TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  A squad of mounted lancers pressed for the same side street, with no way to turn or deflect them. Their impetus from behind pressed the logjammed masses inexorably forward into that ring of spelled light.

  'I hope you prefer hot tarts over witches,' said Arithon in rife desperation.

  He turned his cloaked face aside as the fired glare of the ward fell upon him. Masking cloth availed nothing. The set spell had been tuned to comb auras, infallibly more reliable than the shortfalls of visual identity. Preset rings of ciphers and keys triggered off the instant the flare touched Arithon's person. A sound like a rip tore across the charged air. The baleful burst brightened, rinsing the street into sudden, actinic brilliance.

  'There!' cried the enchantress. Unerringly, she pointed. 'Both the Master of Shadow and his look-alike henchman! Take them in hand.'

  Still hooded, and brazen enough to react, Arithon raised his masterbard's voice in persuasion. 'Indeed! There they are!' He gestured farther down the street. 'Hurry! Clap them in irons! Move quickly, before they escape!'

  Blind instinct turned heads and swerved the first steps of the guards' headlong rush. The following cohort of lancers reined back, reflexively searching the press to locate the flight of the fugitives. For a fateful split second, the crowd swirled to an indecisive standstill.

  Arithon plunged ahead, an eel through turbid flotsam, towing Fionn Areth behind him.

  The first guard by the bakeshop died on his sword. The next, he rammed into a signpost. The last pair entangled in the recoil of bodies as hapless bystanders flinched back from the outbreak of bloodshed.

  'Down!' Arithon shouted. He jerked Fionn Areth with him, just as a bolt of uncanny energy sheared like swarming wasps overhead. 'Stayspell,' he gasped, then whistled an odd triplet that rang out in harsh, cringing dissonance.

  Across the street, the Koriani enchantress screamed. She dropped her quartz focus, clapped her hands to her ears, then screamed again as the crystal changed resonance and nearly shattered.

  The spell the stone matrix had amplified came unraveled. Its skewed impact smashed the shutter. Frame and glass, the bake-shop window imploded to a cloud of hot ash and ripped slivers.

  'Go through,' cried Arithon, unwarrantedly jubilant as he yanked off his mantle. He unfurled the cloth like a blanket over the one intrepid guardsman who burst through cowed citizens to seize him. 'Lights out for you as a damned witch's bloodhound.' He skewered the guard mired in the wrack. While Fionn Areth hurtled on and slithered over the smoking, curdled varnish on the sill, he bent, cleared his sword, and snatched back his holed cloak. When he straightened, the guardsman's purloined weapon claimed as salvage, he ducked through the window on the heels of his double.

  Innocuously fair haired once again, he looked harmless, except for the bared blades he brandished in right and left hands. In baleful, wild humor, he breathed in the thick, yeasty smells of fresh bread. His green eyes missed nothing as he sized up the tradesfolk who stared openmouthed over their dropped utensils. He measured the journeymen, bedecked in floured aprons and bare arms, rolling out pastries and packing them with fragrant gobs of jam; then the women, muscled like fishwives, who kneaded and braided the dough. Lastly, the red-faced apprentices, caught aback tending the ovens, and behind them, the master baker, a wizened elder with muttonchop whiskers, ensconced like an owl on a stool. The old man brandished a bone-handled cane, his toothless lips puckered with outrage. 'Come here for looting, have you?'

  Arithon ignored him. 'Fetch some hot trays!' he snapped to the apprentice who gawped over his shovel by the coal fire. 'Use them to barricade this smashed window, at once. There's a Sorcerer outside, very dangerous.'

  With his head tipped in deference to the spitfire patriarch, Arithon spoke fast, 'We are certainly not thieves, but citizens come to protect you.' Credentials established, he tossed the spare sword into Fionn Areth's surprised hand. Then he asked after the wooden stair which connected every street-level craftshop in Jaelot to living quarters upstairs. 'Someone needs to stand guard on the dormers, lest banespells set fire to your roof.'

  'My daughter will show you along,' said a woman, against the proprietor's bristling objection. 'Stay quiet, you goose. Nobody needs your dose of hot air while there's a crisis afoot.'

  Arithon flashed her his best taproom smile, the universal brand of insouciant charm that won bards past furious wives whose goodmen had misjudged their capacity to hold beer and stay upright. 'We'll go to defend the upper balcony, then. Don't let anybody in or we're done for.'

