Grand Conspiracy

  ‘I reject your rank meddling,’ Lirenda hissed back, slapped by the truth that he had just volunteered the keys to reclaim her self-control. ‘One day you’ll know sorrow. My hand will break you. I promise you then, no schoolboyish prank played on learned theory will spare your insolent autonomy.’

  A gust heeled the brigantine’s deck. Arithon glanced at a star to ascertain his heading, then spun his wheel two points to starboard to compensate. His green eyes lit then, alive to his shrug of apology. ‘No originality there. You’ll be one of a very large crowd falling over themselves to claim the first blood at my capture.’ He ended his byplay in corrosive apology. ‘There’s a curious reverse. I always thought you the type to rule the pack rather than follow.’

  ‘Demon!’ she gasped, riled into unwitting defense by his slicing truth of perception.

  Shamed to have yielded that morsel of insight, she rallied her scattered self-command and framed the sigil of negation. Once she set the dark seal to command air, the shock of forced severance tumbled her back into vertigo. While she raged in the threadbare shreds of her dignity, her naked mind rang with the contrary echoes of his laughter …

  The rinse of white static released her hobbled faculties and gave back the closed heat of the Prime Matriarch’s chamber. Lirenda shuddered through the moment of transition, whiplashed back to cognizant thought by the rasp of Morriel’s reprimand.

  ‘… must be a lackwit, girl! Haven’t I told you time and again? Keep that spell crystal doused in black silk!’

  A snuffling stir of movement, as the young initiate returned a dutifully weepy nod. She fumbled for the remedy bag hung from her girdle, loosened the strings, then shoved tear-drenched fingers inside.

  Morriel’s chastisement was instant. ‘Dry your hands! Never, never let salt near a crystal set into a resonant spell pattern!’

  Trembling now, the girl blotted her damp knuckles on her skirt; and Lirenda, caught aback, received the demeaning revelation that she had been led to engage the Named resonance of Arithon s’Ffalenn in the presence of her personal spell crystal. The misfortunate quartz had yet to be cleansed of the melody Arithon had imprinted to lay bare her vulnerable heart. The girl initiate had been given the task of lifting the impurity from the quartz; and though months had passed under Morriel’s direct tutelage, she had not only failed to master so simple a task, but had also neglected the basics of handling an activated focus pendant.

  The sheer magnitude of the incompetence rankled. The novice initiate Morriel had chosen to groom had raw talent without the brains of a flea. Lirenda contained her resentment, well aware that the Prime would discern far more than the young woman’s stupidity. She dared not invite the parallel comparison, that she herself had strong aptitude and skilled training, but a woeful inability to checkrein her personal feelings.

  Eyes closed, wrapped in the evanescent perfume of hot candle wax, Lirenda forced down her inner turmoil. While the girlish initiate restored the crystal to proper wrappings and retied the cords of her remedy bag, the older enchantress slowed the sped beat of her heart. She doused heated nerves and noosed the wild, wakened spate of her anger back into settled calm, then rebalanced the sigils which fused the burst web of the quartz scrying. Left to mark time, she bent her will back to the master sphere in her hand.

  Where the sigils of command already in place should have revealed Arithon’s image, the crystal hung smoke dark and veiled; no surprise. The effects of sea brine alone would inhibit the virtues of quartz scrying. In addition, the man would have cloaking spells and circles of guard set about him by Dakar the Mad Prophet. Morriel Prime herself had long since established the futility of scrying for the Prince of Rathain. Yet though his immediate presence stayed obscured, his peripheral connections were less ruly. In the marginal spaces, where random event and emotion spun loose ends, the quartz could tag subtle connections to Prince Arithon as the unshielded currents of conscious activity deflected the signature vibrations of the earth’s flow of magnetic lane force.

  Linked through the darkened rock crystal in her hands, Lirenda changed focus. She searched the bloom of movement and color as vision coalesced in the depths of the slave-linked spheres on their stands.

  One showed the stripped trees of a glen in Halwythwood. Under the night’s dusting of snowfall, a cluster of clan lodge tents, guarded by a large-boned, rangy man wrapped in a bearskin mantle. By the glint of bronze hair revealed as a woman passed by with a torch, Lirenda recognized the man as Jieret s’Valerient, caithdein and steward of the realm in the seafaring absence of its sanctioned crown prince. The trill of infant laughter that brought the smile to his lips would be his daughter, Jeynsa, named his heir by the Fellowship of Seven, and not yet aged one year. A steadfast adherent of the old charter law, the liegeman served as Arithon’s voice in Rathain. Like the Koriathain, Earl Jieret could do little else but wait for the day when his oathsworn sovereign chose to return.

