TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The images framed a fleeting, grainy impression of future event, as the energies rocked from their sure, channeled track, and skewed off into disordered eddies. The residue would not die, but turn and pool, and sink at last into stagnation where the flawed transmission through the mountain failed in its natural function. Since the wards over Rockfell were calibrated to mesh with the stable emission of stone, even an infinitesimal change would admit a dangerous, weakening influence.

  'We could have days, or a month, or a year before the damage becomes threatening.' Sethvir shut his eyes, worn threadbare from even that minimal effort. 'Or we could have only hours. I dare make no forecast. Not since the Mistwraith revealed that it knew how to act on those spells from within. Your choice, whether clearing the seals on the grimwards ought to be shouldered first.'

  'No choice at all,' Asandir said, his calm forced. In truth, an abyss yawned at their feet.

  Should the seals that contained the boundaries of even one grimward let go, the very template of creation would shift. The unbinding ruin to land and life would see destruction beyond all repair. Desh-thiere's ills, with their long-range potential to choke sunlight, could not touch the coiled power of the drake shades spelled and bound in their sealed-off pockets of warped time.

  'Eckracken's haunt, then,' Sethvir gave out after a labored silence. 'His spite is most vengeful. When the mate interred on Kathtairr dreams of coupling during the full moon, his ghost always bids to escape.'

  'That's less than a fortnight away,' Luhaine despaired from his hovering roost in the doorway.

  The grimward which prisoned the skull of Eckracken lay in the Salt Fens of West Shand, far down the southern peninsula. Asandir faced a transfer down the third lane to the ruins at Earle, followed by a desolate ride up the wind-raked winter coastline. No hostels, habitations, or inns graced that broken stretch of roadway, with its towered, gray pinnacles of limestone. Trade gave wide berth to that abandoned expanse. The last bastion of a more civilized age had gone also, the old enclave built by Ath's adepts left roofless for centuries, drained of its powers during the Third Age defense to stem the Mistwraith's incursion.

  'My black stud is well fed and rested, at least.' Asandir tugged a crimp in the coverlet straight. Unwilling to be first to broach the necessity, that all of Athera's seventeen grimwards would have to be tested to guarantee their stability, he reached out with spread hands to clasp Sethvir's temples.

  His gesture was arrested by a snapped flick of air and a sensible admonishment from Luhaine. 'Enough. You'll need every bit of your strength. I'll attend to Sethvir. Kharadmon will be called if need warrants.'

  Not trusting that tone of dismissal one bit, Asandir pushed to his feet. 'Remember this,' he said in grave parting. 'Of the pair of us, Sethvir's not expendable.'

  'Well he can't hold the compact without help in the field!' A moment of impasse, while the dust motes streamed in chiaroscuro eddies from Luhaine's agitated presence.

  Asandir said nothing, did nothing, but stood with his hands hanging empty.

  'You've always had the stubborn set of old granite.' The discorporate Sorcerer gave way at grim length. 'Watch your back. Stay inside safe limits, or be sure, I'll kick the four chambers of Eckracken's thick skull to bedevil the unstrung wisps of your consciousness.'

  Asandir tipped his head, his mouth lifted into a half smile of truce. He spoke his last words from the doorway. 'Sethvir, keep you safe. If anything good can be wrung from disaster, at least, by clear terms of the compact, we have reason at last to put an end to Morriel's reign of self-righteous power.' On one lingering, last glance, he raised the latch and swiftly let himself out.

  For a stark, silent interval, dust motes settled their stealthy patina over statues and books and the oddments of stray hardware stashed in their haphazard corners. Even the candleflame burned straight and still, as if time had paused in reflection.

  'I couldn't tell him,' Sethvir admitted to Luhaine after a tormented interval. 'Not now. Not about Morriel's unconscionable possession of that misfortunate young initiate.'

  That one stark truth canceled comfort. The Prime Matriarch's willful acts of damage against lands held in trust by the terms of Paravian generosity had been crowned by a last, diabolical masterstroke. Morriel had arranged her web too well. Fellowship authority now could not touch her. No redress could be claimed for as long as her spirit seized sanctuary inside the body of the victimized girl.

