Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  At the forefront, the Mayor of Jaelot simply gaped, jowls sagging like wattles from his receded chin. ‘The sorcerer? Is this true?’

  The captain said, steady, ‘Your Vastmark veterans are convinced.’

  The discomfort of slippers and gout fell aside as the mayor banged out of doors and elbowed through the closed ranks of guardsmen. Their fellows on the outer stair stepped aside, silent before authority, as his Lordship of Jaelot bent to inspect their bagged quarry.

  In snowfall and night, the prisoner was an indecipherable bundle, slung inert in the grip of two bearers.

  ‘Where’s my Sithaer-forsaken light?’ cracked the mayor.

  The shrinking footman on the fringes hopped forward, but too slowly. The mayor whirled like a mastiff, and snarled at the circle of stalled men-at-arms, ‘If that creature you’ve brought is the Master of Shadow, bring him inside straightaway.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ cried the wife.

  But consensus opinion brushed off her protest. The men-at-arms crowded inside on hobnailed boots, despite her nattering, shrill outburst. ‘Remember the drunken sot who was prisoner on the labor gang? He freed that one from a scaffold and fetters. Unlocked cold iron without any key, just used the fell powers of magecraft.’

  ‘Well he can’t break steel wire!’ the sergeant barked back. ‘For the rest, it’s your mayor who’ll make disposition for the scoundrel’s immediate death.’

  Elaira fought back her paralyzing horror, loosed her sweating grip on the statue’s carved marble wingtip. Shaking, near fumbling, she clawed out her quartz crystal. She whispered a swift, guarding cantrip and set a glamour of concealment. Then she waited, on fire with impatience, for the spell to bend light and air. She dared make no move before her cast sigil blurred sound and sight of her presence. The moment crawled while she suffered, agonized in suspension. Her unruly mind played a thousand scenarios of Arithon’s maiming and death, while time slowed, and the spell sealed around her. The sensation felt as though the air of itself fractured light. The brief delay lasted a handful of heartbeats, yet spun out in her mind like the Fatemaster’s thread, which wove the black cloth of eternity.

  She slipped out of hiding. One step into the open, she just missed being bowled over by the butler, who fled before the clumping invasion of snow-drenched men-at-arms. What seemed half the watch crammed into the foyer to a rattle of mail and cold steel. Elaira stole among them, unseen and unheard.

  The fear half consumed her, that what she found might undermine her will to keep breathing. One step, two; and she saw the prisoner’s streaked hands, bound and cruelly torn with the grazes of manic struggle. Sprawled facedown in the fine-tiled hallway, he stayed limp, as the watch captain and the off-duty guard sergeant tripped over themselves to relate his spurious appearance and the particulars of his capture at the Lion.

  Amid their raised voices, the veteran spoke loudest. ‘Came in bold as brass, played the innocent as though he could dupe us all over again.’

  Elaira edged nearer. Under the glow of the footman’s hand lamp, the culprit lay unmoving. Black hair clung damp to the nape of his neck. He seemed an unremarkable boy, sorrowfully battered and bloody. His plain country shirt and laced breeches were ripped. The bare length of the forearm, shoved free of his cuff, showed the sturdy, muscled build of a laborer.

  Not Arithon s’Ffalenn, Elaira knew with queer certainty, the remembrance of his fine bones and wiry strength a stamped and indelible part of her. That reassurance afforded her little relief. Any victim of happenstance caught by the guardsmen would fare ill if his case of mistaken identity was not rectified.

  Ringed by his armed men, Jaelot’s porcine mayor prodded the slack torso with the toe of his slipper. ‘Roll the wretch over. I want a clear look.’

  The guard captain bent, still vehement. ‘I’ve known the criminal in two guises, as well. For me, the feud’s personal. I’ve hunted his scarce hide when he vanished into thin air, then survived his assault by shadows and sorcery in the barren mountains of Vastmark. Don’t take any chances now that he’s caught.’ His mailed hands snagged a shoulder and tumbled the prone body front to back like a fish. ‘Kill him at once and be quit of him.’

  The prisoner groaned. Black hair slipped back from his angled, fox features. The light of the candle exposed to plain view the sharp, defined chin, and raked browline which marked s’Ffalenn royal blood.

  ‘Ath preserve, Fionn Areth!’ Elaira gasped. Rage took her by storm. The absolute, bottomless depth of her order’s ruthlessness surpassed her most ugly imagining.