  In a scene purloined from a fortified tower farther east, another sphere revealed the massive frame of Duke Bransian of Alestron, sprawled at ease in a chair with a hound’s muzzle propped on his knee. His war-scarred fingers stroked the dog’s ears, while a diminutive old lady with crab-apple features stabbed an ebony stick in ripe argument over his decision to appoint his state galley for a winter voyage down the south coast.

  In another, the clan chieftain who was High Earl of Alland broached a beer cask in a pine glade, while companions sharpened their knives for a cattle raid, and a runner sewed up a holed pair of leggings, his new orders to bear a message to a secret destination in the west.

  Yet another sphere reflected a high mountain in Vastmark. There a herder woman with bells tied into her tawny braids regarded the stars, and thought wistfully upon Arithon s’Ffalenn. ‘Luck ride your shoulder, wherever you are,’ she murmured in dialect, then appended the heartfelt blessing of her tribe.

  In the deserts of Sanpashir, an elder dipped a hawk feather in fresh blood and read omens in the scattered droplets. The augury received brought a spark to filmed eyes, and sent a young man to fetch darts and knives on his gruff bark of command.

  Arithon’s contacts were varied and many, Lirenda was forced to concede; in yet another sphere, three chattering whores in a Sanshevas garret sewed a marked strip of goatskin into a hem of pink silk.

  A minstrel playing a tavern in Etarra paused to converse with three dicers wearing the colors of the town guard; farther south, an innkeeper who owned a dingier dive in Ship’s Port threw silver to a galleyman, then engaged in whispered talk too faint for the crystal’s tuned matrix to capture.

  A scribe in King Eldir’s service penned a letter by the fluttering light of a candle, while elsewhere a vivacious woman in sailhand’s slops and a gaudy scarlet shirt locked horns in ribald language with a stiff-lipped customs clerk in Tideport.

  Immersed in close survey of the eclectic array, Lirenda could almost touch the intangible thread that tied each disparate player into a logical web of continuity. She sensed the flow of information and the movement of rumor. Yet whenever she grasped any piece of the puzzle and sought to find linear order, the pieces slipped, formless, through the sieve of hard cognizance. The pattern remained stubbornly elusive as water absorbed into felt.

  Lirenda released a soundless sigh, too experienced not to realize when outside forces deflected her practiced technique. Arithon had a trained spellbinder for his watchdog. The Mad Prophet had seeded invisible snares that would smother her most determined attempt to link random event with its core of revealing conclusion. She might glean the surface viewpoint of the Shadow Master’s correspondents, but never decipher their interrelated connection, nor the guarded cache of their secrets: the links that would yield the site where the brigantine Khetienn made landfall to replenish provisions.

  Lirenda shivered with starved longing to break through Dakar’s web of safeguards. How she ached to smash the flesh-and-blood source of her weakness, which had deprived her of privilege and the fruits of her ear
ned inheritance. Immersed in dire passion, she failed to notice that the Prime’s reproval of the young initiate had long since reached final closure. Nor did she hear the crone’s scratchy address, or look up, until the yawning, expectant silence intruded, and quenched her rush of hot need.

  ‘Your pardon?’ she murmured.

  A figure of shriveled ivory and wax in the faltering glow of the candles, the Prime Enchantress regarded her. Morriel’s hands were crabbed knots, tucked in smudgeless velvets, and her black eyes lightless wells of malice. ‘The sigil of summoning to trace and mark the future?’ she prompted, succinct as flung acid. ‘I bade you to finish the scrying.’

  Lirenda flushed. The request was impossible, as the Prime knew quite well. Set up to fail before a green novice, she stiffened, her heart struck to glass-edged fury, and her thoughts plunged into a quicklime stillness that the Prime’s waspish wit could not pierce. Her voice was chilled honey as she made the traditional reply. ‘Your will.’

  The sigil with its barbed runes and crossed square flowed off her scribing fingernail. Its coiled directive sank into the quartz orb like charged wire, filed to razor-edged light. The energy sank into the stone’s matrix, bit through its dimmed depths, and unfurled a riptide of backlash.

