Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Not friendly,’ Elaira whispered, her flare of exuberance unraveled to threadbare worry. She groped in the straw for her satchel of remedies, then latched boyish fingers around Fionn Areth’s left elbow. ‘Let’s not test their mood. I think you’ll do better if you’re up on your feet when they come.’

  Through the horrible, sweaty interval while the boy fought stiff muscles and the constraint of tight bandages to rise, the warden’s henchmen descended the stairwell. They were armed. The pair in the lead bore a chiming length of forged chain between them. Grotesque shadows flittered over the walls, tossed by the flare of pine torches.

  Arrived at the cell, the rough, bearded warden pressed his chin to the bars and hailed the Koriani enchantress. ‘This be no lynch mob, lady. Requisite orders are sent from the mayor. Can’t be a stay now, for trial or argument. Stand down, move aside. We’re taking the Sorcerer for his due reckoning with the steel and the fire of retribution.’

  Elaira squeezed the trembling flesh of Fionn Areth’s forearm, by her touch urging him to bear up. ‘I’ll walk by his side. He’s not steady.’

  Keys jangled. The doorclashed openand boomedflat against the damp wall. Two burly guards shouldered through, ducking under the five-foot lintel. Both were armored in field helms and mail, and two others at their heels brought the chains.

  ‘Those irons are not necessary,’ Elaira protested. ‘This boy can’t run anywhere. He’s injured, you blind dolts! To bind wrists that are bandaged over stitched gashes is an inexcusable cruelty!’

  ‘Won’t matter, lady,’ snapped the warden, a safe distance removed outside the barred grille of the cell. ‘He’ll be ash inside the hour, and all your fussy needlework gone to Dharkaron along with him. Cry shame, or cry tears, you won’t do a damn thing to stop the sword the mayor wants run through his heart.’

  Soiled from the straw, the deep auburn hair she had braided that morning hung straight as oiled bronze between her shoulders, Elaira held her ground. ‘By the principles of mercy my Koriani Order was founded to uphold, beware. I will protest every act of undue harsh treatment. By your own mayor’s word, my life stands as surety for this prisoner’s untimely escape. Leave off the chains! He can go well enough in my custody.’

  Fionn Areth, from behind, could not see her features. Small as she was, and weaponless beyond the two little daggers sheathed in her satchel of remedies, something about her determination raised fear. The men-at-arms who carried the chains stalled outright, while two in the lead cringed and found cause to stare elsewhere.

  The mayor’s warden lost patience. ‘Carry on, and no shirking! The orders we have are to bind him.’

  ‘Then use a nice, soft rope.’ Sweet reason etched in acid, Elaira tapped her foot. ‘We can all smile and wait while you fetch one.’ When nobody moved to fulfill her demand, she let fly with the scorn of the streets. ‘What do you fear, you cringing, limp daisies? That this poor wretch will walk and haunt you in flames, after the sword’s let his heartsblood?’

  Fionn Areth gasped. Reeling faint, with his gut clenched with nerves and his head split by the pain of a crashing headache, he swayed. A savage rush of vertigo seemed to upend the floor. The enchantress’s cool hands and unyielding support were all that held him upright while a shambling sergeant with bad breath and chipped teeth stepped in with a rope and bound him.

  ‘Mind you don’t tie too tightly,’ Elaira snapped. ‘Chafe those dressings in your clumsiness, you’ll tear open his wounds.’

  The man hawked and spat. ‘Who’s to care on the matter, when he’s bled like a pig on the faggots?’

  Elaira bristled. ‘Leave that work to your mayor’s paid butcher. Do you understand threats? For every small drop of his blood shed beforetime, I’ll lay your bollocks under curse as repayment.’

  The knots were made firm, but without undue pressure. Elaira insisted on checking. Through a sucking ebb tide of dizziness and fear, Fionn Areth felt an unsettling tremble invade her touch. The change close to unmanned him. She was not one to quail. Through the difficult hours spent stitching and setting the spell seals to heal his gashed knee, she had been unflinching as rock.

  ‘Buck up,’ she whispered. Her hand pressed his shoulder, guiding, before his impatient escort could tug at his bonds and drag him out.

