Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  ‘No extra pay for armed engagements, mind. But if you kill a barbarian defending the goods, you can claim posted bounty for headhunting.’ Coreyn extended a hand, his grip banded wire over the untried flesh of Fionn Areth’s offered palm.

  ‘Be at the eastside land gate by sunrise,’ he finished, and disengaged his brisk handshake. ‘No excuses for lateness. The season’s too chancy to waste even an hour stalling for damn fools and laggards.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Fionn Areth promised, his green eyes grave. Under the spill of the torches stubbed into the iron brackets by the doorway, he seemed suddenly young, and too vulnerable.

  Coreyn masked his disgust in stiff silence and strode off into the darkness.

  Long after the caravan captain departed, the hired sword whose face held another man’s bane never thought to wonder if his gift of good fortune held the thread of a wider design. He lingered in the stone entry of the Cockatrice, marveling at his incredible luck, and whispering endearments to the ancient, chipped carvings that gave the old tavern its name. The fretwork on the facings and the interlaced coils of the serpents themselves bespoke work too refined for human artisans.

  The world was a wide place, now his to explore. Excitement bubbled up and burst out in a whoop that slammed echoes off the gabled roofs, with their queer, rampant guardians crouched in their scales of shagged lichen. The cry rang over the icy gray cobbles and bounced through the arched columns that supported the massive, hewn beams of the balconies. More than one shutter slammed open, the rudely wakened sleepers inside howling outraged obscenities.

  Fionn Areth did not care. Hand clenched in pride on the hilt of his sword, he yelled again for pure joy. A herder no longer, he was free, and at last on sure course for his destiny.

  Autumn 5669

  Stymie

  By the hour that young Fionn Areth pledged his sword with Coreyn’s road guards in the predawn shadow of Daenfal’s eastern land gate, leagues distant, in Atainia, the night’s reign had not faded. Against the swept hills of the Bittern Desert, the west-facing casement of Althain Tower’s library still showed stars and a setting white sliver of moon. Its Warden was not caught napping through the moment when his earth-sense captured the caravan’s daybreak departure. The rhythmic scrape of the pen nib he used to scribe records on sheets of fine vellum broke off. Sethvir peered over his shoulder, his mild eyes piercing, and his eyebrows bristled with sorrow.

  ‘Luhaine?’ he whispered. ‘Stay with Verrain at Methisle. I’ve already checked. Nothing more can be done.’

  Through the span of one heartbeat, the tower chamber remained quiet. No candles burned. The shadowy, carved dragons supporting the slab table stayed etched into gloom, stone frozen to snarls and bared fangs. Only the restive air shared the charge of a terrible, mounting urgency.

  Sethvir elbowed his vellum and ink flask aside, warned by a cascading rush of disturbed wind that his plea had been disregarded.

  The next moment, the discorporate spirit wheeled in uninvited, riffling a small tempest of papers across the table and clapping shut the board covers of Sethvir’s opened books. ‘May those witches suffer Sithaer’s seven fires of perdition for their incessant, unconscionable meddling!’

  Luhaine’s presence focused into a tempest that rocked the crock of spare quills into rustling agitation. Sethvir clapped out a cobra-fast hand and pinned them before they winnowed willy-nilly in the storm.

  ‘I’ve not become boisterous as Kharadmon,’ Luhaine retorted in miffed response to the Warden’s raised eyebrows. ‘When I throw a tantrum, at least there’s a well-founded cause! The Koriani Prime has no morals, no compassion, and no shred of mercy!’ Without need for a pause to recover his breath, his tirade rolled seamlessly onward. ‘May her black heart char for eternity, and her spirit twist in the lightless pits at the negative pole of creation. If I had to pass judgment, I would suggest the longevity spells that preserve her unnatural life have finally driven her insane!’

  ‘She’s frightened,’ Sethvir said quietly.

  ‘Well she should be!’ Luhaine retorted, his fury transmuted to righteous indignation. ‘That dumpling she’s chosen to train for her office won’t survive the first trial of succession. She has to know. Lirenda’s not fooled. But even a frustrating setback of that magnitude can’t excuse her scheming manipulation of an innocent.’

  ‘You speak of Fionn Areth?’ Sethvir sounded weary, the slope of his shoulders almost beaten as he released the quills battened under his hand. He retrieved the one still dipped wet for writing and blotted the ink against the marked edge of his sleeve.

