TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  But Gace Steward, who missed nothing, expected a fast courier would ride the north road before midnight. The impact of that evening's masterful play of statecraft would make itself felt far and wide.

  Among the first to detect the fresh currents of change, an array of quartz spheres set in stands flashed to life in the stifling, close heat of a private chamber a hundred leagues distant from Avenor.

  There, Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, sat her high chair in the sisterhouse at Capewell. Reduced by age and infirmity to a bundle of thin bones wrapped in a tissue of creased flesh, her robed form was propped upright in pillows. Wax candles burned like pale pillars at both elbows. A violet silk throw bordered with bullion ribbon mantled her lap. Her strengthless hands cupped another sphere of rock crystal, aligned by her trained circle of seeresses to fine-tuned spells of scrying.

  In momentous synchronicity, the image of Avenor's disrupted state banquet danced to the sigils and seals their inveigling mastery had stitched through the stone's aligned matrix. Morriel absorbed every nuance of the scene, intent as a cat poised over a glass bowl of goldfish.

  Her colorless lips pleated into vexed wrinkles, as, in distanced miniature, Lord Eilish arose and stretched, then closed and locked the boards of the ledger which kept his account of the Alliance treasury.

  'Clever man. Clever, clever man,' she rasped on the tail of a stertorous exhale.

  Though her attendant page boys and servants knew not to respond to anything but her direct summons, the dewy, blond woman perched on the stool at her knee had yet to be curbed from such frivolous liberties. 'Do you mean Prince Lysaer?' Her fluttery gesture singled out another quartz, the end sphere of the array of eight, cradled in its silver stand, and positioned in a semicircle around the Prime Matriarch's chair. 'But his Grace has apparently abandoned his council.'

  While she spoke, the torchlit depths of the quartz showed Avenor's Prince Exalted mounting a handsome cream horse in the taciturn company of his Lord Commander.

  Morriel looked up. Her eyes sustained the drilled hardness of obsidian, opaque beside her younger colleague's innocence. 'He has left them, don't you see? Let them know absolutely their money can't buy his complaisant protection. Watch them.

  They'll stew in his absence. They'll sweat and pace themselves silly, then raise still more coin as a blandishment. Oh yes. Lysaer's read their worth and their secret fears to an exquisite, fine point of accuracy. He'll take his sweet time coming back. When he finally returns, his council and trade guilds will fall over themselves to welcome the policies they would once have argued past death to prevent.'

  The woman's youthful features stayed blank, lips parted as she awaited the binding conclusion.

  'Lysaer will have to take Sulfin Evend's council, now,' Morriel mused, finger tapping the quartz, and her eggshell brow tucked with speculation. 'He must hire talent to keep track of his enemies, if he's not to find himself continually blindsided by the doings of Fellowship Sorcerers.'

  'How can you know this?' the girl said, admiring.

  'Study the present,' the Prime Matriarch instructed in dry malice. 'The clues to unlock the future ever and always are written into the patterns of each moment.'

  The initiate furrowed her fresh brow and made a dutiful survey of the scenes logged and transmitted by the quartz spheres. Time passed, and the candles burned lower. Morriel Prime closed eyelids the webbed texture of dead leaves, her crabbed hands stilled upon the purple velvet in her lap.

  'Cast your net finer,' she suggested, unprompted.

  The young woman started. 'Yes, Matriarch.' She deepened her survey, saw a ship with furled sails rock at chilly anchorage at Tideport. She watched torches weaving through the gusty night at the crowded settlement of Watercross, where the fallen from Caithwood were bundled like cordwood in the common rooms of the inns, or sheltered under the gust-slapped canvas of the field tents. She tracked the Prince of the Light, who hastened his column of guardsmen southward, then followed the galloping outriders who raced ahead to secure them a galley passage out of Riverton inlet. She traversed a chain of dockside taverns in Orlest, and tight knots of men at the trader's wharf, where talk ran to raids and losses to the minions of darkness.

  'I see widespread fear of the Master of Shadow,' she lisped in uncertain conclusion. "The moil seems unfounded. He's far at sea, and surely no direct threat to the continent.'

  'At sea, yes.' Morriel spoke with shut eyes. 'Yet he has not withdrawn his presence or his interests. Look for connections. Cast your net finer still.'

  The girl fidgeted on her footstool, unable to find any relevance in the current view, of three trollops sharing gossip over hot chocolate in gilt cups, while a fourth one penned a letter in overdone script on the back of a secondhand parchment. Squint though she would, the initiate could make no sense of the contents. She raised a tentative hand and sketched a cipher for clarity, and watched the image shift from the prostitutes' boudoir to the taproom of a seaside tavern, where a soap merchant with fat jowls and a marten collar lost a devastating hand of cards to the nerve-wound youngest son of the clanborn Duke of Alestron.

  'Nothing fits,' she said, plaintive.

  Morriel scarcely stirred, patient as none before ever saw her. "The trouble with new servants is the tedious time teaching them who should and should not be admitted. Lirenda is here.' Eyes still closed, the Prime added, 'She will demonstrate the thread of reason your inexperience has overlooked.'

