TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  At Sulfin Evend's shoulder, Raiett Raven looked amused. 'His Grace won't shift them now. Threat to profits will keep all his armies at home. I wish I could hire on the duke's younger brother as strategist.'

  Mearn was speaking again, his ultimatum to Lysaer hurled over the water in a voice the whole gathering overheard. 'Believe us, or brand the s'Brydion liars, then swallow the consequence of that.'

  Still etched under the perilous threat of Lysaer's gift, Parrien signaled to seamen he had kept on station in the mainmast crosstree. 'Cut the carrion down. This vessel has served Avenor's interests as a gibbet long enough.'

  'Why are we drifting here arguing, anyway?' Mearn snapped. His mercurial gesture of impatience encompassed the lightless horizon to the north. 'Presumably there's a bride ashore pining for her absent prince. If all of the wine in this kingdom is drunk dry, Avenor serves her allies a muckle-poor welcome.'

  On the decks of the flagship, the beribboned city dignitaries subsided, content. Never disposed toward seafaring in the first place, they seemed more than eager to grasp the excuse to fare homeward. Since the captain could not order the fleet to put about without royal authority, they regarded the bejeweled prince in his white-and-gold silk with unified expectation.

  Lysaer withstood that nailing regard, his eyes darkened sapphire and his coinface profile expressionless. While the misting night airs riffled his filigree hair, the corpses of eight traitors splashed into the sea, one on the heels of the next. His gaze moved to Parrien and measured; then surveyed Mearn in turn. No more accusations passed between ships. The Prince of the Light kept his right to hold judgment in suspension, while the fires of his gift singed the rigging overhead and wafted the rank taint of carbon.

  He had been stood down. Raiett Raven would have laughed for the irony; except something to the quality of Lysaer's bearing stopped the mirth cold in his belly.

  Danger walked in that magisterial stillness.

  The fire of human pride was a powerful force. Temper, frustration, and hostility must lend fuel to an explosive desire for reprisal. Tension spun out like the pent force of the arrow nocked and held to the drawn bow. The strength of one thought could see Alestron's state galley in flames, as every discomfited councilman realized. Lysaer might seize a mortal ruler's satisfaction. He might ride the moment and indulge in his temper and set off his politically desirable war with Alestron; or he could accept the peace thrust into his hands by s'Brydion intervention.

  He could relax his strict point of principle and allow the invigorating campaign he needed to expand his resources for warfare to become disarmed by the spurious lynching of eight disgruntled conspirators.

  A drawn second passed, while the moist sea winds collided with raised light and spat ghost trailers of steam at the interface. The swell slopped and heaved against the timbers of stalled hulls; gear creaked aloft to their rolling. Raiett Raven's lips were a sealed, strained seam; the councilmen sweated in abeyance. The Erdani, Lord Koshlin, clamped his jaw in sour fury.

  Only Sulfin Evend appeared unaffected as the fair prince he served resumed breathing, deep and even.

  Lysaer brought his seething fury in check, the change as effortless as the sheathing of killing steel into silk. His exacting, fair character raised a majesty that burned, and choked throats. As though all of time must bow to his disposal, he bent his bright head and opened the fist held aloft. The spattering, star brilliance of his gift of light dimmed and released its harsh grip on the night. His presence reduced by the glimmer of mere lamp flames, he smiled with the lucent diplomacy that riveted men to allegiance. ' For your services to Tysan, then, let me welcome s'Brydion to the crown's hospitality at Avenor. My new princess shall arrange lor your public commendation.' A signaling flick of one finger, and the flagship's captain shouted orders to run the war banners down from the masthead.

  While movement returned, and captains received orders to regroup into fleet formation, Raiett Raven watched Lysaer s'Ilessid retire with eyes gone panther wary. 'Never mind whether he's the world's divine savior,' he murmured to the nephew at his elbow. 'He's dangerous beyond compare since no one alive can guess his preferred agenda.'

  Sulfin Evend unglued his fingers from his sword hilt, the gesture a running flare of chain links touched orange under the lamplight. 'He'll go on to Riverton. Care to lay coin on it?'

  Raiett's chuckle came warm in a darkness that felt inexplicably empty since the Prince of the Light had ceded the deck to his fleet captain. 'I'd ask instead, how much gold would it take to bring you back to your father's service?'

