Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The gamblers cut losses and swooped to claim their threatened cache as the duel snaked through their midst. A barmaid dropped her tray of filled tankards, screaming outrage. More heads turned. Fionn Areth’s protestation became swallowed in bedlam as the Lion’s jammed patrons avoided the clangor of bare steel that scythed and snarled in damaging proximity.

  A clashing tight parry and a shallow slice splashed blood down Fionn’s exposed wrist. His wrenching, taut cry rang through the noise, convincing in petrified innocence. ‘This is my first journey from Araethura’s moorlands!’

  ‘Put up that fool steel!’ The Lion’s swarthy landlord cupped his chapped hands and bellowed gruff warning from the bar. ‘The city justiciar gives stiff fines for brawling! You brutes fight here, you’ll sting for it later when my fee for damages reaches the purser at the barracks.’

  ‘Let be, fellow!’ called a concerned comrade. ‘Make peace and come back to your beer.’

  Others hooted in derision for what seemed the disorderly conduct of a drunk baited into a harebrained attack. ‘Why draw blood for a pittance? The boy just wants to sit himself down and go back to scratching his nits!’

  From the dimness between lamps, bare sword clanged on sword. The deep, throaty boom as a wine tun tipped over ground into a soprano shatter of smashed glass.

  ‘Soldier, listen up!’ A resigned officer on the sidelines muscled forward to intervene. ‘Don’t make me take you down for a stint of forced labor.’ He flipped a hand signal to his off-watch guardsmen. ‘Close in. Make an end to this folly before there’s a public embarrassment.’

  But this scrap was no mismatch between rage and innocence. The glitter of poised blades wove and feinted in deadly, incongruous control. While the mailed guardsmen formed a baffled circle and sought in vain for an opening, crossed steel belled again. Like a hiccup in a torrent, their sympathy canceled to the clanging crescendo of a strikingly expert train of blows.

  ‘But you know swordplay, don’t you?’ Breathing in gasps, the veteran spoke through that indrawn, poisonous hesitation. ‘Did the goats teach you that?’ He matched a stunning, well-executed riposte in smooth stride and lunged back. Steel wailed across defending steel, and a wave of freezing consternation swept the onlookers.

  ‘Come on, show them!’ the veteran taunted. Gut-shaken to fear, he ducked a low-hanging lamp. Hot candleflame burnished his taut, sweating face. ‘You fight astoundingly well for a yokel raised up in the grasslands.’

  ‘He’s telling the truth,’ one of his dicing companions exhorted. ‘Black sorcerer or boy, that’s no fumbling greenhorn.’

  Another bench toppled. The veteran caromed through a stew of spilled food and recovered. ‘I know him, I tell you!’ His next cut snatched whining through air yet again. The boy’s style matched his skill with a chilling display of confident, practiced experience. ‘He’s the very same felon our mayor wants dead! Dharkaron avenge us all for blind fools if we let him escape justice this time!’

  ‘You’re mistaken.’ Shaky and strained into white disbelief, Fionn Areth shook back the hair fallen free of the thong tie. ‘I’m no sorcerer.’

  ‘We’ll let the mayor’s aldermen decide that.’ The veteran pressed in, now flanked by two guardsmen. Their combined efforts hazed their beleaguered quarry backward into the vestibule where the aristocracy engaged private rooms.

  Cornered, now desperate, Fionn Areth deflected a lethal cut to the head. He countered another lunge with a close-pressed parry, then blazed back, focused by rage. His following stroke whined past blocking metal and broke through.

  One of the attackers took a slice in the shoulder of his surcoat. His mail shirt spared bloodshed, a useless distinction. The doubters saw only further evidence of culpability in a stripling who could best a seasoned fighter.

  ‘Save us all, it is him, the Master of Shadow!’ Panic erupted. Alarmed citizens bolted to escape, their pandemonium sliced by jangling steel and a salvo of hysterical shouting. ‘Take him alive! There’s a bounty on his head!’

  Fat to the fire, an alderman added, ‘Don’t trust his youth. They say he won’t age, the sorcerer who brought the massacre at Dier Kenton Vale.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Pressed at bay as a dozen men-at-arms shoved through to harry his stance in the hallway, Fionn Areth despaired. ‘I wasn’t even born when the war host marched into Vastmark!’