  Luhaine’s uncontained angst wafted on past the aumbries, circling the chamber’s perimeter. ‘They’ve set that boy up as a road guard, did you know, for a caravan bound into Jaelot!’

  ‘I saw.’ The mapwork of lines on Sethvir’s drawn face revealed all his agonized empathy.

  Luhaine whuffed past the casement. The weathered board shutters swung and banged in complaint, dropping rust flakes from tired hinges. ‘Save us,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t say the boy’s lost. We’re craven if we don’t lend him help to escape. The more so since this backhanded byplay of Morriel’s was conceived to restore her unprincipled use of the Great Waystone.’

  Sethvir shot to his feet in a driven burst that flapped a week’s dust from his robes. ‘Who could be spared? Traithe hasn’t been well. I dispatched him to Vastmark to map the new shale faults, since anything more taxing might kill him.’

  ‘Then Asandir’s gone to Camris?’ Luhaine stated, disturbed into mollified quiet.

  ‘He’s rededicating the wards on the Sorcerer’s Preserve, yes.’ Sethvir sat back down, his chin propped on gnarled fists. ‘There were instabilities in the bulwarks about to become holes, and this time, a cursory patch won’t suffice. He can’t leave prematurely. Not unless we want packs of Khadrim flaming caravans to cinders and marauding the crown territory of Tysan.’

  Luhaine grumbled with predictable pessimism, ‘No one of us should handle those forces alone.’ The powers involved were enormous and intricate, and utterly unforgiving of mistakes. Still worse, the barriers would require five arduous weeks to lay down and seal to stability.

  ‘The crisis couldn’t be made to wait.’ Sethvir sighed, pressed into silence by desperate tact, while Luhaine fumed in a mute fit of thwarted distress.

  He, too, was hamstrung. Ever since Morriel Prime had recovered the strength to command the matrix of the Great Waystone, she had wasted no time schooling a circle of senior initiates to meld their talents through its focus. She now had twelve, with as many more in training. Each initiate added meant an exponential increase in the scope and strength of her power. Pitched alone against such a force, no disembodied Sorcerer dared attempt even subtle intervention. Lacking a dense matter body as anchor, the refined energies of spirit could become fenced and trapped, spellbound to the matrix of the Koriani master crystal and set under a chained seal of binding.

  Only one other discorporate Fellowship mage remained at large with the cunning ingenuity to guard a colleague against the dangerous, drawing powers of a trance circle fused through the amethyst.

  ‘I already tried the last avenue of resort.’ Sethvir shook his head, sorrowful. ‘Davien’s shade still won’t answer my summons.’

  ‘Serve the Betrayer right if we fall, then,’ Luhaine groused in black pique. ‘He’ll poke his nose out of Kewar Tunnel one day and wonder why sunlight’s been swallowed by wraiths and Koriani are running the planet.’

  ‘You’d quit so easily? That’s not your style.’ Sethvir stroked his beard. A sly spark kindled deep in his eyes. ‘The season’s our ally. Do you think an early blizzard in the Skyshiel passes could delay that caravan’s arrival?’

  ‘I’m already gone,’ Luhaine grumbled. His acerbic rejoinder shimmered through the static that marked his hasty departure. ‘Though I’ll ask you to recall that bedeviling kinks in the weather is more Kharadmon’s preference than my own.’

  ‘Trade places
with him, then,’ Sethvir suggested to the air.

  A snort of disdain wafted back across a widening veil of distance. ‘Oh no! Let him stay in the vacuum communing with stars. An indefinite stint of boredom attending cold wards might lend him a refreshed perspective on the fine points of civilized behavior.’

  Alone once again, Sethvir arose and reset the slipped stay on the shutter. He tucked his unfinished page under a vase filled with the sunflower seeds, acorns, and beechnuts he saved for the birds and small creatures who visited his windowsill. Then he leaned on his elbows and gazed out, while the winds nipped and tangled the ends of his beard, and the gray well of daybreak erased the night’s constellations.

  The telling facts he had not shared with Luhaine left their pain like thorns in the heart. For if a diverted storm in the Skyshiels might stall Morriel’s plot through the five crucial weeks to let Asandir try an intervention, other forces remained still at play, every one of which set a dangerous spin on an unpredictable future. The earth link presented every deadly and volatile nuance for review.

