Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Traithe regarded him, level and unblinking as the harbinger bird perched on his hat. ‘Because the very strength of your citadel here makes your family a sitting target.’

  ‘What’s changed then?’ Mearn was first to demand, his thin, vibrant frame outlined in lightning as the storm cracked and slammed at his back. ‘When I left Avenor, the lies were paraded in full daylight, the most glaring of them the false claim that Lady Talith’s fatal fall was a suicide.’

  ‘The summer muster’s all you’ve been shown in the open.’ Pegged oak struts squeaked as Traithe shifted, perhaps to ease the pull of old scars. A snap of his fingers, and the raven hopped down and resettled on his raised forearm. An undefined tension pulled at his mouth, as though he chose words with reluctance. ‘Other developments are afoot, more threatening than these plans for new battlements. Lysaer’s Alliance has been busy recruiting what gifted talent the Crown Examiner doesn’t burn. Etarra will be gathering the library to train them, at first to hunt down their own kind. But a tool in the hand will come to be used. Such is the way of human nature.’ His keen glance at Bransian showed earnest concern as he finished his threadbare conclusion. ‘Your walls will hold against arrows and steel. What of an attack launched in fire and light, and backed by the powers of dark spellcraft?’

  Across a prickling, uncomfortable silence, rain thrummed in tantrums against stone and slate. Dame Dawr sat, bright eyed as a small, ruffled hawk. Mearn shoved back his chair and paced outright, while Bransian rubbed his wire beard with a thumb, his expression bearish and disgruntled. Parrien, in absently thoughtful unease, traced an intricate old watermark left on the oak table by a past visit from Asandir.

  Singled out by the raven’s unfathomable stare, Keldmar relieved his discomfort through speech. ‘We are clanblood, still.’ He slammed his oiled sword back home in its sheath. ‘We uphold this town’s charter in name for a high king whose ancestor swore your Fellowship a blood oath of service to rule under strict terms of the compact. Could we not ask you Sorcerers for help if an assault threatened to overwhelm our defenses with conjury?’

  ‘You could ask,’ Traithe admitted. ‘Against misuse of power, our assistance is entitled. But a promise is worthless without resource to back it. The extended range of the Fellowship’s responsibilities has left our diminished number sorely strained. If the Alliance moved with intent to forestall us, we might have no hand free to send. Sethvir was plain. His earth-sense reads patterns. He sees the hoarded wealth gathering at Avenor, laid against the new template for a fortress that will reforge Etarra into the dedicated sword of the Light. Spark and dry tinder, was his precise phrasing.’

  No need to reiterate that Alestron might become the struck flint to ignite that volatile fuel to burning, not with Cattrick’s craftsmen alive and busy building ships in the citadel’s inner harbor.

  Bransian spoke over the hammering roll as thunder rebounded from the hills. ‘Did Sethvir foresee trouble?’

  Traithe matched his grim honesty, a shadow stamped out in silver and black against the rough play of the elements. ‘Not yet. He saw possibility, coupled with ominous warning.’ The laugh lines at his eyes seemed expunged from his flesh, and the raven a more somber extension of his forthright concern. ‘Sethvir bade me remind you that Lysaer s’Ilessid bears the s’Ahelas gift of farsight through his maternal lineage. Never discount what hidden seeds that man might hold in his hand. The Mistwraith’s curse drives him. If he suspects you are Arithon’s friend, he would hold that knowledge in close calculation. He might bide for years if he thought he could wring best advantage from arranging your moment of downfall.’

  ‘S’Ilessid already knows we’ve changed loyalty, I’ve no doubt left on that point.’ Seated stark straight, her features sharpened with testy autocracy, Dame Dawr clasped neat hands over the ferrule on her stick. ‘At Avenor, I caught too many prying eyes at my back. The sunwheel initiate we put off at Tideport was young, but no fool. More than a spy, I would wager my last pearls that he was a natural-born talent sent to act as Cerebeld’s informant.’

  The raven swiveled its jet bill toward the inimitable old matron, its eyes as sharp as sheared gimlets. Before Bransian could inject a scoffing remark, or Mearn stab back to defend her, Traithe said, ‘That’s a most astute guess. What made you draw that conclusion?’

