Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Site’s haunted,’ insisted the inn’s lanky horseboy as he hefted a packframe onto the last mule to outfit Reysald’s caravan. ‘If you stand there from sundown to sunrise, you’ll see unicorns passing, all ghostly gray in the moonlight. Some men go mad. Some see past the veil. For certain, they say, if you wish on that stone, every shadow in your heart will come true.’

  Huddled in the brisk dawn air of the stable yard, Fionn Areth watched the clouds scud like dirty ice above the brown flank of the hill. The stone was a slender, milk obelisk at the crest, mottled with shag moss and lichen.

  The horseboy adjusted the crupper, then slapped begrimed knuckles on his breeches. ‘Still, you’ll wish you were staying. Snow could be flying by midday, and the caves where you’ll camp don’t offer wenches and ale.’

  ‘I don’t mind the cold,’ Fionn Areth said, neutral, lest his imagination on the subject of women embarrass him into a blush. He grasped the mule’s reins and led it into line to be loaded under the expert eye of the head drover.

  The goods bound for Jaelot required twenty mules, with another ten to pack food and fodder for the train’s master, three hired muleteers, and six outriders. The horsemen went armed, ostensibly to guard, but in fact each one carried a stiff leather prod to drive balky animals at need. This turned out to be most of the time on a trail that snagged like shorn thread through vicious black crags of sheer rock. The scarps in between were not steep in these foothills, but strewn with the tumbled debris of old slides and spiked by the stripped limbs of deadfalls.

  Accustomed to goats, Fionn Areth did not balk at handling animals. The destination was agreeable. From talk at the inns, he had learned that the Mayor of Jaelot kept a field troop of mercenaries oathsworn to Prince Lysaer’s Alliance. The force was committed to guard against Shadow, wherever such conflict might call them. Stirred by the accounts of the earlier wars against sorcery fought at Tal Quorin and Vastmark, Fionn Areth resolved to enlist.

  The trail switched back and climbed from the Severnir valley, flanked to the right by the forbidding summits of the spur that gave rise to Rockfell Vale. The rugged knife ridges and dark, fanged peaks were perpetually snarled in cloud. Mornings shook the ground with the distant rumble of avalanche as the slopes shrugged off the night’s snowfall. Those few stands of fir which clawed leaning hold against southbound winds off the barrens wore jagged scars from the onslaught of each winter’s storms. Steep-sided valleys arrowed from the crests, zigzagged and forked as the imprint of frozen lightning.

  ‘Men die in this pass at this time of year,’ the road master cautioned after Fionn Areth strayed beyond sight while foraging wood for the cookfire. ‘Storms can whip in off of Eltair Bay with terrible force and no warning. Just a mess of black cloud will come howling down the notch. These peaks trap their fury like a witch’s funnel. Never be more than ten steps from your horse. Your life could depend on her instincts.’

  The onslaught of two such blizzards delayed them. The first one they weathered in a string of small caves, one of the uncounted fissures that branched from the caverns of Skelseng’s Gate. The second storm caught them at the end of their supplies, with no choice but to batter ahead. They made punishing progress against shrieking winds and blundered through chest-high drifts. One mule was lost, and two men suffered frostbite before the caravan struggled to shelter in a wayside posthouse jammed into the oblique cleft of a valley.

  There, they waited the fell weather out. The road master grew short-tempered on beer as the days wore past one by one. ‘Bedamned to Koriani and their idiot priorities.’ He glared at the mule packs piled in the corner, and cursed in complaint of the chimney smoke wafted back down a flue in neglected need of a sweeping.

  Fionn Areth tried dicing. He lost a week’s silver and his father’s skinning knife before he learned not to play fast with the men in the taproom. Holed up in the loft with the horseboys, he fared better. They staked only copper, or broom straws for sport. There, his shy smile won him the attention of a freckle-faced potgirl. Dicing lost favor before the sheer fascination of her teasing, warm kisses and hot eagerness. The hours melted into a swift passage of nights, while the high drifts subsided to glaze ice. Surefooted mules could be trusted to compensate, but horses required caulked shoes.

  Fionn Areth spent his last coin in the smithy, then mounted his newly shod pony as the caravan rousted to resume delayed passage to Jaelot.