  Lirenda fell into a flowering burst of color and noise, then a sleeting gray static through which one sensation emerged to rush the blood in her veins: she felt a man’s lips on hers, and an eruption of passion to burn every nerve incandescent.

  Then Morriel’s laughter, like the scrape of dry leaves, hurled Lirenda earthward and grounded her back into shrinking humiliation.

  ‘It would appear your feelings of superiority are unjustified,’ the Prime said. While the initiate looked on in vacant confusion, she added, ‘Tell me to my face, if you dare, that I should not stake my trust in your replacement.’

  Lirenda arose. Self-contained by her desperate desire for vindication, she curtsied in defiant breach of form, that she need not behave as all others in the order, and request formal leave to depart. ‘Stake your trust where you please, until the year Fionn Areth grows to maturity. Then I will face the sure test of your reckoning. On the day I deliver Prince Arithon in chains, let any latecoming applicant for your office overmatch my fitness if she dares.’

  A pungent, breathy laugh brushed her challenge aside. ‘I do see that my years of infirmity won’t pass without entertainment. That is well. I have no intention whatsoever of biding my time in blind faith. You must prove your competence to assume the seat of my power.’ Small triumph became punishment as Morriel flicked her wrist in derisive finality. ‘You are excused.’

  While Lirenda swept out to a rustle of splashed mantles, the Prime’s fathomless eyes fixed a predator’s stare upon the untried face of her current favorite. ‘We’ve seen what we needed,’ she rasped in conclusion. ‘Those spells Dakar’s cast throw off a wide resonance. When Lysaer s’Ilessid binds loyal talent to his cause, that unsubtle touch could become a dangerous liability …’ As her musing trailed off into stillness, she realized the young woman drooped like a lily kept past its best bloom. ‘Rest now, Selidie,’ the Prime crooned, almost fondly. ‘See yourself off to bed. One of my servants will go to the kitchen to arrange for a bowl of warmed milk.’

  Winter 5654

  Althain’s Warden

  The guard spells securing the grimward in Korias were a maze framed in paradox, a blaze of wild power channeled through ciphers that bridged both sides of the veil. Entangling coils wrought through time and space framed both bulwark and bias, a weaving of consummate delicacy that layered chaos through primal order like acid burns struck through taut parchment. The barrier carved an isolate pocket between the fabric of Athera’s solidity and the dire peril contained inside. No spells in existence were more deadly; nor did the Fellowship Sorcerers command better means to stay the unbinding currents of flux energies unleashed by the dreams of dead dragons.

  The juxtaposition of hours to months always made the last crossing a feat of unparalleled danger, even for a Sorcerer whose hand had renewed the bindings that laced those same ward rings to renewed stability. Flat weary, aching in shoulders and neck from the wear of unswerving concentration, Sethvir bent his head and whispered encouragement to Asandir’s long-suffering black horse.

  The stallion flicked back an ear; responded. His stride lengthened. He bore his rider through the dusty, stale air locked in stasis within the outer perimeter. Sethvir raised a hand marked red with cinder burns and traced the final string of seals in blue fire. Power surged through him, sure as aimed lightning, the discharge drawn into an exacting harmonic balance. His labor completed, the Sorcerer sensed the shimmering currents lock shut in the windless void. He sighed his relief. The grueling task of sealing the breached grimward had reached completion at long last.

  ‘We’re done here, little brother,’ he confided to the horse.

  The black stud shook his mane, gave a ringing stamp on the white-granite paving, and wheeled. The eerie song of charged forces slipped behind as his step carried through the outermost spell of concealment.

  Waiting on the far side was the damp, winter blast of a sleeting snowfall in Korias.

  Sethvir drew in a shuddering breath. Early dusk spread a pall over the land. Around him, the low, rolling ground was patched gray and white, rocks and lichens snatched bare where the gusts whined off the weathered hillcrests.

  Bone tired as he was, for a half second the Sorcerer sat the ebony stud’s back, confused. The sting of the storm on his face, the bite of cold air on bare knuckles seemed discomforts that belonged to another man’s body. Althain’s Warden blinked as though jostled into a dream. He watched, all but mesmerized, while his breath puffed plumes in the gathering darkness.

