Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  ‘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.

  While the brigantine slammed smoking through another black trough, the Mad Prophet pleaded. ‘Eight men are dead who served Arithon’s cause. As well as he knew them, he’s not shown one shred of natural grief for their passing. That behavior is worrisome, in light of the curse. If you knew the man’s twisted nature as I do, you’d help plumb the bent of his thinking.’

  Vhandon lowered his blade, but did not sheathe the steel. A stalwart presence of masked shrewdness and subtlety, he held his ground with the obstinacy of a siege wall. ‘Your prince isn’t mourning. He believes that Cattrick and the others still live.’

  Dakar swallowed. ‘Self-blinded delusion,’ he husked. ‘I saw the corpses in a scrying sent by Sethvir. Arithon caught the resonance of the vision through his bard’s gift. When I gave him the names, he was blithe as a man undone by a surfeit of gin.’

  ‘Delusion or no, he’s not so blithe now.’ Disdainful of talk, Vhandon snapped a curt gesture toward the quarterdeck.

  There, to judge by the uncanny, straight course the brigantine slammed through the cross swell, Arithon manned the helm without the assistance of ship’s mate or quartermaster.

  ‘He’s alone up there?’

  Talvish tapped his fingers in staccato tattoo over the studs of his bracer. ‘What, you haven’t been listening?’

  Dakar harkened. Through a lull in the gusts, amid the white hiss of spray, he belatedly detected a snatched fragment of song. The notes were an exquisite rendition in minor, and the phrases of lyric Paravian.

  ‘That’s no one’s grief for a fallen comrade,’ Vhandon observed, his brute manner sharpened to an astuteness the Mad Prophet found more disturbing.

  Talvish said, impatient, ‘Man, if your prince is heart torn for any one thing, it’s the fact he can’t break his self-imposed exile without bringing dire ruin upon everyone that he cares about. If he turns back from here, I’d stake my own neck, his decision won’t be made willingly.’

  Nor was the assessment of character inaccurate. By then, Dakar had absorbed the raw gist; Arithon bled off his anguish in song, his haunting, sweet tribute for the Koriani enchantress who had irrevocably captured his heart. All the salt sea would not be enough to close the wound of that sorrow. Each mile the Khetienn logged widened a separation that remained a living torment to them both.

  In a gossamer fabric raised soaring over the complaint of the ship’s timbers, his melody described a suffering as lucid as etched glass. Arithon sang, in the absence of choice. His bitterness for the years that must lie ahead, filled with the hard forces of water and wind: the vistas of a ship’s lonely passage, far removed from the sweet summer smell of earth’s greenery, poured into expression in clean sound. His art became his inadequate solace. The vulnerability, the pain, the sheer longing of spirit that cried out for its exquisite, paired match shaped an agony beyond all wounding.

  Dakar’s resolve crumbled. He found that he lacked the ice-cold nerve, after all, to invade the quarterdeck and badger the singer’s snatched solitude. His sigh commingled with the next risen gust, while spray flung chill runnels down his moon face, and sorrow pressed lead through his heartstrings.

  ‘Ath, but who is she?’ Talvish burst out, his throat wrung to tightness. Against his turned face, wind-lashed strands of blond hair wicked the salt tears from his cheeks.

  ‘Her name is Elaira,’ the Mad Prophet revealed, equally helpless in sympathy. ‘And Vhandon is right, the point’s moot. Conjecture or delusion, it scarcely matters whether Cattrick and his men are among the dead or the living. I presume we agree? Arithon s’Ffalenn can never be permitted to risk another entanglement with Desh-thiere’s curse.’

  Through the shudder as the vessel slapped spume off the next crashing wavecrest, neither one of the s’Brydion retainers delivered a word in agreement. Against that spiraling spell of wrought song, gestures came sooner than speech. The older, more taciturn Vhandon stirred first and snapped his sword back in its sheath. ‘His Grace won’t go back. Not since we’ve sworn our oath to protect him.’

  But the younger, dancer-slight Talvish delivered the most punishing insight of all. ‘If there was ever a crime against nature, it occurred on the hour your Teir’s’Ffalenn was compelled to lay hand on a sword.’

  ‘That’s what Caolle once said,’ the Mad Prophet conceded, struck through by undying grief. He did not add that the caithdein’s late war captain had taken hard knocks and hot argument before he ever reached that understanding of the torn thread in Arithon’s character. These retainers charged to guard the s’Ffalenn prince’s safety possessed a fearfully well honed perception. Through the long years ahead, to the ominous event that would one day match Sethvir’s forecast, Dakar could but hope this pair owned wit and strength enough to offset the Shadow Master’s fiendish cleverness.