  The trail climbed like a stair through a narrowing gap. The Pass of Sards tucked like a fold in the vast, forbidding fault line, where the continent had buckled in an age-old cataclysm and raised up the Arwent plateau. The spur of the Skyshiels ranged to the north, hammer to anvil against the glittering southern summits. Peaks jumbled one on another against the washed blue of the sky like a giant’s clutch of dropped knives.

  ‘Whole of Sards Pass was a dragon’s eyrie, once,’ the head drover confided in a dawn that splashed the upper snowfields to a riot of carmine and gilt. He squinted, skin creased like old leather, and pointed out the inky, glass scars where the balefires of drakes had melted the granite to slag. ‘The creatures had claws big around as your leg, if you can swallow the tales the herb woman told in my village.’

  ‘Light holds they tell lies,’ an outrider groused as he mounted his horse.

  The old drover slapped the dusty rump of the mule he had just hitched into the traces. ‘Light or Shadow, who cares? Old dragons are three Ages dead.’ He winked at Fionn Areth, then whistled through his teeth to signal the wagoneer to start his vehicle rolling.

  For eight days, the mules skidded and scrambled and made backbreaking work for the drovers. Nights passed to the moaning misery of the gusts, rampaging down from the heights to box and batter the tent canvas, and flutter the cookfires ragged. The caravan suffered no attack beyond boredom. Men-at-arms pinched their frost-numbed fingers sanding rust from their chain mail and passed the slow hours in complaint.

  ‘Nothing alive could be worth this accursed unseasonal delivery,’ the master despaired. His second-string horse had shied into a gulch and gone lame when an iyat infested its pack straps. ‘Winter’s no time to be crossing these mountains. Whatever Reysald did to invoke a Koriani oath of debt, remind me next time to brain him. He’ll never again foist a late trip like this one on a fool old enough to know better!’

  He returned a solid laugh to Fionn Areth’s question. ‘Oh, aye, trouble like this is usual enough near the solstice. Accursed fiends always travel in packs, besides. You’ll see more, or mark me for a dead man.’

  For two nights running, the predicted plague of iyats turned the camps inside out and bedeviled the livestock to bedlam. A storm moved them on, with horizontal snow that yowled like a chorus of hags. Progress through the passes slowed to a crawl. Along the valley floor, the pack train inched forward, each day made perilous by potholes and chancy footing where hot springs leached under the sheeting, white blanket of drifts. The men drew scalding water to launder their clothes. One of their rough company, Fionn Areth combed ice from the bristles on his chin and exalted in his newfound sense of accomplishment.

  Eighty grueling leagues, and two months from Daenfal, the caravan wound downward from the heights. Along the narrow strip of lowlands against the Eltair coast, the footsore mules were prodded northward on the trade road, squelching through wheel ruts paned over with ice and splashed by galloping relays of post riders. Slowed down by the traffic of lumbering wagons, they closed the last miles onto the head of land and arrived to stand shivering before Jaelot’s front gate.

  The caravan’s captain doled out final portions in silver and dismissed the men hired as road guards. Fionn Areth could scarcely contain his wild joy. Granted his coin and his freedom under the sky-rimmed shadow of another great city’s black walls, he stood with his collar muffled up to his ears, and said his farewell to Reysald’s drovers. The outriders clapped his back in goodwill and accepted his wish to part company. They, too, had been young, and remembered the yearning for adult independence.
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  Fionn Areth sat his moorlands pony, alone and felt as if the whole world turned in his grasp.

  Here, in a momentous past hour of conflict, the Master of Shadow had revealed his black heart and called down a barrage of dark sorcery. The event had shaken down solid stone walls. In the intervening years, the signs of that havoc had been bricked over, the rubble long since cleared away. The trappings of old wealth and grandeur remained. This town was larger, more prosperous than Daenfal, set as it was at the junction of two land routes and served by the sea trade as well. Under a sheeted ceiling of low cloud, Jaelot’s slate roofs and octagonal guard towers commanded a hook in the shoreline. The setting was favored by a generous harbor, loud with the unraveling thunder of spume hammering seawalls of granite. Beyond, the rough waters of Eltair Bay heaved lead and pewter, sliced by the oars of an inbound galley with bright streamers flying from her masthead.

  Commerce came and went through the gates, even in the late day. Couriers on fast horses spurred past, bearing dispatches. Ox wains rumbled in from the quarries and sawmills, interspersed by the wagons that rolled north and south, hauling cloth goods and barrels, and sacks of ground meal lashed under oiled canvas. Trappers and farmhands plodded on foot. The gilt-trimmed carriages of aristocrats rumbled by, attended by liveried grooms. Under the feet of the Skyshiel Mountains, the gloaming of twilight fell early. A lampsman bundled in fur made his rounds. Torches set burning in steel baskets on the revetments hissed and snapped, harried by a thin snowfall.

