ice-crusted tools that had not been there a moment ago. At least, Fionn Areth did not recall avoiding the rakes and the outthrust, rusted mattock when he had traversed the same pathway. Nor were his footprints, or Arithon's, still visible, though the sleet fell too thinly to have masked their fresh tracks.

  Cold fear threshed through Fionn Areth all over again, that an illusion wrought out of shadow could beguile sound eyesight with such consummate ease.

  The lancer bypassed the apparent obstacle, none the wiser for the fact that he was the victim of sorcery. He stamped, crackling, through the browned stalks of last summer's flowering annuals. At next step, for no logical reason, he tripped and measured his length. The incised clay pot that had raked his shin bloody should have been too obvious to o
verlook, the blare of exposed terracotta a red flag on a walkway dusted dull gray in the falling winter twilight.

  'Sithaer's coupling fiends!' Propped up on one fist, the downed man spat ice from his mustache, then winced and sucked his breath through locked teeth. 'I've turned my damnfool ankle.'

  'Well, limp on it!' the mounted officer snapped. Although he could not see what had passed, he had small patience left for delays created by bumbling incompetence. 'We aren't going to have orders to stop searching courtyards until the mayor's convinced that shapechanging Sorcerer can't be found.'

  The guard reached his feet, stumbled, then gimped purposefully onward, his mind distracted by pain. He swept the shallow archway with a cursory glance. Nothing suspicious caught his eye: apparently he discerned no more than blank gloom and shadowy, dank stone strung with runners of sun-starved ivy.

  'Nobody here,' he concluded to his sergeant in disgust. Spurs jinked in staggered, uneven rhythm as he hobbled back through the street gate. 'I'll stake beer against hog wind, we don't find a damned thing.' He slapped the thin rime of snow from his saddle and scrambled awkwardly astride, his carping folded into the crack of departing hooves as his party retreated down the lane. 'Next time, someone else can grunt on foot, beating Ath-forsaken flower beds for criminals.'

  Fionn Areth relapsed into shivering reaction. His clasp slipped, nerveless, from the wrapped grip of his sword. He tipped his head back to rest against icy masonry while the pounding fear drained out of him. Spared yet again by the veiling gift of the Shadow Master's trained talent, he tasted sharp guilt through his rush of relief. If in plain fact he was still safe and breathing, he must not lose sight of his true purpose by feeling beholden to the dishonest tricks of a Sorcerer.

  'Not much farther,' said Arithon, every nuance of his bardic skill pitched to offer encouragement.

  Fionn Areth shot him a loaded glance of resentment. His ongoing need for healing and protection left him vulnerable and self-betrayed. All the bright, shining dreams, all the fierce expectation that had ridden on the promise of his birth prophecy had become irremediably spoiled by discovery his fate was eclipsed by another man's weightier destiny. He could not accept the hand offered in friendliness. Not without feeling the sting of his worthlessness. What was he to become, if not a used pawn in the byplay to capture the Shadow Master?

  Even as he moved through the gathering nightfall on the heels of his living nemesis, he swore afresh to reclaim his plundered identity. He would wait for his chance, then draw reckless steel and end the life that entangled his own in dark partnership.

  If Arithon was aware of the blind hatred that stalked him, he displayed no sign of caring. His step on the sleet-dusted path stayed assured; his manner alert as a man who walked softly through enemy territory. The long, plain mantle veiled him down to his boot cuffs. His low hood shaded the distinctive angles of his features into disingenuous anonymity. Felted in gloom as he picked his way across the ice-locked beds of dead flowers, he was dangerous for the fact that his understated presence suggested nothing out of the ordinary. No sign or fell portent marked him out as the Master Sorcerer who had thrice brought wholesale ruin to Lysaer's valiant war hosts.

  Presented that face of vulnerable humanity, his black arts and fell deeds could become deceptively easy to excuse and forget.

  Fionn Areth moved, unforgiving, at Arithon's heels through the glazed tufts of dead chrysanthemums that rimmed the far wall of the garden. Failing light scribed the cover of ivy in jagged ink, snow-pocketed silver in the crannies. The Master of Shadow paused, ever watchful, as he explored the overgrown masonry with his fingers. In the street, a dog bayed. Horses clopped past to a jangle of mail, and a muffled whoop of male laughter. The troops that scoured the streets in massed force showed no sign of letup by nightfall. The oddity persisted, that in switched-back flight through the terraced maze of courtyards, the fugitives had encountered no sign of further Koriani pursuit.

  Arithon answered Fionn Areth's concerned thought. 'They haven't lost interest.' His hands, still busy, dug under the ivy, apparently disappointed in the object of his quick search. 'No help for us; we'll have to go over.' The Shadow Master dried his reddened, wet hands and restored them to the warmth of his gloves. "The hidden door's rusted shut. Evidently grandfather Tawis didn't bother to pass down his penchant for smuggling.'

  Half-turned in inquiry, his face a pale blur against the backdrop of gathering gloom, Arithon regarded the unhappy presence of his double. 'Can you give me a leg up? I'll bear the risk if the street outside isn't empty.'