  The next instant, the latch clicked. The haughty, black-haired initiate swept in, a damp cloak on her arm, and her woolen skirts rimmed in the pale clay wicked up from the trodden-up yard of a countryside posthouse. She sank into obeisance, exuding the frost-keen scent of winter air. 'I return from Araethura with word that the child, Fionn Areth, has been made our oathsworn servant.'

  Morriel's pinched face tipped aslant in the candlelight. 'How convenient for you.' Her eyes opened, black glass flecked in spite and the false, warm reflections of flame. 'Forgive me if I don't reward you with credit until your vaunted plan brings a success.'

  Lirenda's flare of rage was adroitly masked behind a facade of decorum. 'How may I serve?'

  The Prime goaded, relentless. 'Since you've come, you can show Selidie how to draw out the connecting thread for the Shadow Master's interests on the continent. I hedge all my options these days. You'll know that already, since you've assiduously applied all your training to sorting the rumors.' A rim of worn teeth lent an edge to her smile as Morriel watched for the signs her baiting had chafed on a weakness.

  The former First Enchantress arose to full height, self-contained as a panther. She chose caution before argument. At the end of a difficult, cold-weather journey, this needling trap the Prime spun presented a mazework of pitfalls. Not least, the scrying would demand a calling rune set through the resonance of

  Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn's true Name. The ignominy burned, since a near-fatal fascination with that same prince's character had tripped her downfall from the Prime's favor. Her meddling desire for personal revenge had upset the grand construct that had formerly failed to take the wretched man captive.

  Lirenda lidded her personal bitterness under a mask of humility. Morriel herself remained a cripple since that day, confined to the Capewell sisterhouse in the months that followed her collapse. Through her tedious convalescence, the most gifted of her healers yet failed to restore her lower limbs. While concern began to be fretted in whispers, that the Prime might never recover her lost strength and walk, Morriel herself was not sanguine. Burdened with the need for additional servants, and pinned between bedridden ennui, or the jostling discomfort of a sedan chair, her eggshell-frail bones and translucent flesh contained the irascible fury of a volcano denied any vent for eruption.

  Over that whelming maelstrom of infirmity, the frustration of balked will and spent hope, amid the perilous turn just taken by Tysan's curse-driven politics, the Prime Matriarch still ruled her domain like honed diamond. Nor did she allow fraility t
o loosen her grasp upon current events.

  Lirenda knew better than to misjudge the request as a petty bid for vindication. She stepped forward and accepted the ice weight of the quartz from her Prime, set on notice by the play of cruel ironies that her character stood on trial yet again. She must perform this small office without flaw, or be judged inadequate to win back her lost rank as the Koriani prime successor.

  She dared not vent her towering rage, that her competency was being used to tutor the green candidate set up as her replacement. One deep breath, two; she reestablished her calm. Any work done in concert with quartz required absolute emotional control. Lirenda assessed the sphere held in hand, its directive the tuned key for the array of eight ranged in their stands about Morriel's chair. One of the Prime's unobtrusive servants brought her a claw-footed stool.

  She sat. Travel-stained clothing could not dim the innate poise of her breeding; she might as well have been offered a throne. The eyes she fixed on the young, blond initiate were antique amber, notched with pupils like primordial night. 'One begins with the rune of relationship,' she explained, her tone detached as struck bronze. 'Such power draws the lane forces into alignment, that one quartz sphere will resonate with the next, letting a live current pass between them.'

  Her hand traced the symbol over the crystal, each cross stroke and upright inscribed in etched ribbons of light. 'Bind the energy into unity with the sigil that demarks the joined circle.'

  'The rune seal for holding?' the initiate asked, her diffidence emphasized by an affected flounce.

  Lirenda's smile turned graven. 'Then you've learned the twenty-eight primary seals? Very good.' Her polished encouragement showed none of her contempt, that an enchantress chosen for Morriel's training should have mastered such basics beforetime. 'Do you know the next step?'

  The woman pinched a peony lip between her even, pearl teeth. 'The circle is empty?'

  'Yes.' Lirenda stifled an exasperated sigh. 'Every spell needs a vector, an energy, to lend it purpose and direction. In this case, your Prime requests linkages to the affairs of the Master of Shadow. Therefore, the tie must begin with knowledge of the subject's true Name.' Lirenda cupped the master sphere, stared into its depths, and inwardly sealed herself into a calm that admitted no chink for distraction. She could feel the eyes of the Prime upon her like hot probes, testing, observing, awaiting a reaction that might expose any lingering canker of weakness.

  But Lirenda had long since shielded her vulnerable core against Arithon's beguiling attraction. Venomed hatred remained. She would see the last scion of s'Ffalenn struck dead before she allowed his compassionate potential to awaken the seed of her dormant passion. Disciplined to perfection, she spoke the invocation to call and to bind. Over that matrix, she added the sigil of self-mastery, then into that waiting vessel of containment, the shaped memory of an unmistakable male face. Three times, she called the name of Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn.