  Shivering with cold and excess excitement, Fionn Areth steered his shaggy pony from the verge. He wended his way through the city gates behind three chattering servants who returned with cut greens for the solstice feast. The keeps on both sides were Second Age remnants, laid of quartz granite and emblazoned with a gaudy escutcheon of embossed, snake-bearing lions. Tin talismans for fiend bane jangled and chimed. No less than ten sentries stood guard by the windlass, sure enough sign the Mayor of Jaelot maintained a vigilant garrison.

  With pay in his pocket and dreams of enlistment against the fell forces of Shadow, Fionn Areth loitered in the cobbled gloom of a side lane. When the horn blew for the sundown change in the watch, he trailed the knots of soldiers released from their posts, trusting their lead to locate the wineshops preferred by the off-duty garrison.

  The onset of full darkness found him stabling his pony under care of the Gold Lion’s hostler. ‘Two pence a night, he won’t eat like a war-horse. One if you groom and muck the stall for yourself.’

  Fionn Areth paid for full care, weary as he was, and starved for hot food and new company. He handed the pony off to a horseboy, gripped his cloak against the wind, and crossed the rutted snow of the coach yard. Inside the iron-studded doors, the taproom of the Lion was packed. The heavy air held a redolence of fish stew, oiled pine, and wet wool, underslung with the heated aroma of humanity. A man who wished lodging must brave the crush of patrons clumped in camaraderie beneath the sooty lamps slung from the ceiling beams.

  In Jaelot, by stiff custom, the wealthy dined apart. The commons of the tavern served those off the street, from women dressed in motley who sold cakes in the market to tradesmen with stained leather aprons. Shopkeepers in neat broadcloth contended with dockside fishsellers for seats at packed benches and trestles. Mule drovers rubbed sweating elbows with couriers still wearing their emptied, mud-splashed satchels slung on shoulder straps.

  The space between the brick hearth and the racked phalanx of tapped beer kegs was staked out by soldiers, mail-clad and imposing in dark surcoats. The ones finished eating shot dice or threw darts, or made laughing wagers with coin scattered over scarred trestles. The planks were marked with scratched targets for knives, or lines drawn for bouts of arm wrestling. On other occasions, the same rearranged boards served as the arena for cockfights.

  The boisterous crowd at the Lion thrived on blood sport, and the inn’s florid landlord turned no one away who carried the requisite coinage. A half silver secured Fionn Areth a tiny room in the attic, with a milk-faced maid to lug him a bath basin and soap. For a copper and a kiss, she brought him a knife from the kitchen. The favor included her chattering interest as she watched him scrape off a two-month rime of black stubble.

  ‘You’ll want me back later?’ she asked, and then laughed as he flushed ardent crimson with his bare knees poking from his bathwater.

  ‘Later,’ Fionn gasped past the fire in his groin.

  ‘’Twill cost you another three coppers, then,’ said the unabashed girl, then clattered out, leaving him deflated.

  The towel was coarse as the nap on new burlap and smelled like wet dog from hard use. Fionn tossed it aside in disgust. He settled for tying the wet tangles of his hair in a thong stripped out of his sleeve cuff. Clad in his spare shirt, a fresh tunic, and the brushed-down wool of his breeches, he strapped on his sword and retraced his steps down a maze of tight stairways to the common room.

  The soldiers still congregated, joined now by others with beards like filed iron and the scars of twenty-year veterans. Their rough, tight-knit company discouraged outsiders. The trestle adjacent stayed empty. Fionn Areth settled into the space and smiled, until a fair-headed bar girl brought him a plate of hot bread and cod stew. He topped off the meal with a tankard of mulled wine. Relaxed with fatigue and the comfort of clean clothes, he soaked in the welcome heat off the hearth, content for the present to listen.

  Barracks gossip informed him the city pay was on time, but too low, and that overseeing convicts during seawall repairs was the unpopular duty on the roster. Loose comment ranged the gamut from the favors of wenches to the irregularities of the aging mayor’s effete secretary.

