TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  'Dakar?'

  The pull of that call sent vibrations coursing outward through the drawn span of the circle. An image bloomed over the wood like spilled oil, then transformed into cohesive contact. The Sorcerer gazed through that window across distance and beheld the tight confines of the Khetienn's stern cabin.

  There, the Mad Prophet hunched in despair on a berth. His moon face was pressed between his cramped fingers, and his screwed-up hair dripping sweat.

  'Damn those blighted, warmongering weasels to the ugliest pit of oblivion!' Through muffling fingers, Dakar's next imprecations changed target. 'And may Dharkaron's Black Horses piss on the obtuse doings of mages! You demented, miserable dreamer! Get your dighty nit-picking nose out of your books and lend me some help when I need it!'

  'I'm already here,' Althain's Warden announced with acerbic clarity.

  'Sethvir?' Dakar straightened, flushed with disbelieving, wild hope. 'Thank Ath! Have you seen the disaster Parrien and Mearn s'Brydion have stirred up with Cattrick at Avenor?'

  'Nit-picking?' Sharpened to a forbidding attentiveness, Sethvir added, 'Dighty?'

  He did not withdraw, though his tart remonstrances raised no sign of embarrassed contrition.

  Miserably pale above his rucked doublet, the reprobate prophet displayed every sign of being sunk in a wasting indulgence.

  Sickness imprinted the dough folds of his skin. His laces were snarled, as if he had been too befuddled to locate the business end of his points. Yet the earth-linked awareness of the Fellowship Sorcerer saw beyond surface dissipation: the damp fingers trembling in the flare of the oil lamp could not have lifted a wine jug.

  'Please, will you help?' Dakar whispered.

  Sethvir touched his fingertips to the edge of the circle. He probed past the burn of Dakar's nausea and affirmed that its cause was not excess drinking or seasickness. Unthinking as reflex, the Warden's tuned powers singled out the thread of happenstance that had wakened the Mad Prophet's wild talent for prescience. 'You foresaw the citadel at Alestron under siege by Alliance forces.'

  'In a dream, yes.' Dakar flopped backward in prostrate relief. 'You must see the scope of my problem.'

  Sethvir tracked the converging angles in one vaulting chain of swift thought: that the two retainers Parrien s'Brydion had left aboard the Khetienn to guard Arithon were the duke's sworn men. Their old tie of loyalty might supplant their charge's safety if their lord's domain became threatened; and should the Master of Shadow return headlong to the continent to intercede in Alestron's behalf, nothing could stop an encounter with Prince Lysaer and the wrath of his southbound war fleet. The insidious grip of the Mistwraith's curse worsened with each successive encounter.

  'Dharkaron's Black Spear!' Dakar exclaimed. 'How can you stay calm? The half brothers can't meet, or Arithon will shatter.' At Riverton, even the proximity of a Koriani fetch endowed with Lysaer's auric energy had hurled the Master of Shadow beyond sanity. 'An armed conflict now would destroy your last hope to reunite the Fellowship and keep the s'Ffalenn bloodline alive.'

  Sethvir looked away. All of time seemed to hang in the balance while his awareness expanded to plumb the night sky through the arrow slit over his head. 'We cannot intervene, Dakar.' As though something inscribed in the distant stars moved him to nameless sorrow, he added, 'You know this.'

  Yet stakes on Athera were no longer malleable. Two accursed princes held the world's fate between them. The risk unleashed by a live confrontation would fling wide the gates to disaster.

  'Don't even dare to suggest I break his leg.' Dakar winced as the force of his vehemence lanced stabbing pain through his temples.

  'And anyway, Parrien's crude tactic just let Rathain's prince learn the notes to fuse shattered bone.'

  Sethvir said, mild, 'Arithon knew those already.'

  'From Elaira, at Merior, I remember.' Dakar hugged himself through a wretched shiver. 'You didn't have to listen through his hours of practice until he recaptured the tonalities.'

  Sethvir set a knuckle to his lips in forbearance. In cold fact, he had; the earth link was unremitting, its depth of detail as intricate as the patterns inside a revolving kaleidoscope. The melodies wrought by Arithon in convalescence had made more than the new retainers from Alestron blot streaming tears in broad daylight.