  Then even that fragmented awareness upended. His senses whirled away in kaleidoscopic chaos as the restored torrent of the earth link hurled his mind through a cataract of impressions.

  For a brief, helpless interval he swayed in the saddle, hands locked in black mane to stay upright. Visions rinsed his mind like actinic static, a deluge of disordered, random events spiked by the odd, recognizable fragment …

  He saw a royal birth in Havish laced through the mating of whales in the china blue reaches of South Sea. In a cedar-paneled room with red curtains, Duke Bransian of Alestron read a letter penned by his brother Mearn, his iron brows bristled to irritation. Black bears in Strakewood huddled deep in hibernation. An old tree dreamed of rage, and a snarl of stalled trade sent mounted couriers splashing through a rutted ford in Camris, led on by torchlight, and given right of way by their rippling sunwheel banner. A field mouse snatched kernels of corn from a granary, and a shepherd child in Araethura complained of a deep ache in the bones of his face. Southward, where windy rain fell, a brig with a white star carved on her counter cracked out full sail on command of a fair-haired female captain …

  For one moment, two, Sethvir’s mind pinwheeled, hazed through the gauntlet of images that came on as senseless bundles of color and noise. Then the innate mastery of his gift resurged. He recaptured those uncountable, disparate threads, deftly sorted their origins, and loomed them back into one web of exacting, immaculate order.

  Moon phase and tides reset his awareness. The grounding solidity of the earth lent him roots to withstand the vast void of the sky. Then the vista of storm-ridden landscape around him regained continuity and rebalanced his position to the cardinal points of direction. Restored to his venue as Althain’s Warden, Sethvir sat with closed eyes. In one snap-frozen second, he mapped the changed patterns of harmony and discord. Another fractional instant let him touch each of his distant colleagues with the informed assurance of his return.

  Asandir stood, hip deep in a snowdrift on the Plain of Araithe, retuning a damaged stone marker that smoothed a confluence of earth’s lane force; Traithe, on the storm-beaten strands of Lithmere, was completing the final ward in the chain forbidding landfall to slave-bearing galleys. Luhaine, an arrow of liberated joy, rode
on a breeze that ranged southward out of Atainia. Kharadmon still stood on watch amid the sealed silence of the void. There, where the distant sun of Athera was reduced to a candleflame glimmer, the star wards raised against the mist-bound wraiths trapped on Marak posted a vigilant guard across arc seconds of darkness. Last, though in pain and peril, never least, Sethvir sensed the presence of Davien the Betrayer, lurking in self-imposed isolation in the caverns beneath the roots of the Mathorn Mountains.

  Of Ciladis, as ever, his earth-sense found no sign, though he combed all the planet in vain hope and sorrowful reflex. Then, the raw cold offered welcome distraction from the razor-sharp pain of old grief.

  Sethvir stirred from his stupor. Mauled by the teeth of the gusts, he closed slackened hands on the reins. The sleet seeded droplets of melt in his beard, and the horse underneath him blew a loud snort of impatience.

  ‘Brave one, I’m with you.’ He stroked the stallion’s wet crest, chilled by much more than inclement weather as he measured the days that the grimward’s torn wards had engaged him.

  Summer’s hot winds had changed guard to midwinter. Five months had elapsed since he left Althain Tower, a grievous interval, but necessary. Any overlooked weakness in the complex ring of guard spells could spin final havoc through Athera’s stability. For one crisis averted, old problems had acquired vicious new impetus. Foremost among them, Sethvir tracked repercussions from the roused trees in Caithwood, an event that had seeded a canker of strife across the Kingdom of Tysan.

  Asandir’s stopgap action had jammed travel and trade to a strident halt. Balked merchants bandied damning accusations against sorcery, while their craftsmen hoarded every coin they could squeeze for the purpose of Alliance retaliation. While goods piled up on the barge docks at Watercross, and guild tempers frayed and shortened, tales of armed men falling prey to fell sorceries fretted the towns to hysteria. Quarn’s mayor was left indisposed after five hand-wringing weeks of protestation. Valenford’s treasury had been emptied in the purging belief that Lysaer’s claimed divinity could avert the ruin of prosperity. Each passing day and each fallen victim lent Avenor’s crown examiners refreshed cause to denounce the practice of magecraft as a felony. Despite the season, small troops of sunwheel riders scoured the backcountry settlements in search of herb witches and birth-gifted makers of talismans.