  ‘Etarra’s new tithe put the pinchfist in a howling bad mood,’ a man with a sergeant’s badge grumbled. He sighted into his near-emptied tankard. ‘A stroke of the pen, and there went the allotment for upkeep. We’ll live with that leak in the barracks until spring, and watch bats fly and roost in the rafters.’

  ‘Fatemaster’s bollocks,’ the guard with the sausage red nose chimed in. ‘Just let the tenderfoot recruits sleep there. First week they come in, they’re too pissing scared to notice the slosh in the bedding.’

  A veteran’s dice throw clattered across the crammed trestle. The winner hooted his ecstatic victory and pounded the boards, jouncing the litter of tin spoons and crockery and all but upsetting the picked bones.

  ‘By the Wheel, you cheat,’ the loser groused back. ‘Bedamned if you didn’t jink the plank on that throw, and tumble a six down to one. Didn’t survive Vastmark just to be felled by your flippity, swindling fingers.’

  Fionn Areth leaned forward, his awed anticipation taking the lead from good sense. ‘You did battle against the Master of Shadow?’

  The broad-shouldered mercenary opposite the war veteran twisted around on the bench. ‘Why should you care, boy?’

  ‘If a man can fight sorcery with weapons of steel, I’d like to hear how it’s done.’ Lent confidence from his stint as a road guard, Fionn Areth raised his chin. ‘Is it true that you marched in the Vastmark campaign?’

  Preoccupied by his game, the burly veteran snapped his fingers for the dice. ‘That I did.’ He spun another throw, showed his teeth in satisfaction. ‘Can’t top two sixes,’ he gloated.

  ‘Could match them,’ the dicing partner shot back. The pieces were passed and sent clattering again.

  ‘Did you ever see the Shadow Master?’ Fionn Areth asked.

  ‘Just once.’ Still engrossed, the veteran held out a palm for the coin won back from his fellow. ‘I served in the mayor’s personal guard on the night the fell sorcerer smashed all the glass in the feast hall.’ Twas uncanny. And Vastmark? Like most wars, a drawn-out, miserable stint in the mud. The shadows froze bone something cruel. Cousin of mine lost half his fingers.’ He glanced up at due length. One eye cast into a squint, he stared down his nose at Fionn Areth.

  His mouth opened. For an eyeblink of time, he froze in stark horror. ‘There! That’s
him!’ The stupefied surge as he shot to his feet sent the bench flying over behind him. ‘Save us all! There’s the Master of Shadow himself!’

  ‘Man, are you crazed?’ cried his dicing companion.

  A metallic scream answered. The veteran hauled killing steel from its sheath and surged ahead, bent on murder. Two startled guardsmen sought to restrain him. Their belated grab missed. He charged, clambered headlong over the trestle top to skewer the source of his outrage.

  Fionn Areth flung sidewards, barely in time. Crockery and bones and tankards pelted airborne as the sword impaled in the struts of the trestle and overturned both by raw force.

  ‘He’s just a fool boy!’ cried an incensed bystander. ‘One packing a grasslands accent thick as the hair on a goat.’

  ‘It’s the Shadow Master, I tell you!’ The veteran pursued as his target rammed backward, unraveling chaos through the tavern’s packed company like parted thread in a knit. ‘Might look like a boy. Illusion’s his specialty.’ The longsword tracked his quarry’s terrified retreat, steady and waiting for opening.

  ‘You came into Jaelot before to make mischief,’ the veteran accused in low fury. ‘That time you looked like a minstrel’s apprentice, with quiet ways and brown hair.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ gasped Fionn. He ducked scything steel. Once, twice, again, he skipped backward. His hip rammed something hard, and a caroling chime of refined metal splashed at his back. The cardplayers his mishap had disturbed reviled his idiot clumsiness. He had nowhere to turn. The murdering attack of the veteran came on, before his numbed fingers remembered the sword and the reflexive training to use it.

  ‘Ath’s mercy, please listen!’ He ducked under the trestle, came up with drawn steel, somehow prepared for the stabbing downstroke he had been rigorously schooled to anticipate. Through the tangling brunt of a parry, he pleaded, ‘That man wasn’t me.’

  Blade drawn and guarding, he evaded entanglement in the upset table and stools. Displaced patrons cursed him. Coins and cards jostled to each hampered move as joined swordplay erupted in licking, fast strokes across obstacles. Around him he sensed the undermining panic as other onlookers saw he was armed. They shouted and gave way, shoving themselves clear of chance injury.