  Fionn Areth completed the first steps without stumbling. When he faltered, the enchantress held to his side, her grip firm and sure as she braced his failing weight upright. Through his swimming, drunk effort to manage the stair, she railed like a virago, haranguing the guards for their goatish mismanagement and threatening to leave them in a state unfit to breed children.

  Had Fionn Areth not been so wretchedly frightened, he might have measured his length from sheer laughter.

  Too soon, the stink of rat urine fell behind. Dank, dripping stone gave way to linenfold paneling, and the close jangle of mail opened up into the loftier reverberations off varnished wood floors, gouged white from the hobnailed tread of authority dragging prisoners to the upper hall for trial. Today, no candles burned on the justiciar’s dais. The caryatids trapped in suffering support of the massive table seemed a stamped huddle of frozensouls in the gloom. The stagnant air wore the fusted reek of citrus peel and rose petals, and under these, the miasma of degraded humanity, forced down the worn path from incarceration to impersonal judgment.

  Fionn Areth battled his panic-struck weakness and a terror that drained his last wits. His senses reeled as the blood left his head. In his state of near collapse, the massive, black pillars seemed to dance on square pedestals, and the high, groined ceiling became insubstantial and prickled with light. Despite his pride, he fainted, jerked short of a fall by the guard who had charge of the rope.

  He bled then, despite Elaira’s kind heart. Her shouted imprecations thinned and grew distant, then frayed away altogether as he sank in a rising torrent of darkness.

  He woke to the splash of ice water on his face. A keening east wind razed his skin. Ugly, shuddering chills danced after the runneled wet, which streamed on and soaked down his spine. Pink droplets fell, rinsed through torn bandages, where his hands were lashed to a crossbar. The pain seemed detached. He blinked water from his eyes and saw he was fastened to a post set upright in an open cart. Four guardsmen were stationed at his shoulders, all fully armed. Their helms shone a dingy, pebbled gray against the graphite gloom of low cloud cover.

  ‘He’s awake,’ the gruff bass of the warden pronounced.

  Fionn Areth surveyed his surroundings through a plastered swath of hair. The enchantress Elaira was no longer beside him. Only the guards in their gold lion surcoats, frowning and jumpy with tension.

  ‘Move him out, then!’ cracked the warden.

  A drover’s whip snapped. The rough-coated horse in the traces shouldered into its collar, and the cart used in Jaelot to bear the condemned to the gibbet creaked and rocked into motion.

  The jerk on the ropes reawakened the burning sting of torn sutures. Buckled at the knees, Fionn Areth received the kaleidoscopic, spinning impression of the prison yard, the gapped board sheds used as barracks for convicts frowned over by three turreted towers. Two warders brushed past, running, to fling wide the heavy, barred gate.

  Nothing of herding wild goats on the moors could prepare for the noise as the panels swung open.

  A mob rampaged outside, a weaving mass of fists and faces, thrashing and screaming and seething in an explosive, bleak fury of hatred. The cordon of mailed soldiers who held them back seemed inadequate, a loose dike thrown down to dam a rank flood. Mounted lancers in field trappings reinforced the line. Eight more in double file escorted the jolting, slow progress of the cart. Death beckoned on all sides, in the shining crescent edges of honed steel, and in the reviling mouths ofmen, women, and children, contorted with passion beyond even nightmare imagining.

  Fionn Areth swallowed. Shivering violently in the rasping, cold wind, he glanced to either side, appeal and desperation on his face.

  The guardsman behind h
im guffawed. ‘No hope for you, laddie. Can’t shelter behind any damned witch’s skirts now. Yon small, mouthy bitch got ordered off elsewhere by direct demand of her senior.’

  Spurred beyond fear, Fionn Areth ripped back a grasslands phrase which meant skat of a loose-boweled goat.

  A mailed fist split his mouth in punitive fury. He spat blood and glowered, his fury cast in the same mold as the royal heirs descended of Torbrand s’Ffalenn. The guardsman stepped back toward the safety of his fellows, muttering, ‘Devil’s eyes, that one has. The born spawn of a demon. We’ll be better off when he’s ashes.’

  The adrenaline surge brought on by the pain served to clear Fionn Areth’s head. He planted his legs against the sway of the cart, while the horse passed the gates, and the vile imprecations of the crowd closed about him, a battering, dense mass of savagery and noise that built to a force that was deafening.