  Fionn Areth, astonished, followed the daughter's lead, with Arithon, still talking, behind him. He scarcely heard what the Masterbard said. No sooner were they pounding up the twisty, narrow stair, when the downstairs door thundered and gave way with a splintering crash. The mayor's mounted lancers had apparently mustered a charge and rammed down the flimsy panel. A hiss and a squeal marked the fate of another man-at-arms, come to grief in a joust with a pastry tray at the window.

  The comely daughter glanced behind in uncertainty, while the two fugitives raced on ahead. Arrived on the third-floor landing, Arithon loosed a maniacal whoop of soft laughter. 'Score one for the hounds, but two points for us foxes. They can't chase with horses on the roof.' His critical gaze gauged the limp in Fionn Areth's stride, then the sword and the young hand that held it. 'Good. You know how to use that. We'll see about finding something better forged than Jaelot's garrison issue.'

  Two more light steps saw him through an open door. The bedroom beyond had thin dormer windows, and no other egress. Fresh out of safe options, Fionn Areth carried forward. He found the glass casement swung open, and Arithon's shod feet dangling from the roofpeak outside. The shoes vanished, replaced by a down-reaching hand. The fingers were sea tanned, longer and slimmer than Fionn Areth's, yet ringless in their refinement.

  'Grab hold, and be quick,' came Arithon's encouragement. 'Those troops are the mayor's elite guard. They've infested the downstairs like ants.'

  Fionn Areth felt the floor vibrate to the pounding of boots up the stairway. He clasped Arithon's wrist, cleared the sill with the sword, and swung out on faith, just as another fall of shadow clapped down, impenetrable and dense as a corpse shroud.

  'They've got marksmen with crossbows,' the s'Ffalenn prince apologized.

  Fionn Areth snapped a crude word through locked teeth. Suspended over thin air, scrabbling for firm purchase against unpainted clapboards sun and weather had raised to an uncouth morass of splinters, he skinned his good knee and wrenched his bruised tendons in his upward clamber onto the bare slate above.

  The roof proved no haven. Runneled ice cased the peak. Sea wind lashed his hair and flapped the long cloak like a sail around his wrenched shoulders. Hugged to the soot-tinged brick of the chimney, Fionn Areth coughed out a breath fouled with coal smoke. 'What do you plan to do now?'

  'In simplest terms? Run.' Over the yammering shouts from the street, a furtive slither of boot soles and cloth marked where Arithon tested the way down the sloped eaves. 'The Koriani have scryers. If they pin us down before we reach Dakar, we'll have much worse than city guardsmen howling murder.'

  Below and to one side came a clang and a clashing scream of smashed glass. Someone had hammered a weapon through the panes of the adjacent casement. Armed men were pursuing onto the roof, with nothing but darkness to slow them. Since a sliding fall into the cobbles below seemed a kindlier death than facing a sword on the faggots, Fionn Areth followed the touch on his wrist that pressed for a speedy departure.

  'Mind the loose slate,' said Arithon, breathless. 'How bad is that knee? Can you jump?'

  Rushed by adrenaline beyond reach of the pain, Fionn Areth replied, 'There's a choice?'

  'Always. It's the outcome that sadly limits things.' The Shadow Master paused, his other hand busy with some unseen task in the dark. He moved on momentarily, tacking what seemed an erratic course down the pitch of the roof.

  From above came more shouts, then a belling clash as steel coll
ided with stonework. The cry of abused metal interlaced with ripe language, and an officer's bellow of disgust.

  'I left my cloak draped over a chimney pot,' Arithon confessed through the clangor and din of redoubled pursuit on their back trail. 'Should have blunted the edge of one weapon against us, what the Shandians call a one-penny advantage. Come on. We're doubling back.'

  Fionn Areth balked. 'Going up?'

  'No,' came the snatched and hasty reply. 'Sidewards. There's a lady I knew who kept chickens in her attic. Hope and pray that her daughter still does.'

  The gap between buildings proved mercifully narrow, where upper stories overhung the back alley that paralleled the main thoroughfare. With the roaring noise of the square to the left, Arithon crossed, waiting only for Fionn Areth's arrival before he used his dagger to slip the locking bar on another dormer casement. He cracked the hinged window open a handswidth. Against the warm sigh of air past his cheek, and the reassuring, ammonia reek of guano, he sang a soft, low note into the loft where an unseen flock of fowl were still roosting.