  Of all cities, Jaelot’s hatred of the Shadow Master was the most viciously entrenched. After the disaster wreaked on their solstice feast, their trade galleys had burned at Minderl Bay, and their garrison had left four thousand dead on the back slopes of Dier Kenton Vale. Long memory and deep grudges would not pause to question the guilt of a look-alike victim.

  ‘That’s him, before Ath!’ Through the swelling, dark bruises, the Mayor of Jaelot beheld no boy innocent, but the sorcerer who had posed as a masterbard’s apprentice twenty-five years in the past. Feature for feature, he saw the face of the man that had emerged from masking illusion when spellcraft had stampeded his guests, and torn stone from indiscriminate stone from city warehouses, mansions, and battlements.

  He shuffled an unnerved step back, hands clasped to his paunch for protection. ‘Don’t anyone believe this appearance of green youth. The Master of Shadow’s a crafty illusionist. Our Prince of the Light has cautioned us for years the unnatural creature wouldn’t age.’

  ‘We should drag him outside and gut him at once.’ The captain at arms enforced his opinion by drawing his steel from his scabbard.

  ‘What about our claim on the Alliance bounty?’ a gruff voice cut in from the sidelines.

  ‘We’ll settle that issue once he’s safely dead.’ Steel flashed as the captain angled his sword blade. ‘If spellcraft can dismantle steel locks and bars, no dungeon is safe to contain him.’

  The mayor was too terrified not to agree. The next instant would see life’s blood spilled on the floor, unless some fool dared intervention.

  Elaira found her voice. ‘No! You’ll do no such thing.’ She dropped the glamour, burst through the enclosing men-at-arms, and fell on her knees beside the prone captive to shield him. ‘You’ve taken a prisoner on criminal charges. No trial has established his guilt. As a Koriani sent on an errand of mercy, I protest the injustice. By whose law do you order the summary execution of a man given no chance to speak for his freedom?’

  ‘Freedom! Are you mad?’ snapped the mayor. ‘It’s the Master of Shadow they’ve taken!’ Incensed as though a pet lapdog had bitten him, he added, ‘The man’s a sorcerer, and criminal, and identified before witnesses. There will be no farce of due process in this case. This wretch deserves nothing but a fast sword through the heart and a fire to consume his remains.’

  Elaira swallowed, pulse pounding. In desperate effort to defer the inevitable, she traced the sigil for confusion over the tuned matrix of her personal quartz. For mercy, she pleaded on an inner cry of anguish. Let this seed of wild spellcraft win someone to rally in Fionn’s support to stall the immediate crisis.

  For a split-second interval, the tableau held unchanged.

  Then the mayor’s wife shrieked and shoved in from the sidelines. She seized the guard captain’s sword arm before the blade could descend.

  ‘You can’t think to dispatch this unprincipled killer without first making him suffer! Not after the monstrous damage he’s caused us.’ She rounded on her husband, white faced and furious. ‘This man reviled the best blood in Jaelot! He threw down stone buildings with spellcraft! Let him die in slow agony. Every living person who was shamed or lost property deserves the chance to bear witness.’

  ‘Milady, that’s folly! His arcane resources are by lengths too dangerous.’ The captain at arms tugged, but failed to dislodge the woman’s maniacal grip. ‘A corpse can’t work spellcraft. Cut in pieces and burned
on hot faggots is safest.’

  While the argument raged back and forth over her head, Elaira ran her trained hands over the prisoner’s slack body. He was shockingly cold, but no bones were broken. Beyond shallow cuts and purpling contusions, he had torn his knee, but sustained no irreparable damage.

  Despite gentle care, her touch roused response. Fionn Areth’s bruised eyelids fluttered. Preternaturally alert to additional peril, Elaira gripped her quartz. She slipped a swift spell of binding upon him, that her familiar face not be recognized here, with so many hostile eyes watching.

  Her ministration came none too soon.

  One bound arm flexed. The grasslands boy stirred, then opened green eyes in confusion.

  ‘Save us, he’s awakened!’ The mayor leaped back, shirttails flapping, while around him, his guardsmen drew their weapons in alarm.