  Dawr expelled a derisive breath through her nose. ‘Raised the hair at my nape, that young man did. The woman’s a born simpleton, who mistrusts her instincts where the safety of her family’s concerned.’

  Traithe’s startling, bright smile came and went through the flare of the storm through the arrow slits. To Duke Bransian, he concluded, ‘You would do very well to pay heed to your grandmother’s hunches.’ As though aware the audience had drawn to a close, the raven launched off and flew, then vanished on spread wings down the stairwell. The Sorcerer arose, the grace of each movement undone by the unkind ache of old injuries. He braced one palm on the table, leaned over, and swept the flat of his hand across the copied lines inscribed on the unrolled parchments. ‘The masons from Elssine know fragments of old lore?’

  Bransian rested his massive forearms on the chairback he straddled like a camp stool. ‘Judge that for yourself. This tower was built by the master craftsmen’s great-grandfather.’

  ‘Then Sethvir was not wrong.’ Traithe gathered himself, well aware he faced a difficult night after a long, slow descent of steep stairs. ‘These new walls at Etarra are going to skew the free flow of the fifth lane, if our Fellowship doesn’t walk over the ground there and give the earth her fair warning. At least one of us must go to reaffirm the lines that channel the subtle magnetics.’ He tipped a nod to Dame Dawr, then clasped wrists with the duke. ‘Forgive my rushed parting. This round of ill news means I must send word back to Althain Tower and ask for a summons to Asandir.’

  Autumn 5669

  Grudge

  The Mayor of Jaelot had gout, which pained him to distraction at the first onset of cold weather. Each autumn, when the sea air off Eltair Bay raked its damp chill through his city, he muffled himself in flannel and took to his bed, his puffed ankles braced like bloated red sausages in the lace-bordered pillows his wife favored. His face above the pleats of his nightshirt bore a scowl; his pouched, bulldog jowls and narrow-set eyes became indelibly lined with distemper.

  If the experienced servants knew well to stay clear, the new clerk standing in for the municipal secretary droned away in pedantic oblivion.

  ‘Our treasury is still grossly in debt from the last annuity granted to the Alliance. Two raids at sea caused setbacks to trade. We can’t tax the merchants’ lost profits.’ His lecture lagged as he fussed with his parchments, ticked a mark with his pen, and wagged a vague finger toward the bundled invalid on the bed. ‘With our city finances on the verge of collapse, the cost of sending state funds to Etarra in support of Prince Lysaer’s proposed war host would seem an imprudent extravagance.’

  The mayor lost his last shred of equilibrium. He rammed his fists in the quilts, tore a seam in the lining, and shouted through the resultant explosion of goose down. ‘Damn your advice past the Wheel to Sithaer! And damn the expense to perdition! I’ve waited fifteen years for the Divine Prince to tire of pandering to the whiners on his council back in Tysan. His heir’s all but grown. Do you think a black sorcerer who bends darkness itself will wait while we bemoan the theft of a few cargoes? Jaelot will pay this new tithe to raise arms! Our delegates will endorse Lysaer’s call for better fortifications against shadow if we have to beggar every last one of our craft guilds.’

  The clerk looked up, blinking. While the Lord Mayor still glowered, hair raked up in tufts, the young man under scrutiny tipped the feather on his quill and made casual effort to scratch an itch underneath his wool collar. ‘Surely, your lordship, other cities than ours could underwrite the burden of routing such evil from society.’

  The mayor choked, rendered speechlessly purple. Through his stertorous rasp as he struggled to recover, the doo
r to his chamber flew open. The panel rebounded from the wainscoted wall and trembled every silken tassel on his bedhangings.

  A wire-thin woman in pearl ropes and ruffled taffeta sailed through, spouting distressed imprecations.

  ‘Oh dear,’ sighed the mayor, defensively mollified.

  His wife, her ladyship of Jaelot, stalked up to his bedside, her dark hair rammed up like a ship’s prow with combs, and her pointed chin cocked for a tirade. The first victim became the guileless clerk.