  The Mad Prophet ground his fists against his closed lids, but the memory remained, embedded like nails through the brain. "That music could strip a man, spirit from flesh, then remake him in ribbons of light. To hear, you could never believe any suffering could lie past the reach of such mending.' He broke off and sighed for the sorrowful fact that Desh-thiere had worked the exception. 'Your Masterbard was walking without splints in two weeks, yet the hurt in his heart was no less.'

  'I know.' At whim, Sethvir could affirm the devastating grief inflicted by Caolle's death. Nor had he missed the scarring sorrows left since Vastmark that still destroyed Arithon's sleep. The accusation told hardest of all, that the Teir's'Ffalenn's peace had been sacrificed for the blood vow sworn at Fellowship behest on the sands at Athir nine years ago.

  For Dakar's discomfort, Sethvir scribed a healing glyph into the link that established the span of his circle. 'Granting Rathain's prince permission to die is not an acceptable compromise.'

  The gifted relief of his suffering did nothing for Dakar's strangling concern. 'One day your Master of Shadow will go mad, and nothing in anyone's living power will be able to call him back.' The threat carried weight: against the thick gloom, a pale streak at each temple, the hair grown in gray since the hour when Dakar had drawn on his own life force. His sacrifice then had been all that contained Arithon's fit of insanity brought on during crisis at Riverton.

  Sethvir caught the unused thread on his needle and wound it in hoops on his thumb. 'Go to sleep,' he advised, his turn into vagueness a whim that defied understanding. 'The s'Brydion have always been first-rate strategists. They would scarcely start a war for the sake of an escapade to foul the Riverton shipworks.'

  Dakar shoved erect in fish-eyed suspicion. 'That's much too evasive, in particular since Cattrick has already betrayed Arithon's interests before this.'

  'No faith without proof?' Sethvir's tufted brows rose. 'Very well.' He slipped the thread off his knuckle and stretched it two-handed, faintly singing and taut on the air. 'Pay close attention. You aren't going to see what you expect.' A deft flick set a slipknot into the end. 'Fetch the lamp, or a candle. Any small flame should serve.'

  A flurry of trepidation arose from the circle of spelled wood framing the connection across land and the vaster leg over water. Then a mundane yelp as the brigantine broached a swell and fetched Dakar into a bulkhead. 'Pox on all sailing!' He rummaged a candle and pricket from the locker beneath the Khetienn's chart desk, then peered uneasily over his shoulder. 'Will this scrying stay private?'

  Sethvir set another knot into the thread. His eyes were blank sky, at odds with the sly smile which stirred the untrimmed cascade of his beard. 'Arithon won't see. But Ath Creator himself couldn't stop him from hearing the spell's resonance if he has inclination.'

  Dakar paused in dismay, the striker left dangling, while the wick flared and glazed his bunched frown and the pale moon curve of one cheek. 'You do have your way of letting me know when I've pried outside of wise limits.'

  Althain's Warden said nothing. His seamed, pixie features held strict concentration, while the strand in his fingers came alive. Whipped by unseen spells, it turned in contortion and formed an animate chain of fine ciphers. To these, Sethvir fastened the tail of a thought.

  Power surged through the construct. Spell-wrought twine glowed silver and threw off smoking trails of blue light. 'Now hold the flame steady.'

  Aboard the Khetienn, clammy and chilled by uncanny trepidation, Dakar sensed someone's footsteps emerge from the quarterdeck companionway. As a second presence took station at his shoulder, he had no time to acknowledge that Arithon s'Ffalenn stood motionless in the shadow behind him.

 
; For the Warden of Althain stabbed his steel needle into the circle, straight into the heart of the candleflame. That contact joined an arc across time and space. Earth-linked Sight and elemental heat achieved flash point union, and the scrying that Dakar had begged for intercession flooded in and became manifest inside the brigantine's stern cabin . . .

  * * *

  Five Alliance vessels in command of Lysaer overtook the mayor's war fleet dispatched from Hanshire in the dwindling light after sundown. By full dark, Lysaer's rotund ship's master was immersed in the delicate maneuver of merging the two disparate fleets. Orders were shouted through bullhorns, and the blink of signal lamps rocked over heaving waters when, bearing northward, the inbound s'Brydion raked into the muddle at attack speed. The boom of the drum which timed their crack oarsmen barreled through the breach, dire as the oncoming storm that opened the gates to stark chaos.