  'No coin on this earth could buy that,' said the man sworn heart and spirit to the cause of the sunwheel Alliance.

  When Raiett replied, his honesty rang bright as ruled brass. 'As Hanshire's First Counselor, I don't know whether such loyalty will become the world's grace, or if it's the most frightening thing I'll ever witness inside of a lifetime.'

  * * *

  As the scried image delivered by Sethvir's powers tore away, Dakar reeled, unsteady and confused through the shock of restored awareness. He forgot where he was and shot to his feet. Rammed crown first into the unforgiving edge of the Khetienn's upper deck beam, and suffering a bitten tongue, he yelped, bent in half to avoid further mishap. Every hatred he bore toward the hazards of seafaring revisited with venom enough to stop thought.

  'Fiends plague!' Collapsed on the bench by the chart desk, he agonized to Sethvir, 'Never mind that those meddling brothers averted a war. How do I tell Arithon that his most loyal shipwrights were tortured and killed by the hand of Parrien s'Brydion?'

  Sethvir's patience seemed to rise from the stones that weighted the unfurled scroll, whose lines described vistas of ocean. 'His Grace knows already. Could you forget? He's still with you.'

  Dakar groaned, while the pain danced in whorled black patterns across the shut dark of his eyelids. Since he hurt too much to focus, he extended his mage-sense to measure the motionless presence at his back. For ongoing, dreadful seconds, he listened. Tuned to Arithon's temperament like a brother, he waited, braced for the soft, fractured breath that would reflect deeply buried distress.

  'Who were the victims?' Arithon asked instead in a tone that was frightening and ordinary.

  The Mad Prophet mouthed a desperate, short prayer, poised for explosion, and foolishly lacking the cowardice to leave without giving an answer. 'Your master shipwright.' His voice bound up on the unwonted memory of Cattrick, filled with feisty life and arguing over beer in a tavern.

  Dakar coughed, resumed. 'Ivel. That mule-stubborn caulker with the missing finger you lured on a challenge from the ship works at Southshire.' No movement yet from Arithon s'Ffalenn, an ominous sign his reaction was going to defy every reasonable prediction. Yet the Mad Prophet dared not flag in his office until he had spoken each name.

  The shipyard's master craftsmen who best served the Shadow Master's cause were now rotting in the tide beneath the seacliffs south of Hanshire. Each wore the severed ends of a noose on his neck, sent to the Fatemaster's judgment with his ankles lashed to a ballast stone.

  'Even the caulker,' Arithon mused, then broke into wild hilarity. 'Parrien's brilliant! He can break my leg anytime in exchange for a strategy as thoughtful and well timed as that!'

  'What!' Dakar recoiled, shot straight, his horrified regard pinned to the Shadow Master's face. 'You can't be glad of this!'

  'Why not?' Arithon's insane ebullience threatened laughter. 'Lysaer's been hobbled.' He tripped the latch on a locker and tugged out a cloak, the original reason for his untimely appearance at the moment of Sethvir's augury. 'The same body of officials my half brother needed to fund his new war will now insist he stay home. He'll have to suspend his armed interests in Tysan and cut back his bid to extend his martial foothold at Etarra. We're free, Dakar. We can now sail for years, unmolested. Not only that, for the few reputations that Parrien sacrificed, we still have two dozen left outside suspicion. They can safely stay covert and keep us informed of Avenor'
s upcoming policy.'

  Dakar damped back his inimical rage. 'Eight men are dead, and you've got no access to mage-sight. You could not have read so much into that scrying from Althain.'

  'No,' Arithon admitted. Unchastened, still pleased, he flung on the cloak, prepared to slip through the companionway. 'My ability to divine through straight sound still has limits. Why else should I trouble to ask after names?'

  To the stones on the chart desk, safely unvolatile, Dakar said in cat-footed care, 'Then you won't be aware those men were tortured by Parrien to buy off the others as innocent?'

  'But I heard him admit that.' The Shadow Master set his hand on the latch. His last whoop of laughter rebounded through the cabin as he let in the chill of the night. 'Their bones were bull stubborn to break, that I warrant.'

  'Mercy,' Dakar murmured, overtaken by a sorrow to make his years of steadfast effort come to nothing. 'Once, the friend I knew had the mark of humanity on him.'