  Even as the sun rose over the frost-powdered moors of Araethura, Sethvir tracked a courier westbound on a barge flying downriver toward Halwythwood. His dispatch satchel held a letter from one of Raiett Raven’s agents, addressed to the nearest officer of Lysaer’s Sunwheel Alliance. That missive would reach Morvain inside the next fortnight. A fast galley to Dyshent would bear word into Tysan that a man bearing the Master of Shadow’s description had been seen plying swordplay for wagers in the public market of Daenfal.

  Sethvir stirred at last as the first brown sparrows chirped from their roosts and took wing. Touched gold by dawnlight, he left to make tea in vain effort to quiet his ominous dread. For naught could halt fate, even if Asandir could effect a last-minute deflection. Fionn Areth’s carefree innocence now led him into dire straits, with no surety set on the outcome.

  Only one consolation could be wrung from the earth link’s converging train of bad news: Arithon s’Ffalenn and his crew aboard the Khetienn were far removed from the center of conflict. Three thousand leagues of chartless ocean lay between their logged position and the disastrous affray now setting up on the continent.

  Autumn 5669

  Fulcrum

  The snarl of cold winds over stripped stone kept Morriel Prime from her sleep. The frame of the palanquin where she lay wrapped in furs shuddered to each veer in the gusts, and the incessant pain which gnawed at her joints twinged to each tiny movement. Of all possible sites where she might need to winter, the mountain citadel of Eastwall ranked among the most miserable of choices. Yet there, as nowhere else along the sixth lane, the spine of the earth thrust upward, the great slabs of dark granite veined in white quartz. The stone of the Skyshiels formed a natural amplifier for Athera’s magnetic currents. In Eastwall, Morriel could lay her thumb on that pulsebeat, and fuse the all but limitless wellspring of raw power into chains and seals of her making.

  If the site served her ends, the journey into high altitude was a curse.

  No matter how many coverings she piled on, her hands stiffened, each knuckle a cold knob of glass. Imprisoned by frailty, tormented by her circling thoughts, she endured. The burden of the proscribed knowledge she safeguarded for the future benefit of humanity pressed on her shoulders like lead. Nor did companionship bring her relief. The obsequious lisp of the young woman she trained wore at her fragile, strung nerves. Solitude stung her with the trickling passage of seconds that chafed her like separate sand grains. She suffered each day, eaten raw by the unending cycle of hope and despair.

  Sleep brought her nothing but nightmares and frustration. While Lirenda sought to redeem her past flaws and draw Arithon s’Ffalenn to captivity, the Koriani Order looked to a threatened future.

  Morriel responded in pathetic relief when the seeress tapped for admittance.

  ‘Enter.’ The word was a reedy, thin whisper, scarcely audible through the thrash of the gusts as the curtains were pushed aside.

  Morriel tightened her grip on the fur quilts, wincing as the high, thin chime of star energies grazed through her sensitized consciousness. She had lived too long. The more her bodily senses failed her, the stronger grew the inner awareness, until even plain stone seemed to gibber impressions that spoke of the past flights of dragons. Moment to moment, the ancient Prime Matriarch had to fight for the focus to strain real sound from the untrustworthy chorus of phantoms unleashed in her mind.

  The seeress announced on a bright edge of triumph, ‘Dakar’s made landfall, just as you’d hoped.’

  ‘Oh, well-done!’ Morriel propped upright and snapped her thin fingers.

  A page groped from the shadows at the foot of her pallet. Blinking to shed the confusion of torn sleep, he stifled a yawn, then adjusted the pillows to settle the crone into a seated position.

  ‘I’ll need the Great Waystone,’ the old Prime directed. ‘Also the small coffer that’s locked in the cupboard beneath the sedan chair.’

  The seeress fetched and carried as the Prime requested, while the page followed orders and kindled the lamp. The shadows danced back as the flame caught. Lavender hangings sewn with silver seals of guard sparkled like frozen rain. The edges of cushions and the laced shine of braid framed Morriel’s erect form like a kiosk.