  The quartz sphere absorbed her building intent. Its matrix took fire and responded, amplifying the tuned alignment of gifted talent and aimed thought. Lirenda sensed the impacting force of that presence storm her unassailable calm. Prepared, she held firm. Trained will locked her mind into permafrost clarity, until an unexpected influx of outside force wrenched her alignment off course. A sweet, sustained note pierced through, then a chord that melted all armor. The opening measure swelled into an intimate play of glad sound that beguiled beyond will to deny.

  Lirenda lost grip on her construct of ciphers. The unbearable purity of a melody she had most diligently expunged out of memory burst through and flanked her shield of defenses.

  The quartz in her hand pealed back in kind, and magnified that clear cry of rapture into joy that burst all restraint. Then the wrought spiral of harmony raised raw desire, and whirled her off center into trance . . .

  * * *

  Sucked down, and down again into a well of absolute darkness charged with delights and addictive possibility, Lirenda cried out in furious protest. Her denial just raised a more clamorous, inward betrayal.

  The whispered male presence of the musician gave her back his lilting, unbridled laughter. 'But lady enchantress, surely in this case you made the first effort to call me?'

  Dragged into a vista of dreaming vision, Lirenda beheld a starlit night where the winds blew mild and warm. Far beyond the winter's fast grip, a ship's masts with its spiderwork of running lines and tarred rigging sliced the sky into graceful geometries. Nor was the vessel's quarterdeck unoccupied.

  Framed against the sturdy, spooled taffrail, and jeweled constellations skewed at unfamiliar angles by an extreme change of latitude, she confronted the brigantine's helmsman: none else but the slim, dark-haired bard whose mastery had loomed the exquisite snare that entrapped her.

  The angular, stamped features of s'Ffalenn royalty were unmistakable, cast now into a patent, amused inquiry that tipped up one corner of Arithon's mouth. Across the friable trance which suspended her, his presence ignited her confusion, fed and fueled by a whirlwind of formless emotion.

  Lirenda fought to resist the influx of detail that split second of contact engraved on her inner awareness: the fine grace of his carriage offset by commonplace clothing, and the jet strands of hair fallen loose from their tie to tangle and wisp at his temples. If the events of the summer had harrowed his health, in seafaring solitude, Prince Arithon had won back a carefree, if temporary, freedom. His dark breeches were buttoned with engraved silver studs, and his strong, arched feet were bare. His plain linen shirt was a soft, unbleached ivory, and the loose, doeskin laces with their beaded pearl ends were flicked and teased by the winds. The agile fingers which had danced those honeyed measures on fret and string were wound now on the spokes of a ship's wheel.

  Apparently he had sensed her intrusion before her shocked moment of recognition. His sharpened gaze was not fixed anymore on the stars or the compass he steered by.

  Nor was his face entirely invulnerable, caught as he was in the listening intensity of sounding her presence in return. She received the impression of eyes that were haunted and deep, and disturbingly focused until he captured her individual identity; not by sight, but by some unseen resonance of intuition kept entrained by his prodigious talent.

  'Ah, Lirenda.' His voice made disturbing music of her name, while his expression showed dry irony, and his lips widened into the faintest, curved smile of mockery. 'You've reconnected with the gift I left in your quartz crystal, I see.'

  Formless in fury, imprisoned in the flux of an involuntary scrying, Lirenda reacted before thought. 'This should not be possible!'

  Arithon's eyebrows arose. 'No?' He brightened. 'Shall we use the occasion to indulge in a philosophical argument on the principles of magecraft? The result might leave you wiser, if no less enlightened.'

  She disdained to answer.

  'Your thinking is crippled by limitations, dear lady, not to mention your beliefs.' A pause, jammed by the stone-walled strength of her obstinacy. 'What, no riposte in dry wit? No unhappy jabs at the cuticle? Enchantress, you wouldn't prefer having me speak for us both?'

  Head tilted sidewards, the free wind in his hair, he delighted in choosing the words for her anyhow, teasing and blithe as a swallow. 'Well for argument's sake, let's say you'd affirm the crystal carries a vibration. If fire's your base element, you would understand that water stands as the placeholder for emotion. Is your foot tapping yet? It would be, you know, as you moved on to insist the salt contained in the ocean must obey its coarse nature and negate every trace of transmission.'

  A toy to his whim, Lirenda returned nothing. The dream held her fast, while the stars rocked to the gentle roll of a ship's hull. The hand that had recently known trials and illness held her course with relaxed and infuriating competence.

  'Then perhaps you need clues to unravel the riddle?' Arithon grinned in provocation. 'Very well. I'll be generous. The sound I created was vibration also, if pitched for the octaves inside the range of hearing. The seed
for my music is carried by air, the primal element of inspiration. Dear lady, wind wanders where it will. It knows no boundary, nor heeds human law, nor answers to the earth-grounding virtues of salt.'

  '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!'