  Fionn Areth made a stirrup of his hands, set his shoulder to the vine-clad brick. The slight, athletic body he assisted up the wall owned the climbing skills of a sailhand. A scuff of leather sole on the coping, a minimal rustle of greenery, and the prince gained clear vantage of the thoroughfare below. Suspiciously quiet, the twisty, torchlit avenue bordered the north bastion, overlooked by the high black loom of the battlement.

  A pause of assessment, as Arithon weighed unease against a flat lack of viable options. He listened, strained and still. By the rustle of cloth at his back, he knew Fionn Areth wrestled the same crawling nerves. Despite his leashed patience, the Master of Shadow detected no trace of the subliminal chime of spellcraft he expected. Nor had he kept the gift of the lady's crystal through the risk of this last passage. 'Something's not right.'

  The timing seemed too fortuitous, that this most critical crossing should conveniently fall in a lag between mounted patrols.

  'You think we're expected?' Fionn Areth had to fight his strained whisper to keep his teeth from chattering outright.

  'If we are, more delay will just work against us.' Arithon's etched word of decision floated down. 'I can mask us with shadow, provided we're quick. The pine brands in the sconces can be made to go out, but that's best done with finesse to look natural.'

  Yet the night was dead windless. The sleet pattered down perpendicular, undeflected by so much as an eddying draft. Whatever sleight-of-hand sorcery Arithon concocted, the air would not serve him as ally. The best he could do under adverse conditions was hope the shadow-doused torches would be taken as an act of neglect by the lampsman who made rounds at nightfall.

  'Still clear,' Arithon said. 'If we step into a trap, we'll make an ally of havoc. I hope you'll be sporting and help improvise.' Although every instinct jangled in mute warning, he extended his arm to the Araethurian herder who peered up from the gloom-shrouded garden.

  Fionn Areth grasped the proffered wrist, felt his flesh clasped in turn by fingers that were firm and too humanly chilled. One wrenching heave drew him up mortised stone to a precarious shared perch on the wall enclosing the rich merchant's courtyard.

  Near at hand, all was stilled. The hissed backdrop of sleet served as a lens to magnify the distant shouts of a matron, objecting to searchers invading an attic that no doubt held someone's stashed contraband. The echoes of discord bounced off the faqade of Jaelot's high battlements, threaded through by a neighbor's crying infant.

  'Now or never,' said Arithon, fired to unlikely humor. 'If the spitting mayhem concerns Dame Carrigan's loft, her shrieking will provide us as good a diversion as any.' He cast his leg over, then lowered himself from hooked fingers. 'The old woman keeps a still, and sells watered-down gin,' he cast back, his amused explanation accompanied by a brief rustle of ivy as he released and set down in the street. "The town guard was bought off to leave her in peace. That's why she's busy maligning their mothers back to the sixth generation.'

  'You knew her?' Fionn Areth dropped down alongside to a faint scrape of steel as his quillon clashed with a cloak button.

  'No.' Arithon darted a swift glance right and left. 'But Dakar used to swill her rotgut spirits. That made him her bosom confidant. Come on.'

  The pair sprinted across the narrow thoroughfare. Ahead, the rise of an octagonal battlement loomed against the gray screen of precipitation. A scant twenty paces distant, the arched portal at the base that housed the st
rapped postern which smugglers' bribes kept unlocked. If a garrison archer lurked in the corniced embrasure overhead, the fugitives could but pray the doused torches would impair the visibility required to snap off an accurate shot. Freedom nearly within reach, neither man dared rely on fool's luck, that the lag in patrols had extended too long to be trustworthy.

  The moment held all of their desperate commitment, and no last-ditch avenue of escape when the Koriani snare overtook them.

  The resonance of the spellcraft unfurled out of nowhere, inaudible to mortal hearing. A masterbard's extreme sensitivity sensed the vibration through skin and bone. Given split-second warning, but no time to act, Arithon slammed to a stop.

  Fionn Areth skidded into his shoulder, his puzzled exclamation bitten off short as an explosive flare of light razed the gloom from the street. The fagades of the mansions, stone battlement, and curtain wall vanished into an eye-searing glare and the whiteout dazzle of snowfall.

  'Stand fast,' commanded a female voice. 'If you move, you'll find yourselves helpless, struck down by a seal of paralysis.'

  The noose of flung spellcraft flickered and dimmed, leaving the fired runes of a circle of ward that held the look-alike fugitives surrounded. The hazed glare thrown off those hot lines of force unveiled the enchantress who had lurked under masking seals of illusion until her chosen moment of ambush. Her exquisite beauty was jet and fine ivory, a frost maiden's majesty cloaked in the amethyst purple worn by the Koriani Order. Cut sable against the moonstone silk lining of her hood, her pinned coils of hair crowned a carriage of aristocratic refinement.

  'I know you!' Fionn Areth exclaimed. Betrayal rang through as cruel revelation unstrung the last, lingering thread of denial. 'You promised a sword in exchange for my trust.' He rammed forward, obstructed by the arm that Arithon raised in restraint. 'I remember your lies! You were the one who set meddling hands on my fate, long years ago in my childhood.'