  Surrounded by bare steel, the source of their fear blinked in puzzled discomfort. His gaze flickered over the ceiling vaults, with their carved nymphs, and vine and flower motifs painted in gilt. He squeezed his eyes closed, opened them again in patent disorientation. His survey encompassed the ring of armed guards, passed Elaira without seeing, then rested at last on the mayor’s fat legs, stuffed into crumpled silk hose and expensive, glass-beaded slippers. ‘Why am I here?’

  In this ornate setting, within the same walls where Arithon s’Ffalenn had once been constrained through the course of Halliron Masterbard’s grueling satire, the rolling vowels of that grasslands accent fell with the effrontery of a slap.

  ‘Fiends, he’s not human,’ a stout guardsman murmured. ‘Battered as all this, he shouldn’t be able to manage a clear thought, far less play the guise of hurt innocence.’

  ‘What guise?’ Fionn Areth said, stronger.

  The mayor’s wife tapped her foot, incensed. ‘You’re quite the rogue to believe we could forget your wiles and your sorceries, even so many years later.’

  Fionn Areth shivered, flinching with pain as he unwisely tugged at his bonds. ‘What wiles? What sorceries? There’s no magecraft in me. I was raised up herding goats.’

  ‘Dharkaron’s own vengeance!’ snapped the bearded veteran. ‘Don’t try to playact under my charge. I knew you too well to be taken.’

  In clear grasslands dialect, Fionn Areth insisted, ‘I’ve never seen you before in my life.’

  ‘Sweet liar.’ The mayor laughed from wound nerves, slapped to fresh reminder of the sincerity and skill of the singer who had blinded his guests to stunned pity during the performance that preceded their ruin. ‘We’ve all seen you spin deceit with plain words. Don’t think to escape justice this time.’

  ‘Of what am I accused?’ Fionn Areth demanded, then cringed away from the boot that bashed into his side. Left winded by the guard captain’s harsh prompt, he gasped the required honorific with no shred of sophisticate sarcasm. ‘Please tell me, Lord Mayor. What harm does your town claim against me?’

  ‘My lights, you act as smoothly as you sing. A pity that sorcery corrupted you.’ The rage flaming through him with frightening force, the mayor clapped his hands to summon his hovering footman. ‘Go fetch the town justiciar! He’s needed as witness.’ To Elaira, he added, ‘You demand a fair trial? There’s only one way to be sure of a sorcerer, and that’s to set bane seals to hold him. Promise to bind him in Koriani wards, and he might live to be given a hearing. Are you willing to swear surety against his defection? Let him escape, and your life will be asked in his place.’

  ‘I’ll swear for him freely,’ Elaira retorted. ‘Since he is what he seems, just a grasslands herder who bears a misfortunate likeness. His innocence can be proved. Let’s start with the fact that his right hand and forearm bear no trace of the burn where Arithon s’Ffalenn deflected Prince Lysaer’s light bolt thirty years ago at Etarra. The wound left him disfigured.’

  The mayor’s wife sniffed. ‘The Master of Shadow had no scar at all. His hands were unmarked when he played for the guests at my feast.’

  ‘Nor did the man I sparred with in the guise of Medlir show any sign of blemished sword hand,’ snapped the veteran.

  The mayor’s cracked oath rocked off the domed ceiling. In whispered, vast echoes, the reverberations ranged through the feast hall beyond the vaulted doors. The nightmare memory from the past seemed hauntingly sharp, when the sorcerer had seeded wholesale terror and havoc, and sent panicked guests into flight.

  ‘Let the criminal suffer,’ said the wife. ‘We ought to hear him scream.’

  ‘My lady is right.’ Jaelot’s ruling despot blinked drug-glazed eyes from the possets just mixed to ease his pain-ridden sleep. ‘How amusing this fell creature will be for us all, standing trial in chains for my magistrates.’ He smiled at the prisoner bound helpless at his feet. ‘I wouldn’t miss the performance for gold as the high officials you’ve shamed cross-examine you. Let’s watch you squirm to deny your black nature. That should salve the pride of our city’s first blood for the wicked satire visited upon us. We’ll have our revenge for the conniving tongue of your dead master. By the hour we finally put you to death, you’ll plead on your knees for release.’

  ‘Plead?’ cried Fionn Areth, desperate now, the fear shaking through him in tremors. ‘Spare me, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘Take him off,’ snapped the mayor. ‘I’ll waste no more sleep. Lock him in the deep dungeon. The enchantress stays with him to set spells of guard, with my order of slow death if her incompetence lends the prisoner any chance to break free.’