  * * *

  When the Fellowship Sorcerers tapped into lane force for travel, the effects were instantaneous and disorienting to a wrenching degree that always left Dakar blinded and dizzy with nausea. The effect when the power was charged active by music from the ancient Paravian ritual was different, a slow, turning, lazy spin that felt like a fabric of dream whose meaning had melted and gone formless. Through a fuzz of intense color, and a descant of clear song, Dakar was aware of the anchoring pull of the night constellations, their high, ephemeral range of vibration ringing in the advent of winter solstice. He felt beneath him the spin of Athera, her iron core driving her magnetic engine and re-creating from second to second the mighty flux of the currents which buoyed him.

  Drawn like syrup through that queer keyhole through time, the Mad Prophet sensed that the transit from Sanpashir's focus had spanned the course of three hours.

  He felt no urgency as the kaleidoscopic net of suspension gradually dissolved. On the cusp of that moment, as he recrossed the threshold of material continuity, he felt only calm and the peaceful, sweet union that welded the natural elements.

  Then awareness of his body resurged with a crash of hard impact that snapped his jaw shut on the trapped meat of his tongue.

  He yelped, tasting blood. In stunned reflex and cross-eyed, reflexive bewilderment, he flopped like a beached fish off the shards of smashed porcelain that threatened to impale his backside. The bewitching last strains of Paravian melody ripped away with his oath as he slid headlong off a table.

  The linen cloth ruckled and dragged with his weight, its contents disgorged in a clattering rain over his importunate head. Battered by spoons and almond paste comfits, silver plates and soiled napkins, and, finally, the limpid flutter of lace doilies, Dakar swore. A finger bowl sloshing with rose petals doused him. He blinked through the runoff, spluttering. Insult to rank injury, the tureen which had broken the brunt of his landing glopped gravy into his hair and down the skewed nape of his collar.

  'Dharkaron's black vengeance!' He had neglected fact, on departure from Sanpashir. In Jaelot, the mayor's palace of state was built over the old site of the lane focus. Arrival had hurled him, undignified and bruised, amid the uncleared leavings of the feast to honor the eve of winter solstice.

  Dakar threw off the stained tablecloth and stood up to a cascading jangle of flatware jostled loose from his cloak hem. He groped through black gloom, found an upright table, and all but impaled himself on a centerpiece of gilt paper lilies in his quest for a napkin to sop congealed sauce from his clothing.

  Hard fingers caught his arm, faced him around, and impelled him in another direction.

  'Sithaer's raving furies, let me alone!' he snarled to his scatheless companion. 'Damn you for luck, you didn't fall backside first into a cold dish of pudding.'

  'No.' Neat as a cat, Arithon flitted between the fake archway of a kiosk, swagged with gilt ivy and plaster-cast doves flocked together with wire. 'Be grateful. We unleashed a shock that just shook the foundations. Once the house staff stops quaking, your noisy crash landing will bring servants running with candles to see if the ceiling has fallen.'

  In passing, Arithon snagged up a decanter. The scanty slosh of liquid inside proved to be lees of stale wine. 'We'll find you dry clothes.' With no more word of apology than that, he upended the dregs over Dakar's redolent head.

  The Mad Prophet's yell of fury was silenced by the same hand that launched the outrageous offense. Struggling, snarling insults into the fingers clamped in the bristled stubble of his beard, he
landed just one vengeful kick on a shin before being dragged through a corridor. He identified the smells of the kitchen and pantry before a sharp sidewards turn pitched him through a narrow side doorway.

  The closet room had pallets for scullions who shared turns at the spits through the night. Dakar knew the place. One fateful evening a quarter century past, Halliron Masterbard had been laid here unconscious from the head blow that had finally killed him.

  This time the pallets held children. The filtered gleam of a lamp through the window revealed their sprawled forms, soundly asleep from long hours of labor under a short-tempered kitchen staff.

  Dakar assayed another vicious kick, cut short by the Shadow Master's frantic whisper at his ear. 'Act like you mean this, or else we're both going to burn.'

  The bard's fingers maintained their punishing grip on his mouth. Dakar howled anyway. Never more tempted to bite in his life, he wrestled, as Arithon's other arm clamped him by force into a lover's embrace.

  Then the Shadow Master's taunt, shot through with a manic hilarity, 'How exciting. Moan again. In fact, you can scream all you like.'

  Dakar felt himself pressed backward into the mimed pose of a blindingly passionate tryst between a wealthy young blueblood and a servant. His howl of protest broke into a squeal as light flickered, then poured through the opened doorway.