  ‘What have you said to upset my lord? He’s ill, can’t you see?’ Wafting a breeze of patchouli, she thrust her beaky nose in the shrinking man’s face and snatched his ordered parchments from his hand. ‘Get out! Take these and your nattering back to the countinghouse and use them to balance the ledgers.’ She slapped the sheaves of parchment against the man’s chest, driving her point home as he frantically snatched to save his notes from cascading onto the carpet.

  ‘Where the capture of the Shadow Master’s cohorts are concerned, no man questions the mayor’s will.’ Her ladyship sniffed. ‘Jaelot’s depleted revenue will scarcely come to matter if the s’Ffalenn bastard returns and levels half our walls by means of fell powers and sorcery.’

  Through the clerk’s rankled mewl of protest, the mayor howled back. ‘Where the enemies of this city pose a threat, I can speak for my own affairs, woman!’

  His wife ignored him. ‘You’re ill and in pain.’ Her brisk, jeweled hands tugged and prodded at bedclothes, oblivious to his winces as her efforts jostled the tender flesh of his ankles. ‘You ought to be sleeping, dear, and not driving yourself to a lather over the treasury’s state of debt.’ A decisive last slap plumped the pillow beneath the Lord Mayor’s tufted head. ‘I’ll send one of the maids with a posset.’

  Pearls clicked and spattered muted points of light as she flounced the elaborate, trimmed layers of her skirts, then pinned bird-beady eyes on the clerk, who still cowered behind the clutched leaves of his tally sheets. ‘You had better be gone when the medicine arrives.’ She gave a chirp of exasperation and marched out.

  Perfume gusted back and rippled the lion-bossed hems of the hangings as she snatched the door closed behind her.

  The mayor crushed down the pillow, which poked him in the groin, and shot a whipped-dog glance sideward. ‘Nobody ever crosses her without spoiling their day.’

  At least wise enough not to answer, the rattled public servant bent his storkish frame into an upholstered chair. Leather squeaked and horsehair stuffing rustled as he evened up the corners of his notes. ‘The way you carry on, a man might believe the Master of Shadow was demonkind.’

  The Mayor of Jaelot blinked his couched eyes. ‘You must be quite new to your post here.’

  ‘Yes, actually.’ The clerk dared a smile. ‘I trained with a country scribe on the grass downs north of Daenfal, but herders don’t require written records. I came east to make my start in the world. The ways of a port city are wonderfully diverse. Beats the plodding bore of counting out bales of shorn wool and verifying ownership on spring kids pastured out in the bogs.’

  A grunt issued from the mounded ruckle of silk bedclothes; the mayor slapped down another offending pillow, his irritable mood turned expansive. ‘Well, the first time your cronies become garrulous with wine, they’ll share what they know of past gossip. The name of the Shadow Master is forever accursed here in Jaelot.’

  ‘I don’t like drinking,’ the clerk prompted, his fresh features politely expectant.

  The entrenched glimmer of ire returned, fanned to warning brilliance as the mayor crossed his arms over the gold-frogged closure of his nightrobe. ‘The ugliness happened twenty-five years ago.’ He steamed with the memory of the event he had nursed to a virulent grudge. ‘The black-hearted mountebank they call Spinner of Darkness came to our city disguised as a masterbard’s apprentice. He stayed here six months. No one suspected. His innocent manner could have duped Ath Creator himself. Then on midsummer’s eve, as a guest in my hall, the fell creature called down a whirlwind. His sorcery dismembered half the roofs and walls in the district to cover his tracks as he hid. Four days later, he escaped. Disappeared through the heart of a thunderclap. You can still see the marks in the palace hall, where the floor tiles had to be replaced.’

  The rest, of course, had to be hyperbole. The clerk folded his arms, and admitted disbelief, that the tower by the east postern gate still showed cracks in the bedrock foundation.

  The mayor drew breath, riled back to indignation. ‘That’s a truth attested by witnesses, man! We still have a half dozen battlements bricked up where the walls are considered unstable. Not even the farmers in the countryside were spared. Their cottages and barns were shaken down in a swath that extends all the way to the Skyshiel Mountains. The destruction struck terror into every honest heart. Let me say, there’s no one here in Jaelot who will ever forget the event. My council will not rest the case until this shadow-bending sorcerer and his barbarian cohorts lie dead. For myself, I’d stake all my fortune to bring the Light-accursed meddler to the faggots.’