  ‘I’ll want the silk cloth that carries the seals for summons and dispatch.’ Morriel accepted the covered burden of the Waystone and cradled it between her raised knees. ‘Set a circle of guard. Then light the tienelle tapers at the four directions and place the coffer in my lap.’

  The loose, wispy fall of her unbound hair made her face seem a dry, wrinkled skull caught in a must of old cobweb. But her hooded, jet eyes gleamed with burning, mad joy as she bade servant and seeress, ‘Now leave me. This night’s work will be mine alone to complete.’

  Left in the flickering spill of the lamp, and crossed in crawling shadow thrown by the sullen gleam of the tapers, Morriel drew a key from a chain clasped to her skeletal wrist. She opened the coffer, then sorted through the silk-wrapped packets inside until she found the one bearing Dakar’s name.

  ‘Ah, well, my blundering beauty,’ she crooned to herself, while the winds slapped and moaned through the pennons on the finials outside. ‘Your time is well come, is it not?’

  White, spidery fingers untied the covering. Inside lay a tied wisp of curled, chestnut hair, purloined years ago by a harlot. The doxy had snipped her little keepsake while Dakar lay oblivious in one of his drunken stupors. No slave to sentiment, she had sensibly traded the trophy to the sisterhood for a potion to purge a malady caught from a sailor.

  Morriel Prime laid out the deep black square of silk with its embroidered silver circles. Then she unwound the faded ribbon which tied Dakar’s lock of hair. One strand, she placed on the stitched runes of the summoning seal. A second, laid crosswise, bridged the seal of dispatch. Then she unveiled the facets of the amethyst Waystone and positioned its chill weight inside the circle that joined the two points in opposition.

  The wind muttered off the peaks, stirring and stretching the flames in the drafts. Morriel Prime no longer felt the bite of the cold stabbing through her aged joints. Immersed in the throes of dire art and high spellcraft, she mastered the focal matrix of the Great Waystone for the unprincipled purpose of playing Dakar’s power of prophecy as her personal puppet string …

  Many leagues over the Cildein’s waters to the southeast, the risen sun blazed high over the sands of an atoll lapped in the aquamarine shallows of the tropics. The small string of islets capped a volcanic ridge uncharted by previous mariners. If Paravians had ever set foot there, or if dragons had alighted to rest in their flights on the thermals as they crossed the vast waters between continents, none knew. The islets were too sparse to sustain any settlement. Even the records at Althain Tower held no vellum with an inked position for the cove where Arithon’s brigantine, the Khetienn, currently nestled at anchor.

  Sethvir’s earth-sense linked the site with the flight of
nesting petrels, or touched on the dry land through the chambered veins of magma flowing underneath the deep sea floor.

  The volcanic cone held a rainwater lake. The outflowing stream offered one of nine springs where Arithon’s fleet put in to replenish its water casks. Here, also, it took on stores shipped from the mainland. Such stops for provisions never observed a fixed schedule. The inbound vessels to restock the brigantine’s hold came and went by the whims of winds and weather. Sometimes the seagoing crews matched their landfall. Other times, rimed with the salt crust of unbroken passage, the Khetienn and one or more companion vessels might ghost in through the reefs to find the idyllic cove empty. Their spare lines and nails, their sailcloth and barrels of salt meat and ale would be left, stashed in a dry cave near the shoreline. Over the years, routine became set.

  Each hull would be careened and inspected. Between hours of hard labor and needed repairs, the crews would ply the rank jungle to snare birds, then spit them and feast on the beaches. Some years they brewed palm wine. Shipboard discipline dissolved to a bedlam of celebration, while children born to the clan wives at sea would scream and race through the shallows. Replete with fresh meat or a meal of purloined eggs, men would argue and wrestle, content to snatch reprieve as they could, while Arithon riffled through his sealed packets of correspondence. At need, he would open his affairs to discussion, penning out cryptic replies to be left in the cave for the next ship to dispatch to his contacts back on the mainland.

  Dakar’s requirements were simpler. Resigned from his years of privation at sea, he curled in the sheltered shade of a palm tree and drank himself senseless on spirits. He would dream of women and silk sheets. When he awakened, he kissed the dry ground that stayed warm and solid, with no prank, heaving waves set to trip him. His hatred of seafaring had not lessened with time. The miracle left him dumbfounded, that his heart had not yet shirked its weary task of pumping his bored blood through his brain.