  Those captains who executed the command to join forces screamed orders for their oarsmen to hold stroke. Steersmen leaned hard on oak whipstaffs and veered. Lysaer's royal galleys and the vessels from Hanshire scattered like schooling fish set to flight by the splash of a boulder. Oarblades entangled. Rowers and captains vented rank tempers, and transformed a calm night off the coastal cliffs to a bedlam of clashed discipline and oaths.

  Amid the confusion, one man's enthusiasm overrode the clamor of bellowing irritation and splashed looms. 'Almighty Ath! Did Prince Lysaer engage every seagoing ship inside hailing distance of Avenor? Who in Sithaer has he launched off to fight? Naught's left to be saved. His shipyard at Riverton's already burned. The ashes are cooled for three days.'

  'Who speaks?' Lysaer's fleet commander yelled back. He gestured for his officers to withhold hard action, stalling for time as a tactic to allow the other galleys to surround the brash new arrival and close in. 'You're fresh out of port? We're anxious for news from the estuary.'

  The voice claimed identity as Parrien s'Brydion, then added, intrigued, 'What, were your scheduled post riders waylaid on the road?'

  For the disastrous details should have reached Avenor by courier well before a galley could row the long way around the outthrust reef spurs and chains of jagged islets sprawled off the Korias coast.

  Through the ensuing stiff silence, Parrien's commands to his crewmen rang across the inked darkness. Alestron's port rowers backed oars. With a cool that brooked insolence, they spun the duke's galley in a froth of kicked spray, then drew her abreast and matched pace with the sunwheel flagship.

  Her flanking course made the royal fleet's flag captain edgy. The close quarters forced him to cease stroke to avoid an entangling collision. Amid the blundering noise made by other ships manned by less polished crews, he hailed back, 'If our dispatch riders were waylaid, then where were yours? The duke's family blazon might have seen the news past the clan raiders who caused the delays.'

  Through the slap of the bow wake, and the rumble of wood as oarshafts were raised and run in, the companionway door squealed open. Raiett Raven stepped out, trailed by Avenor's justiciar, who minced no words, but shouted across to the lamplit rogue who commanded the s'Brydion galley. 'Or are you too late for the royal wedding because Alestron has joined in conspiracy with other renegades who favor the Shadow Master's packs of barbarians?'

  Against every precedence, Parrien failed to take umbrage. 'I know there were vessels deliberately foundered.' Across the heaving span of light chop, he strode up the rambade and took position beside a slimmer figure, until then unobtrusive as a wraith. Both men were armed. Nicked glints of orange gouged up by the stern lamp played over the chain mail on shoulders devoid of a surcoat.

  'You make a grave mistake, if you accuse s'Brydion,' Parrien added, while the man at his side remained silent. 'Arson and sabotage against Tysan's crown interests are not any folly of mine.' While the distance between galleys closed to the jostling nudge of the rip currents, the duke's brother seemed more interested in the faces which inhabited the flagship's decks than in defending the slur just leveled against his family honor. Nor did he mind the predatory circle of vessels which maneuvered to cut off his escape.

  The flag galley's captain belatedly realized his autonomy had gone with his elbow room. Raiett stood silent vigil on his quarterdeck, and Avenor's high councilmen now crowded en masse from the companionway, Lysaer s'Ilessid among them.

  The Prince of the Light had small patience with delays. He pursued the charge of s'Brydion disloyalty in the imperious manner he used to freeze his trade ministers in mid-argument. 'Your brother's representative missed my state wedding.'

  'I was late,' Parrien amended. While the figure at his side held the queer, lethal stillness of a cobra gauging its distance to strike, he added in silken patience, 'My reasons are forthright. I expect the gift I bear strung from my yardarms will fully exonerate the lapse.' His following gesture to an unseen crewman caused a lantern to be unshuttered and tipped aloft.

  From amid the pack of brocade-clad officials, one of the trade ministers gasped. 'Ath's own mercy! Are those corpses strung up there?'

  Hats and feathers flurried as necks craned to see.

  The Prince of the Light simply raised his right fist and let the brilliance of his gift shatter the obscuring veil of darkness.

  Light flared over ships and men with swift and revealing brutality. There were indeed bodies noosed to Alestron's squared yardarm, eight of them dangling, and each of them over a day dead. Rigor had left them. Their slack-limbed remains hung by the neck and flopped to the roll of each swell. The victims had not danced overlong in their agony. Each had been dealt the Wheel's swift passage with a ballast rock lashed to the ankles.