  The liveried footman who carried the pricket gasped in embarrassed surprise.

  'Stayed on from the feast, did you?' A boy's voice, probably coach staff to judge by the surly accent. He was thankfully too young to remember the connection between a short, rotund convict with ginger hair and the Sorcerer blamed for the infamous ruin of a solstice feast twenty-five years ago.

  A sniff of disgust, then the dry admonition, no doubt inspired by the wine fumes that wafted off Dakar's sticky head, 'Got inns in this city where beds can be found. Take the heat of your passion off elsewhere.'

  Arithon straightened, the hood of his cloak skewed over his eyes. He affected the extravagance of a rich, wellborn rake caught slumming in a dim corner. Over his shoulder, Dakar's furious, bright blush lent his slurred protest full credence. 'Oh, but my dear, we're much too drunk to find our way through the streets.'

  'Well, that's no problem of mine, now is it?' The servant held his candle in sour impatience for the amorous pair to move on.

  Arithon smiled, willing to oblige, and in disarming conspiracy asking to be let out the back. 'One of the late watch is my uncle, you know. He could cause merry hell with my father, if we're seen. They both think I'm visiting a courtesan quartered on Threadneedle Street.'

  'Forget the niceties,' the serving boy grumbled. 'I'd need the porter's keys to do that.'

  A discreetly palmed silver sweetened the request. 'Oh come, now. You must have some way to slip out for the wenches.'

  Arithon laid his other arm across the boy's shoulder, good-naturedly encouraging mayhem, while Dakar strove to rein in rankled temper and smile through his thunderous frown.

  A footman was kicked awake to pick the lock at the rear of the pantry. An older, bald man with a throaty, wet cough and the bloodshot eyes of a head cold, he shared Jaelot's relish for gossip. 'You heard the town alderman's daughter got herself a big belly? Slept with the lad who cares for the carriage teams.'

  'Our grooms knew that two weeks ago,' said the boy, masking a yawn with the back of his hand.

  The footman warmed to the challenge. 'Well, you won't know the town executioner just quit his post. Thirty years of unbroken service, and he chooses now to retire. It's stinking bad timing, for all of that. Got a wager laid on with the cousin in the shoe trade, setting odds on how long a Master Sorcerer takes to die.'

  'Headsman's cold frightened,' scoffed the coach boy.

  'Likely so, likely so.' The footman shrugged. 'Would you put a Sorcerer to the fire and the sword, and risk his death curse on your family?' He twirled his bent wire against the last, stubborn tumblers. 'Off you go, now, young sirs.' Leering in salacious conspiracy, he swung open the strapped door used by the cook to admit butchered carcasses from the stockyards. The scrubbed stone floor harbored a death reek beneath the taints of lye and old blood. Mixed with fresh gravy and clammy lees of red wine, the odors drove Dakar to nausea.

  He was in no mood for wild pranks and exhilaration and said so, in pungent, choice phrases, the instant the door thudded shut. In afterthought, he added to his errant companion, 'I do hope you used a kind twist of shadows to lend me the glamour of a maid.'

  'Of course not,' Arithon quipped in barbed malice. 'After all, this is Jaelot. Or do you think styles have changed?'

  Poised on the rickety wooden stair with the steam from the midden spiraling past his dark hood, the Shadow Master laughed, a full-throated peal of extravagance that set the coursing hounds yapping in their kennels. 'Dharkaron's sure vengeance, the sheer irony's priceless!'

  'What irony?' Dakar grumped, still nursing bruised dignity and blackly unwilling to share humor at his own expense.

  'But it's glorious, don't you see?' Arithon swiped brimming moisture from his eyes. 'I've developed a reputation so bleak, a professional's terrified to kill me.' He strode forward, determined, past the flare of the torch left burning as a deterrent to rats and other two-legged scavengers wont to lurk in dark alleys.

  The Mad Prophet followed, disgruntled yet, and altogether too rattled from the unlikely success of the lane transfer. Never, even in nightmare, had he planned to abet Arithon s'Ffalenn in his choice to run riot in Jaelot. The unresponsive silence from Althain's Warden chafed his thoughts to disturbing unease. Too worried to field manic ebullience concerning the superstitious whims of hired killers, Dakar hunched up his gravy-stained shoulders. 'If you're not surprised, you must have a plan to use that grim fact to advantage.'