  The hampered fight thumped against the closed doorways. Fionn Areth grasped the first latch within reach and flung wide its gilt-trimmed panel.

  A wailing scrape of disrupted melody informed him the room was in use. He turned anyway. Cornered now beyond hope of redemption, he plunged in pounding flight through the heart of a discreet social staged for gentlemen who kept fancy courtesans.

  Two steps, and he collided headlong with a vielle. The instrument shattered to a jangle of burst strings and a squawk of dismay from the musician. The bass fiddle crashed to a boom of split wood. Guests peeled away in a flutter of ribboned silk as the fugitive burst into their midst. Bloodied and exhausted and stripped of finesse, he elbowed his way through a cloying maelstrom of perfume and gold-braided velvet. A froth of feathered hats batted his face. He battered, rammed with the flat of his blade, and wrenched clear of the ringed hands which snatched at him. Breathless, bewildered, he shouldered by main force between dandified bluebloods, groomed and prinked and screaming imprecations under a dazzling brilliance of candles.

  Fionn Areth tripped on the fringe of the carpet. He skidded on waxed wood, hit the wall, and despaired. The room had no windows and no rear exit. He spun, sword raised and eyes wild, braced for the smashing attack that must come from the guardsmen who pounded behind him.

  ‘Bedamned!’ cried a cultured, baritone voice. ‘I know that man! He’s a criminal!’

  Exposed to the fluttering light of the sconces, the severe angled features and sable hair of s’Ffalenn drew a storm of aghast recognition. The effete society of Jaelot hoarded their grudges like heirloom jewels. No infamy in memory was more venomously nursed than the Shadow Master’s ploy, enacted one past summer solstice. Under the guise of fine music, his tricks of low sorcery had shamed the city’s best families. The diversion he spun to mask his escape had shattered the glass in the mayor’s mansion, then razed buildings, gutted roofs, and flattened stone walls in an unhinged surge of wild conjury.

  ‘Dharkaron avenge!’ screamed a city councilman, roused from bemoaning his torn lace. ‘The Spinner of Darkness has come back! That man’s none other than Arithon s’Ffalenn!’

  A vase crashed from a niche, torn down by the rush as vengeful guardsmen piled in from the vestibule. Their advance was coordinated. A ranked captain screamed orders. Men-at-arms fanned out and formed an unbroken line of advance. Still brandishing bared swords, they tore the cloth from the feast table. Crystal toppled and shattered. Flung food and dishes smashed to the floor, to the yammering dismay of a servant.

  ‘Stand clear!’ yelled the guard captain, out of patience with fools. ‘You want that wretch alive and in chains? Then move your mincing, soft arses aside and let us attend to our business!’

  He signaled. His guardsmen edged forward, each step crunching glass and mashing stewed quail into the priceless carpet. Mailed hands grasped the table legs. The furnishing was overturned and raised for a shield, then run forward in a ramming charge that pinned Fionn Areth to the wall. His sword arm was seized. Rough hands wrested his weapon away. Still shouting protest, he was caught and bent with his torso jackknifed over the rim of the table. A fist smashed him silent. Someone’s forearm clubbed his neck. While his senses spun dark, another guard gripped his hair and slammed him, half-comatose, back upright against the wall. Gilt and plaster chipped down in a pattering rain.

  Fionn Areth moaned, dissociated by pain. ‘Mercy, please. I don’t know you.’

  ‘Do you not?’ The veteran laughed. ‘Then pray, let us help your lapsed memory.’

  Slammed to jelly by the barrage of hard blows, Fionn Areth let his senses go numb.
He rode the storm of brutality, helpless, while men vented their fear and their hatred. Their punches and kicks first hammered him flat, then tumbled him, crushed and bleeding, amid the spilled sauces and wrecked porcelain sprayed on the hardwood floor.

  Voices pitched high with excitement churned into a vertigo that racked him to paralyzing nausea. Through spinning pain and a sick taste of blood, a command funneled down, blurred into nightmare unreality. ‘Go! Yes, waken the Lord Mayor. To Dharkaron with his gout! We’ve taken the Master of Shadow alive, and our city’s tribunal’s waited lifelong for this moment.’