  Sethvir's voice reached back in gentle rebuke. 'For five centuries' study under Asandir, you remain remarkably unobservant.'

  Dakar pushed straight, disarranging a stone, which dropped with an indignant clatter on the timbers under his feet. 'Don't say I ought to forgive the expedience. Those were living men, and companions who gave trust.' He strangled an uglier, deeper concern, that the Khetienn now sailed with two s'Brydion retainers. They had been sworn over to Arithon s'Ffalenn, but were placed in a chilling position if in fact they were spying for the duke.

  'Your suspicions are blinding you to the truth,' Sethvir said, the acuity of his earth-linked perceptions as always a galling embarrassment. 'To distrust the integrity of those two clansmen will set the s'Ffalenn prince in danger.'

  Dakar winced. Before the stone wandered to the heave of the sea and wound up battering his ankle, he bent and groped in the darkness. 'Parrien s'Brydion might be a ruthless strategist, but I did expect better of Mearn.'

  Althain's Warden said, oblique, 'You might then ask why they had to sink the remains, and the stone you can't find has lodged by the locker a half a pace behind your left heel.'

  Dakar rested his forehead against the salt-flocked parchment of the chart. His head hurt too much to pick apart circumstance, and his heart ached too deeply to unwind the next flaw Desh-thiere's curse set in Arithon's character.

  'At least take the time to admire the science.' Across distance, Sethvir sounded rueful. 'Arithon's ear for true sound has set a new precedent if he's learned to differentiate the separate bands of animate vibration from the broad scale of the life chord.'

  The Mad Prophet retrieved the errant stone. 'I'll leave the riddling nuance of the present in favor of hearing your take on the odds for our future.' Exhaustion made all his bones feel cased in lead. He smoothed down the ruffled edge of the chart, where Merior and the sands of the Scimlade hook interfaced with the unexplored leagues of the Cildein Ocean; his hand shook as he replaced the weight on the corner. 'How long are we free to seek the Paravians before the next threat on the continent forces the Master of Shadow to react?'

  From the Warden at Althain, a measuring silence, while the running swell under the Khetienn's keel kept time to the fair weather course that carried her outside known waters. Amid night and ocean, his sight tracked her hull as a tossed seed of warmth at the driven whim of the elements. In the dimmed stern cabin, shut away from the sailhands who diced at the galley trestle, Dakar caught the secondhand imprint of power as Sethvir engaged his wide vision. He could almost feel the unborn currents of cause and effect as the Sorcerer attuned his will to plumb the forward progression of time.

  Still touched in light linkage, the Mad Prophet sensed the tunnel of years, laid out in seasonal rhythms and the coiling cycles of storms. Through Sethvir's gift, he traced Athera's binding webwork of energies, from the living, molten fires of her core to the secrets encrypted in crystalline bedrock. Wrapped warp through weft with the world's breathing aura, her quickened tapestry of flora and fauna unreeled, each tempered strand etched in fine imprints of light. The riddles set into their patterns lay beyond his understanding. Dakar lost the translation as the ranging expanse of overwhelming minutiae frayed away cognitive reason.

  A mere spellbinder's training could not plumb that intricate geometry. Nor could Dakar sort the movements of men from the endlessly shifting individuality of wind-scoured sand grains. Sethvir worked under no such limitation. The forces he commanded through vast wisdom and experience let him tap the grand mystery. His mind accessed realms where Athera's law did not rule, and the undying song of Ath's creation expanded beyond the darkened constraints of dense matter.

  Power rode on that cusp, at the threshold interstice where the sensory boundaries dissolved into the spectrum of higher vibrations. There, rarified energies linked the light-dance of form, made accessible through disciplined mage-sight. Like a particle swept up in a comet's lit tail, Dakar received glimpses of Sethvir's mastery. In flashes and bursts, he snatched trains of sequence he recognized: the seasonal budding of leaves and the lightning of summer storms, stitched through by the lane currents which guided the birds in migration. Between those he sensed the Naming ceremony for Havish's young princess, hard followed by the birth of a brown-haired royal brother. Through the shuttling passage of uncounted trade ships, and the veils of dust raised by toiling caravans, he heard the marching of men under the sunwheel banner.