  Nor did the evidence stop at execution: each body was encrusted with bruised wounds, the dried blood on slack flesh like rust stains too vividly rendered.

  'Mercy, do you see?' Raiett Raven murmured. 'All of their fingers were broken.' Beyond Lysaer's stance, a fainthearted councilman laced his hands on his belly and retched.

  'Your wedding gift,' Parrien stated, flat as a whipcrack across the hellish reflections chipped off the waves between hulls. He grasped the shoulder of the figure beside him. 'My brother Mearn has spent a busy winter in behalf of Alliance interests. You might thank his vigilance, since you see before you the cut heart of the Riverton conspiracy.'

  In stark truth, for those with the stomach to look, the bloated gray features of the corpses were known. Nearest, the recognizable brown hair and blunt jaw of Cattrick. Beside him, the face with the half-toothless rictus was Ivel the blind splicer. Next in the lineup, the plump joiner who had fitted the ships' brightwork, and after him the master sawyer and the yard's wiry caulker, who would harry his laborers no more with his fits of perfectionist temper.

  'They were tortured,' Lysaer said, revolted by the unrecognizably swollen appendages that once had served as human hands. Through the distant, flint scent off the cliffs by the shoreline, wind wafted the clinging miasma of putrefied meat. Murmurs of disquiet ran through the oarsmen stilled on the benches, while on the bunched galleys adrift with the tide, Lysaer's light beat down like the molten flare of poured steel.

  'Well yes, they were tortured,' Parrien agreed, his bear-stubborn features surprised. 'How else to be sure we had caught all the ones who were guilty?'

  Lysaer's fury broke in a wave that fired his gift to white static. 'How dare you take these men's lives and usurp my right to administer royal justice?'

  Limned in unbearable, silvery glare, Parrien s'Brydion laughed. 'Why trouble to split hairs? Shouldn't you thank me? Or are you and your councilmen so in love with due process that you'd rather spend your wedding week haring off south to wage an unnecessary war? No need to put all of Riverton to the sword. The bunch swinging here are your criminals.'

  The diamond clasp on Lysaer's white cloak spat ice to his indrawn breath. 'I cannot know that for certain.'

  "Then you'll just have to trust me.' Parrien's smile turned wicked. 'Or not. I see you have envoys from Erdane and Hanshire on board. Th
ey can bear witness if you want to show your gracious ingratitude and cast public doubt on the validity of s'Brydion honor.'

  'Oh, he's very good,' Raiett Raven observed softly. To the nephew slipped up to stand by his side, locked to hard-breathing frustration, he added, 'How does your prince handle stalemate?'

  Lysaer's blue eyes shone with volcanic rage. 'No man in my kingdom should be condemned without trial, or die before my royal seal authorizes his execution.'

  'Oh, that's rich!' burst out Mearn. 'As a prince who rules Tysan without legal sanction, take care to recall that we're clanborn. The mores of town law can't constrain us, as allies. On the matter at hand, our own scruples bind us. No man of mercy could keep these conspirators alive once they had delivered their confession.'

  'He's right.' The mouse-timid minister of the weaver's guild dabbed at moist lips with his handkerchief. 'To have held these for trial would have prolonged a vile and unnecessary suffering.'

  The council delegate from Erdane offered argument. 'That's a glaring assumption. Would men like these have acted in conspiracy without ties to the Master of Shadow?'

  'Never so lofty an evil as that,' Parrien rebutted. 'Look closer to home. This lot was disgruntled after two years of scant wages.'

  Exclamations from the councilman, with the trade minister's outcry the loudest. 'But we sent them three hundred coin weight in gold!'

  Mearn shrugged in that boneless way which set townborn teeth on edge. 'If your prince sent bullion, the payment you specified never reached its destination at the shipyard.'

  Through mutters of consternation concerning mislaid funds, with more blame and imprecations heaped on the heads of Maenol's clansmen, other factions expressed their relieved complaisancy.

  'To think all of Tysan could have mobilized for war where no real threat of shadow existed!' sighed the trade minister to the coterie of Avenor's guild councilors. 'Imagine the expense saved, not to mention more losses to revenues for the crown to levy more troops.'