  'But of course.' From out of the dark, Arithon's teeth came and went in a ripping, tight smile of invitation. 'Come along and see how. That's if you don't want to stay under that torch and get clapped in irons as a beggar caught scrounging for chicken bones.'

  'You're enjoying this,' Dakar accused, wincing as the first blast of winter air kissed the wet patches soaked through his clothing.

  'And why not?' Arithon ducked down a side street. Evidently he remembered the convoluted shortcut the street waifs used to reach the wharves from the rich quarter. Through the ramshackle maze of the fishmonger's sheds with their salt barrels and stacked wicker baskets, his rapid-fire patter floated back. 'Koriani presumably know that I'm here. Why tire ourselves out over subtleties?'

  Yet Dakar noticed: Arithon had remorselessly quickened his pace. The flaring pine knot by a sailor's brothel revealed a fanciful enthusiasm turned hard, even angry, as the adamantine glitter of sheared diamond. 'We might as well be disruptive and give the interfering bitches their due share of cheap entertainment.'

  Winter Solictice Morning 5669

  Third Upset

  The first blush of solstice dawn brightened the sky over Jaelot, a streaking of gold through stringers of dove gray cloud. For the aftermath of a night torn by terrifying portents, the new daybreak brought in a queer, almost deadlocked quiet.

  Moored galleys rocked on the ribboned steel breast of the harbor, or tugged at fixed bollards by the quayside, fretted lines squealing against the pull of the ebb tide. In that stilled, half-lit hour, while the curs yapped underneath the lamps by the fishmongers' wicket gates, and the earliest slopman's cart rattled over the cobbles collecting nightsoil, the damp, heavy stir of the sea breeze ruffled the collars and cloaks of the servants who waited in the dim lanes, their buckets and basins clenched in raw hands, waste sewage being under the strict control of common rights law and city ordinance. The workaday acts of necessity seemed oddly disjointed, a tapestry backdrop changed overnight, as if a vital but significant thread had jerked free, casting an unsettled pall over the established patterns of normality.

  Peat smoke coiled over rooftops leaded in gleaming winter ice, but the air was empty of flocking gulls.

 
; No birds flew or cried. The anomaly lay outside the long memories of the cod fishermen who ranged along the stone verge of the breakwater to launch their cockleshell dories. Nor had the seagoing trade captains known such an unnerving silence. Up and down the blustery expanse of the seawall, men spat over their shoulders to ward off the following train of ill luck. The name of the Master of Shadow was whispered with sidewards glances and choked fear, and the rumors kindled like wildfire up and down Jaelot's wakened streets.

  The Gold Lion retained its nightlong reputation as a hotbed of news and conjecture. Rich and poor shared salacious speculation, while servants sent out on morning errands spread the details of the Shadow Master's capture. The event had acquired striking embellishment. Sleepers who had missed the commotion when the sky had flared with red portents heard the troublesome news over breakfast, as strings of agitated messengers dispatched sealed orders from the mayor to the ranking city dignitaries, and conscripted lackeys were sent scrambling to the woodsellers to bundle the faggots for a burning.

  By the hour the sky lightened, the first idling onlookers clustered in the city square. A group of inspired zealots chanted litanies for Lysaer of the Light and demanded death for the Spinner of Darkness. Tradesmen gossiped on their way to open shops, their discourse overheard by the countryfolk bearing crated geese to the market. Everyone defended their vehement opinion, that Jaelot had escaped the ugliest fate by only the narrowest margin. Always the uncanny silence of the gulls was blamed on the work of meddling spellcraft.

  The fine point no one seemed able to settle was argued with passionate conviction: whether the mute birds were provoked by the criminal Sorcerer in the dungeons or the protective result of the Koriani bindings laid over the city walls through the night. Safe or threatened, Jaelot's rattled citizens churned up talk with a turmoil that upended routine.

  Full daybreak flushed the sky the luminous gray of poured mercury over the square rims of the battlements. High on the curtain walls, ruffled by wind, six Koriani enchantresses in violet robes lit the air with the flare of sealed sigils. Their work spun a thousand invisible threads. The bold weave of uncanny forces skittered in bursts through thought and mind, until the lamplighters who trimmed the spent wicks in the streets made their rounds in anxious, mute haste. Strange, pent-back stillness gripped earth and sky, a queer sense of suspension like pause, but not, as if some massive, unseen force waited to freeze the incoming breakers on the cusp of each crest and ebb.