  His effort to milk that image for more knowledge entangled with the late-autumn belling of stags. Blue-and-gold banners streamed from the towers at Avenor to commemorate the birth of Tysan's next prince. Other visions unreeled, scraps too jumbled to decipher, until Sethvir's artistry winnowed the morass and distilled rampant chaos to a final cascade of clear focus. Dakar caught the echo of what could have been Lirenda's proud form, pacing the floor with rapacious anticipation.

  Then, through pearly dusk and a dank, autumn rain, he saw the enchantress Elaira, huddled by a smoking fire under the massive white oaks of Halwythwood. She was alone, face pressed into shivering hands, while wet beaded her collar and masked her distraught, silent tears. Then that sequence cut off.

  What remained was the last fated link, a disjointed fragment of latent event that Sethvir had earmarked as a closure. Dakar shared that sight: of a straight-backed young rider on the road leading from Araethura's broad moors toward the lakeshore town of Daenfal.

  Sethvir said, crisp, 'You might have fifteen years, but no longer.'

  Struck dizzy by transition back into the present, the Mad Prophet returned to himself, hunched over the course log on the chart table. Beneath him, the Khetienn rose on a swell. She shouldered through the crest, creaking stout timbers, and rolled through a shattered fall of spray. Brushed by phantom fear, Dakar broke into chill sweat. 'Ath, who was the rider on that moorland pony?'

  But Sethvir's steady presence had withdrawn back to Althain, leaving the question unanswered.

  Alone in the sea-humid gloom, sight reduced to the tiger-lily flare of the flame through the soot-smoked glass of the sconce, the Mad Prophet could but wonder whose future action would trigger the next round of heartache.

  The tangle of posed implication became altogether too vicious.

  Dakar slammed his closed fists into the chart desk. 'Howling Sithaer!' Pained by the burden of Sethvir's late forecast, he thrust to his feet. Fool that he was, and tied up in sentiment, he could not sit by and leave the s'Ffalenn prince to his cavalier attitude.

  'Cattrick and seven shipwrights have died in true service,' he howled to the echoing darkness. "That has to mean something. Or else you've become the cold, heartless bastard the Alliance has claimed all along.'

  On deck, the night was a buffeting scarf of black wind, loomed to wet silk by humidity. This far offshore, no horn lanterns burned. Every drop of oil was hoarded to fuel the flame to light the binnacle, with even that wick set to minimal use on clear nights, when Ath's stars could be used in place of the magnetic compass. That hour, a low cloud cover lidded the sky. The waters
beneath were roiled ink, sheared into foam off the bow as the Khetienn plowed on her close-hauled course.

  Dakar clawed his way from the aft companionway. The wood under his tread was drenched glass, doused by the spray that plumed over the bowsprit. He reached for the rail to steady his way to the quarterdeck, and found his wrist vised immobile by sword-callused fingers.

  Then, in tones of warning, 'His Grace of Rathain has specifically asked that you not be allowed to disturb him.'

  'Ath's own grace, Talvish!' Dakar tugged, peevish for the fact the s'Brydion retainers had taken s'Ffalenn interests so swiftly to heart. 'I'm not Arithon's enemy!'

  The grip did not loosen; in painful fact, was cutting off vital circulation. 'For tonight, his Grace might think otherwise.'

  Dakar's foul language fell short of his pitched irritation. 'His Grace would not still be alive to sit sulking if steadfast friends had not broken his door and invaded his damnable privacy. Let go. You won't like the headache you'll have in the morning if I need to use spellcraft to pass you.'

  'Then fell me,' said Talvish, his clipped laugh indication he found the contest amusing. 'I haven't drawn steel against you, after all. By rights, you're unarmed. Unlike yours, my service is honorable.'

  'This isn't a law court!' Dakar snapped through clenched teeth. Braced for the lash of the Shadow Master's temper, he had no patience left for ridiculous impasse or argument. Yet before he engaged dire forces to win free, he sensed more than felt the presence that stalked upon his exposed flank.

  He snap-turned his head, saw the upraised sword pommel in time to dodge under the blow. 'Vhandon! Desist! This goes beyond sanity.' Frightening to watch this pair act together, each move a dance step made in lethal concert; Dakar backstepped in surrender. Already the retainers from Alestron guarded their royal charge like men bloodborn to s'Ffalenn service.