  'That should keep them sleeping,' Arithon said. 'Try to go softly, nonetheless.' His hands grasped Fionn Areth's shoulder and assisted the tight squeeze through the dormer.

  Behind, clustered atop the adjacent roof, men-at-arms ranged in noisy descent. Astraddle the sill, Arithon paused again, head bent a fraction to one side. As though exhorting a laggard companion, he raised a distinct admonition. 'Ath's sake, man, move! Can't you go any faster?'

  An answering bass shout of recognition, then a scramble among the pursuit. The rush of booted feet lost distinction, turned into a sliding scream of metal, then a pattering of fall of loose slate. More cries, a thrashing scrabble, then a suggestive set of thuds as several bodies lost their purchase on the roof and hurtled to the cobbled street below.

  'Loose shingles,' Arithon said, apologetic, as he darted into the close-pressed heat of the attic and assayed a neat path between the railed perches that held rows of slumbering chickens.

  'You made those slates give,' Fionn Areth accused, prudent enough to keep his rage contained to a frantic whisper. 'That roof was sound when we passed down the pitch.'

  'But of course.' Agreeable, Arithon cat-footed ahead, still speaking between his odd, soothing croon to the hens. 'Bad acts, worse consequences. This is Rathain, where I am crown justice, and you are an innocent fugitive.' A hesitation, while he conducted a tactile search of the floorboards. 'I'm never heartless. A stay of mercy is offered for every man who gives up the chase to succor the injured.'

  He had found the trapdoor. The fastening yielded beneath his quick fingers, and the squeal of the hinge roused a sleepy cackle from a hen who expected the imminent arrival of her grain ration. 'Isheal,' murmured Arithon, which meant peace in the ancient

  Paravian. Then in prosaic king's tongue, 'There's a ladder. Go down. Just watch where you're pointing that weapon.'

  'I should be concerned?' the herder snapped back in his rough grasslands dialect.

  The sole reply his outburst received was a crash of glass and wood as a mail-clad pursuer burst through the attic dormer. The chickens exploded in racketing alarm, wings blundering hither and yon in the blackness. They crashed willy-nilly into steel helms, wrists, and faces; they dropped guano in cackling panic. Fionn Areth, looking up from his vantage on the ladder, realized that all of the shadows had lifted. Nor was Arithon s'Ffalenn still behind him.

  He reached the lower floor, wrenched sick with understanding, as a spray of shot scarlet fanned through the trapdoor above him. Using chickens for cover, the Prince of Rathain was indulging his own style of butchery. Inside of seconds, only birds held the violated loft, the crow of a triumphant rooster on the sill undercut by the drum of a dying man's heels in the straw.

  Unmoored feathers drifted through the gapped-open trapdoor. Arithon presently emerged and slid through them, slightly winded, one wrist scraped, and the black longsword he carried rinsed bloody. His white face held a look like the locked gates of Sithaer, and he trembled with electrified anger. 'Damn you, run! Four lives have bought us no more than minutes. It might not seem natural, given my reputation, but I don't like killing for necessity.'

  Stunned silent, Fionn Areth took advice. He raced down the hallway, his herder's boots slapping the board floor, striped with the thin, leaden light that seeped in through the second-story casements. The neat chambers on either side were empty, matron or daughter absent since breakfast to judge by the stale smell of grease sausage that lingered in the kitchen stairway.

  'Find the back door,' said Arithon, succinct in descent. 'There's an alley, probably jammed with a midden cart. Go under the axles and turn right.'

  'You know where we're going?' Fionn Areth cast back, his look-alike profile lined in the glow of the coals left unbanked in the grate.

  'To join Dakar.' The uncanny green eyes and black hair were unnerving, attached to another man's body. The voice, more incisive, with accents of chipped flint, 'We need him. The Koriani Order can't be faced down by sword tricks with shadows and flapped chickens.'

  The back door, unbarred, let into the alley, complete with the attendant slop cart. Fionn Areth crouched low, feeling all of his bruises, and the ice bite of wind through his borrowed cloak. Through the struts of the wagon, he saw flurrying movement and realized: the alley Arithon had chosen was occupied with people still fleeing the square. Apprehensive, he pulled his hood close to his face, just as the man who looked too much like himself ducked through the unsprung carriage of the wagon.

  'Don't you think we should separate?' Fionn Areth suggested.