  ‘I see.’ The clerk cleared his throat, reshuffled his notes, and fastidiously crossed out the offending tick mark. ‘We’ll borrow again from the tinsmith’s guild. That should raise funds to meet the Light’s tithe to refortify Etarra.’

  Rapid footfalls sounded outside the door. The mayor flopped back, eyes shut in forbearance as the latch tripped and a maid whisked in, burdened with a tray containing a cup and several bottles of dubious liquid. ‘Your medicines, milord.’

  The clerk received a gruff wave of dismissal. ‘Jaelot won’t stay the worse for our effort, be assured. His Grace, the Blessed Prince has kept every binding promise ever made since our fleet went down in flames against the Shadow Master’s spells at Minderl Bay.’

  The clerk withheld comment, eager not to seem ignorant as he stowed his documents into his bulging satchel.

  Jaelot’s Lord Mayor gave the vials on the tray his jaundiced inspection, signal enough that the morning audience had reached a precipitous end. The clerk snatched his moment and nipped through the doorway as his eminence burst into another bellowing tirade.

  ‘I’ll not touch that repulsive concoction again! Tell my wife! Yes! Say her wretched, bootlicking healer’s an ass. Any more tisanes that taste like burned turds, and I’ll risk oath of debt and call in a Koriani herb witch!’

  Autumn 5669

  Byplay

  Cloaked like a queen leopardess in a throw of white ermine, Morriel Prime extended an ivory finger. ‘See for yourself.’ Her scrying basin of silver-veined marble stood braced in a copper tripod at the center of her rented room in Highscarp. ‘The hour draws nigh. The trap you have planned must soon be set into motion.’

  Lirenda arose from her deep curtsy, each movement embedded in the feathery rustle of silk skirts. If she had not yet recovered the honorary eight bands which denoted the First Senior’s high office, the passage of years had eased the worst stigma of her disgrace. She no longer dressed unobtrusively or shrank from the summons to present herself for Prime audience. For that day’s encounter, she wore royal purple. Her trim bodice and full hemline sparkled with gold thread, laced in patterns of songbirds and vines. Mantled in her air of well-bred self-command, she scarcely nodded her acknowledgment as the upstart initiate who still usurped her place at the Prime’s right hand stepped out in response to Morriel’s flicked gesture of dismissal. The silent, matched page boys stationed at the door latched the panels for privacy.

  The disaffection between the young woman and her displaced predecessor had deepened to mutual antipathy. The new candidate had the gift of raw power, but no brilliance. Though she had grown to three decades of maturity, her lack of imagination made her clumsy and slow, which faults she buried in stiff self-importance when her rival’s keener wit left her threatened.

  Had the reversal in roles been one whit less devastating, Lirenda might have been amused by the woman’s baffled efforts to grasp the nuance of power and aut
hority.

  Quite soon, the issue would become a moot point. From the moment Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn was taken captive, the onus of old mistakes would be rectified. Lirenda arose to the occasion with unassailable confidence. Skirts neatly raised, she crossed the inn’s wooden floor, scarred by the hobnailed boots of the Etarran troops who now routinely patrolled Rathain’s coast.

  She knelt on the throw rug beside the filled basin. Since water was not her favored element, she cupped the quartz crystal on the chain at her neck as the focus to access her powers.

  For all her pretension, the past still left scars. A wretched sense of gratitude still dogged her each time she accessed her heightened awareness. Her memory of shame and helplessness seemed entrenched since the miserable interval when the crystal had passed from her possession. The branding awareness of just what she stood to lose gnawed at her yet, until the succession to prime power obsessed her, waking and sleeping.

  Left with Arithon’s freedom as the obstacle to surmount, Lirenda bent her will to the task of arranging his downfall.

  She settled her five senses, tuned out the distant, slanging argument between the drudges who swept out the downstairs common room. The swirl of cool drafts and the creak of the inn’s cedar shutters faded and dissolved before the strictures of discipline. Immersed within a core of pent stillness, Lirenda laid her hands on either side of the basin. She let her unfocused gaze diffuse into the depths. Slowly, gradually, her passive mind assumed alignment with the subtle energies that coiled through the volatile template of the water.