  When the shouting broke out on the mayor’s front doorstep, the enchantress Elaira had just finished her duties as healer in the perfumed warmth of the grand lord’s bedsuite. Appraised by the critical eye of his wife, she knelt, repacking her satchel of remedies. Two candles still burned on the nightstand. Their mellow, thin light dusted costly silk tassels and furnishings inlaid with gold wire. Her ornery charge was made comfortable at last, reclining with half-closed eyes in a fortress of down pillows and bed quilts. Wealthy clients invariably tested her patience, and this one had proved worse than most. Nor was the wife one whit less demanding.

  When the thunderous clang of the knocker resounded, the woman raised her pinched chin, annoyed to be drawn from her role as active overseer. Her pleated mouth twitched as a bellow from outside demanded immediate entrance. ‘Dharkaron’s Spear take them! If that’s a detail from the watch captain’s men, they’re probably drunk and disorderly.’

  She propelled herself out of the upholstered wing chair. ‘Close the door after me, if you please. I would not have my husband disturbed.’ Stiff with bossy, self-righteous command, she bustled out to intercept any plaintive servants who had the temerity to waken her lord with bad news.

  Elaira shut her teeth in outright irritation and continued bundling her remedies. Belowstairs, the outside door panel crashed open. The shouting intensified, cut by the butler’s agitated tenor. ‘Begone! His lordship is resting, and in no mood to receive your raw noise.’

  While somebody protested in a bullish bass voice, a third party cut in, defending another prong of what seemed a three-way impasse. ‘I don’t care blazes how the miserable wretch dies! We took all the risk, brought him down alive in the Lion as a service done in good faith. Alliance has posted a bounty on his head. That’s a round sum of a thousand gold royals.’

  Up the winding stair with its flanged marble risers, the racket shot echoes in crescendo. ‘None of us goes till it’s paid, or we hold a signed writ in promise of funds from the treasury.’

  ‘If you think the mayor’s justiciar will give this case up to Avenor for the sake of Alliance satisfaction, you’re mad!’ a field veteran cracked. ‘My money says he dies right here, tonight.’ Then, to the butler’s yapping objections, ‘Move on aside, or I’ll puncture your custard paunch where you stand.’

  A finger of draft stirred through the gaped door, while the butler huffed, ‘You’ll do no such thing! Be off, you drunk fools, or I’ll send a footman to summon the guard.’

  ‘We are the guard!’ bellowed the exasperated bass. The impasse crashed into a snarl of yelling, with the fatuous butler too obstinate to move, and the balked party of armed men set to plow in with cold steel and force their way into the palace foyer.

  Elaira swore softly under her breath as a heave of movement ruckled the bedclothes.

  ‘There’s some trouble?’ The mayor blinked, muzzy from the possets just taken to ease his tender swelling and pain, and bring him the surcease of sleep. ‘If my guard captain’s soused, he’ll live to be sorry. Here, help me up.’ His peremptory gesture called for the enchantress to arise at once and assist him. ‘I’d better go down.’

  ‘Your wife went already,’ Elaira pointed out. ‘Please rest. She’s able enough to manage the problem, or at least let it keep until morning.’

  The demanding, fat fingers continued to beckon.

  Elaira omitted the tie strings, slung her satchel to her shoulder, and moved in resignation to comply. Early on she had learned not to try the mayor’s temper. If she allowed his presumption that she was a housemaid, her task was reduced from impossible to simply onerous.

  ‘I’ll need my robe of state from the armoire,’ the mayor snapped, as she raised him. ‘Be sure to include my gold chain of office.’

  ‘I’m not your dresser,’ Elaira responded. Once her charge was perched upright, she stepped to the chamber door and asked the footman who waited outside to fetch his lordship’s valet.

  ‘No, no!’ The mayor thumped a balked fist in the bed sheets. ‘No sense in waiting. The footman can dress me well enough.’

  Elaira and the servant exchanged places without comment, he to set his master to rights through a nerve storm of abusive impatience and she to grip her satchel of remedies and make swift escape down the stairwell. She should have succeeded. The risers were white marble, clothed in a thick runner loomed with Jaelot’s gold lions. Her descending step made no sound. But the mayor’s interfering wife still occupied the first landing, locked in shrill argument with an official-looking stranger wearing livery of unfamiliar colors. However he had managed to slip past the butler, he was less successful with the house mistress.

  ‘Whatever’s amiss, let the town chancellor handle it. My darling’s in pain, and suffering, and should be asleep, had he taken his posset without argument.’