  'No.' The dark head turned, green eyes piercing clear in a concern that itself was unsettling. 'What are you, suicidal?'

  Fionn Areth shook his head, outside of his depth and confused. 'Koriani aren't evil.'

  'For me, they are lethal, and without my protection the citizens of Jaelot would tear you apart on first sight. It's an ugly choice to risk. The witches might pause to spare you from a lynch mob, or they might decide they wanted my capture much more.'

  Given Fionn Areth's continued stiff silence, the Teir's'Ffalenn returned his soft, worldly laughter. 'You don't like my trust? Then answer this question. Is it you wearing my face, or me wearing yours? Ask yourself which one of us is the more likely bait in the trap?' He had wiped his fouled weapon. The blade angled up in a competent, gloved grip, he faced forward again, measuring the clumped knots of citizens who streamed down the mouth of the alley. 'Just don't carry the debate for too long. Dakar's at the jam seller's. If we get there late, he'll have eaten so much he'll be sleeping.'

  The crowd in the alley were goodwives and tradesmen, intermixed with brown-cloaked apprentices. Since they were rabbit frightened and largely unarmed, Arithon chose to push on. He masked his bared blade against his body, and in one fluid move when no one was looking, cut through the moving stream of passersby. Unwilling to remain shivering under the midden cart, Fionn Areth cloaked his own weapon and followed.

  'There's a potter's shop perhaps a midrange bowshot away,' Arithon gave low voiced instruction. 'If anything happens, wait for me there. You'll know the place by its red door.'

  They moved out, their presence immediately conspicuous as they passed against the common flow of traffic. If most folk seemed too absorbed to take notice, the more observant onlooker would be sure to view the anomaly with suspicion. The pair of fugitives kept to the shadows where they could. Yet the outdoor back stairs and crannies between craftshops offered inadequate bolt-holes, should intelligent pursuit overtake them. Limping again, feeling the pain of his disparate aches and bruises, Fionn Areth scarcely cared whether the Sorcerer beside him used unclean spells to mask their presence. He had found Arithon's view of the Koriathain disturbing, and the impact of his truth too entangled to refute; or why else should he and the Prince of Rathain share identical features?

  A touch on his arm snapped his reverie short.

  'Koriani, there.' The Shadow Master pointed.


  Fionn Areth tracked the surreptitious gesture, glimpsed the woman bundled in walnut-stained homespun who waited at the next corner. She had a shawl tightly tucked beneath her trim chin. Her bearing seemed mousy, nervous, and strained, not extraordinary. As the hurrying forms of five dyer's apprentices eclipsed the view of her watchful presence, Fionn Areth said, 'How do you know she's one of them?'

  'Hear it,' said Arithon, thinking at speed. 'She has a ranging ward running. The harmonics can be felt coursing through wood, if you're sensitive.' He made a decision, his mouth turned tight and grim. 'We're not going by way of the potter's anymore. Come on.'

  They passed instead through the wheelwright's back door, into forge-heated gloom alive with the clangor of hammers. Like the bakeshop and the fishmonger's, this craftshop remained too busy to close for the sake of a Sorcerer's execution. Fionn Areth looked about, his hesitant step crunching over shaved scrolls of hard oak, his lungs filled with the steam from the boxes where the wheels were bent and spoked, and fitted with forged iron rims. If he thought to slip through in quiet anonymity, Prince Arithon's intent ran contrary.

  Three bold-as-brass steps saw him poised by the scrap bin, where the bent and worn iron of those wheels beyond repair was saved as salvage for smelting. Possessed, stressed-out, or insanely inspired, Arithon began a racketing search through the jumble of broken metal. Two men at the forges looked up, incensed by the jangling noise. The apprentice they dispatched from his post at the bellows implored in nice manners, but failed utterly to convince the small, wayward customer to cease and desist his disruptive industry.

  Fionn Areth watched, dumbfounded, from the shadows, as a glib spate of oaths from the Shadow Master seeded a fist-waving argument. Smiths threw down hammers. The wood joiners left the steamboxes, sweaty arms wielding their hammers and pry bars, and their faces maroon with ill temper.

  'Everything, these,' Arithon exhorted, his broken language styled in a desertman's accent and his mood expansively unappeased. 'Too little, like fry fish!' His gyrating gesture almost bloodied a man's nose as he flung wide his arm to explain. 'Big! Big! I need a big round! Not these, no better than chick's nests.'