  Ath help them all if his first fears were truth, and the two men proved to be the duke’s spies, with s’Brydion loyalty turned to murder in support of Lysaer’s powerful Alliance.

  Spring 5654

  Aftermath

  The frank fascination which first drew Raiett Raven aboard Avenor’s royal galley did not fade, but attached him to the side of his nephew, the Alliance Lord Commander, when Prince Lysaer examined the fire-torn ruin of his shipyard. Rain had fallen since the blaze. The huddle of officials and guarding men-at-arms reviewed the grim scene, while the tang of wet ash and carbon spiked the mud-sour miasma of ebb tide off the flats down the estuary. Of the sheds and the timbers, the steam boxes and sail loft, nothing remained but charred beams, tumbled in heaps, or stuck skyward like arthritic fingers. If the drizzle had stopped, the sky remained clouded. The cobbled entry wore a slippery sheen of condensation that made the most careful step treacherous.

  No one who attended that royal delegation need argue over the aftermath. The enterprise was a total loss.

  ‘They must have purloined the pitch barrels from the stores to fuel the fires that swept through the buildings. The whole place went up in a whirlwind of flame, just that fast. Bucket brigades formed by the garrison had no chance from the outset.’ Riverton’s stoop-shouldered mayor flanked the Blessed Prince, morose in quilted gray velvet. ‘The heat and the smoke were too thick. Our siege-trained captains couldn’t salvage even the steel tools.’ He tugged at the drooping end of his mustache, sad eyed and white muzzled as a tracking hound who had outworn the vigor of the hunt. ‘Your Grace, I am grieved that misfortune has struck down the trust you placed in my city.’

  Diamonds shimmered in the pallid air as Lysaer broke his long stillness. ‘Riverton will not shoulder the blame. Nor would I see the craftsmen suffer, stripped of their livelihood.’ He snapped his fingers. A liveried secretary delved into a satchel and extricated a sheaf of documents. ‘These are copies,’ Lysaer said. ‘The first list includes the men I wish to interview. The second is compiled from the shipyard’s last payroll. By nightfall, I need the verified names and numbers of each worker’s dependent family. For the loyal ones still in residence here, there will be a crown pension to keep them until my shipworks can be refounded. When that time comes, the laborers will be given the option to resume work or remake their own fortunes elsewhere.’

  ‘That’s wondrously generous.’ The mayor dabbed at his rheumy eyes. ‘More than one goodwife will bless your royal name for the children that will not go hungry.’

  Lysaer pressed on, brisk, and outlined fair procedure for reimbursements to outside suppliers, for by ruthless design, the ledgers and records in Cattrick�
�s loft had been destroyed along with the incriminating ships’ drawings. ‘The wreckage was caused by malefactors acting against the crown interests of Tysan. Therefore, on my word, the regency gives full promise the hardship won’t fall on the shoulders of innocents.’

  Riverton’s overcome mayor bent to one stiffened knee and embarked on effusive words of thanks. The Blessed Prince heard him through, his smile gracious. He then took his leave, together with his guard and his coterie of councilmen, who all looked relieved for the chance to ease their sore feet. By the gate, he acknowledged the cloaked figure of Raiett Raven, watching his effortless dance of diplomacy with experienced sophistication.

  Lysaer paused. The train of groomed officials tagged his heels with carefully guarded impatience while he held the wily Hanshire statesman under his waiting regard.

  After a moment, the comment he expected was offered in stiletto sharp phrases. ‘Well-done.’ Raiett’s thin lips flexed, more smirk than smile. ‘A prince who keeps enemies could not hold good craftsmen in service if he left them exposed to predation.’

  For a moment, the air seemed to crackle between the two men, the prince white clad and shimmering against the overcast, and Raiett in his black, thin and ascetic, with the piercing gaze of a prophet.

  Lysaer spoke at last through a fragile tension. ‘Since you can’t be the dove and accept my act for the charitable welfare of children, then consider the fact I’ll outlive them.’

  Raiett raised an eyebrow, no whit overawed by the charismatic impact of his adversary’s royal presence. ‘They’ll grow up in your debt, and become fodder for crows as adults?’

  Lysaer accepted that searing riposte with equanimity. ‘It was not the crow I wished to court at this time, but the fox underneath his dark feathers. Would you care to come along and witness the next round of interviews?’