  While the men-at-arms crowding the entry rolled their eyes, their acting captain braced the door at the downstairs threshold. He tipped up his chin and accosted the irate woman on the landing. ‘My lady, the chancellor has no authority to speak for a prisoner too dangerous to keep.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ From her crow’s vantage between newel posts, the mayor’s wife stabbed an accusatory finger toward the outside street. ‘Send the wretch back wherever he came from. My husband’s unwell, and the night is no time to be hazing him out of his rest.’

  The frustrated messenger made a last valiant effort to complete his designated errand. ‘Surely that’s for his lord eminence to decide.’ He managed no more, his next line overwhelmed by someone’s declaiming remark from below.

  The mayor’s wife stiffened. ‘Oh no!’ Leaned over the railing, she tongue-lashed the beleaguered butler. ‘Don’t you dare let those brutes bring any felon under my lord’s very roof!’

  Elaira snatched her furtive opening to slip past, while the messenger beat a backwards retreat, and the wife’s imprecations expanded to include the captain at arms, who refused to give way.

  The mayor’s wife joined the butler, pushing the door panel against the offending wedged boot. ‘You great lummox! Where’s good sense? Keep your filth off my floor! Servants these days are too lazy and slow to shine silver, far less scrub up after trampling fools who won’t wipe the mud off their boots!’

  The Mayor of Jaelot chose that moment to descend in gout-ridden, limping distemper. ‘Silence, woman!’

  Everyone present ceased their movement and noise. Caught in a scene that had suddenly crystallized, Elaira found herself trapped. She could not make her exit. Half the armed watch were jammed like sheep in the disputed entry. Determined at all costs to escape from entanglement, she stole behind the statue of a nymph.

  While snow swirled through the double-paneled doorway, and the drafts sucked and pulled at the candles lighting the ornate, lozenged tiles of the hallway, the Mayor of Jaelot stumped down the curved staircase, leaning on a stick, and huffing like a bull walrus. He crossed the lower landing in plush velvet slippers, his wine-colored stockings crimped over his grotesquely swollen ankles.

  The footman trailed him, bearing a hurricane candle. Shadows chased intaglio patterns over his master’s velvet robe of office and gold chain of state, bundled in haste overtop the tails of his nightshirt.

  Red-faced and furious, the mayor rocked to a stop at ground level. ‘What nonsense is this? If my guard captain’s soused, he’ll live to be sorry.’

  The butler shoved forward,
tripping over himself to proffer explanation ahead of the liveried messenger.

  The raw gist read like madness, with the strange servant’s interruptions shouted down, until the beset mayor yanked at his thinning hair, already pushed into spikes from his pillow. ‘Merciful maker!’ He singled out his butler, then bellowed, ‘If you deny my watch captain entrance to my house, why is he here in the first place? He doesn’t need my authority to break up a drunken brawl in the ranks!’

  The butler sniffed and clasped his pink hands. ‘My Lord Mayor, the men-at-arms hold a bound criminal in custody.’ He edged out the messenger and peered down his nose, as though fussy posture could somehow allay the indignity of the problem. ‘His uncivilized blood need not mar your furnishings. Nor should a pack of soldiers in hobnailed boots be let in. They would gouge dreadful pocks in your floor tiles.’

  ‘Criminal?’ The mayor elbowed the agitated messenger aside and gimped another stride forward. While his unctuous butler scuttled clear, still apologizing, the door in dispute was flung wide by the party outside. Windborne snow hazed into the vestibule, and an influx of draft doused the candles.

  ‘I’ll hear an explanation!’ The mayor peered through the fallen gloom, and demanded of his commanding officer, ‘You’ve lugged a common rogue to my doorstep? What for? Do we not have a dungeon to keep him in chains until court is convened in the morning?’

  ‘A cell isn’t safe for a rogue of his stripe.’ A towering brute in a spike-crested helm, the watch captain stared down his nasal. ‘The man we’ve brought in is the Master of Shadow.’

  ‘Himself!’ screeched the wife. ‘I’ll gouge out his eyes.’ Propriety forgotten, she plowed back into the dispute, skirts raised like a galley set to ram.

  Unseen in her niche behind the stone statue, the Koriani healer felt as though her heart slammed to a stop between beats.