  Winter 5669

  Midnight

  The night was a misery of weather and chill on the hour Asandir reached the Great Circle at Isaer. Sleet fell, driven horizontal by the vicious, stinging gusts. The Sorcerer rode into the rampaging wind, his dark hood pulled low over his crusted eyebrows. He had been traveling at speed for twenty-three days. Upon the hour he finished sealing the wards that closed the Sorcerer’s Preserve, he had set off across the barren wilds of Camris, his sleep snatched in thorn brakes through those brief intervals when need for rest overcame him. Across the scoured heights of the Thaldein passes, he shared crannies of rock with consenting wild animals. Spells of air and of earth kept his horse fresh long after the point where the animal should have flagged and foundered.

  The relentless concentration he required to keep his works aligned with the Law of the Major Balance took its due toll, over distance. Asandir held on through grim determination, the last leagues an agony of endurance. In swaying exhaustion, he crossed the crumbled wall marking the outer edge of the power focus. The black stud beneath him dripped suds of rank sweat. Its lowered neck steamed. Matted tangles of forelock and mane wore glazed ice at the crest where the melt had run off and refrozen. The sigils of power which sustained the animal’s long stride were played out. Asandir had small resource left to continue to stand proxy for his mount’s remorseless exertion. The final hours of thrashing through trackless brush had plundered the last of his strength.

  In the cruel, biting cold, he dismounted. Around him, the night was a maelstrom of sleet that rattled like glass through bare branches. Sight-blind in the storm, by mage-sense alone he knew he stood inside the cleared circle of the Isaer focus. His booted feet slid on the icy black agate. The Paravian runes that marked each ring of power lay buried in leaves, storm glazed to a crust like old varnish. Braced against his horse’s shoulder to stay upright, Asandir reached the focal point at the center by touch. There he stopped, breathing hard, his face like pinched clay as he murmured a cantrip of appeal to the earth.

  Soil and stone received his request. Asandir bent his head, patient in gratitude, while the ringing vibration of the lane force played through him and rinsed the fierce ache of travel from nerve and muscle and bone.

  In time, he stirred, stroked sure hands over the stallion’s shivering flesh. Healing moved with his touch. The creature’s laboring flanks eased and settled, and the fevered heat left its sinews. Asandir blew on his hands and loosened the girth, then removed bit an
d bridle. He looped the tack securely through the leather of a run-up stirrup iron.

  The contact he expected from Sethvir came then, soundless and subtle as a shaft of new moonlight. ‘Asandir? There’s still hope. Fionn Areth’s held prisoner in Jaelot’s dungeon, pending trial and due process. The enchantress Elaira is with him.’

  Exposed to the flaying chill of the gale, Asandir shut his eyes. ‘Thank Ath for that blessing. The woman at least will fight to the last to thwart the mayor’s injustice.’

  When a flood of sent warmth from Sethvir replaced words, Asandir flexed tired shoulders and straightened under the wet weight of his mantle. ‘There’s bad news as well. What aren’t you telling me?’

  A sigh from Sethvir, so slight the sound played like the breath of a ghost through the mind. ‘Lysaer’s left Erdane early. One of Raiett’s agents sighted Arithon’s double in Daenfal, and sent word into Tysan by fast post.’

  Alone with the impact of that ugly news, Asandir flicked packed ice from his collar. ‘You feel that’s worrisome?’ Without using his aggressive command of deep sorceries, he himself could not have crossed Orlan Pass once the blizzards set in for the winter.

  Leagues distant, Sethvir tracked the query without effort. ‘Lysaer didn’t try the way through the mountains. He went north by land on fast horses with only ten officers in attendance. Another messenger took the road across the flats to Miralt Head. He carried royal orders to dispatch a galley in swift passage along the north coast. The vessel will make rendezvous with the Prince of the Light in four nights and bear his party across the cove narrows to Atainia.’

  Asandir frowned, while the wind flicked loose hair against his numbed cheek. ‘That’s still three hundred leagues distant from Jaelot.’ Given unseasonal fine weather and luck, the prince’s train could not reach Rathain’s shores earlier than the next fortnight; whereas, plying lane forces and the power focus sited in the feast hall of the mayor’s palace, Asandir expected to reach that far city within the hour of midnight. ‘You can’t think I’ll need more than a day to spirit a captive boy from a dungeon.’