  The populace chanted, as the wagon bore him under the spooled galleries of Spicer’s Row. ‘Death to the Sorcerer! Death to the Sorcerer!’

  Their thousands of voices welded into a barrage of vitriolic spite. The horse sidled, shying. Two guardsmen now walked at its bridle to keep it square in the traces. Every small, accustomed sound became overwhelmed, until all movement near at hand seemed an act done in pantomime, the booming grind of the cart wheels erased, and the oaths of the beleaguered driver. Trapped in that strange, suspended tableau, the mayor’s lancers cantered up and down the cordoned verges, the iron-shod clatter of their destriers’ hooves drowned utterly in that dinning mill of noise.

  Over the spiked helms of his escort, Fionn Areth glimpsed the purple cloaks of Koriani enchantresses embedded here and there amid the tossing motley of the crowd. Their eyes, ever bright, surveyed their surroundings, as if they cataloged each individual nuance of the bystanders on either side of them. None of them glanced in the condemned man’s direction, and none of them proved to be Elaira.

  Fionn Areth endured, wretched as any of the struggling goats he had led to his father’s knife in the slaughter shed. The crowd showedless mercy than hehadfordumb beasts. Here, a ham-fisted butcher shook a bloodied cleaver; there, four ragged children who darted on the fringes threw missiles of manure and mud. He managed to duck, at the cost of torn skin where the ropes at his wrists gouged his bandages.

  Though the wind snapped his hair, the chill ceased to matter. Sweat rolled down the knotted muscles of his back. The cart turned again, rattling into the narrower lanes of the trade quarter. The jut of the shop fronts, with balconies above, were crammed to capacity with screaming people. Garbage and kitchen peelings rained onhis head. Once, the warm slop of a jakes splashed and missed him, splattering the near ranks of guardsmen.

  Two broke away, shouting. They pounded in vengeance up the wooden stair from the street, and found themselves beset at the landing by the shrieked imprecations from a trio of toothless grandames. Someone else capped their outrage with another hurled offering, this time the offal steaming and fresh from gutting a slaughtered pig.

  The cart lurched ahead, its progress inexorable. The curses of the soldiers and the jeers from the beldames fell into the growl of the crowd. Fionn Areth never knew how the altercation ended. The thinned ranks of his short-tempered escort rounded the smithy and the harness maker’s and waded into the choked throng of the eastside markets. There, the cavalcade ground to a halt, blocked by packed knots of onlookers and the ramshackle maze of tinker’s stalls and used-wares booths that ringed the public cisterns of Dagrien Court.

  Froth flew from the bit as the officer in charge reined his mount down from a half rear. ‘Fiends plague! Will you look? The whole townseems possessed!’ He jabbed in both spurs, sent his bucketing mount ahead to flag down a lancer. ‘Close in the cordon! Then get a dozen men up here with bows. They’re needed to cover the prisoner.’ He loosed a hand from the rein and shook his fist at the crowd who plunged and howled against the men-at-arms striving to stay them. ‘We’ll have to back into a side street just to hold our position. Find me two lancers with reliable mounts and send them back to the garrison. We’ll need reinforcements to win clear of this impasse without tripping off a damned riot.’

  The troop sergeant sounded his brass horn to deliver the urgent command for retreat. Wheeled back to rejoin the mounted escort with the wagon, the captain swore in between his spate of rapid-fire orders. Through bedlam, screamed epithets, and a dauntless assault of bone-hurting noise, he fought to regroup his inadequate band of foot to the task of forming a shield wall to hold off the murderous press. ‘Never seen anything like this, not in my born days of soldiering! We’ll be lucky to reach the town gibbet before dark, bearing a live prisoner between us.’

  Winter Solstice Morning 5669

  Fourth Upset

  The old vintner’s shed off Wheelwright’s Lane in Jaelot had ceased being inhabited by tradesmen since deeded ownership had been claimed in recompense for a Koriani oath of debt. The mullioned window overlooking the street remained black, but the interior was not empty. On the hour that Fionn Areth was delivered to his fate, an initiate’s cloak blocked the incoming light filtered through the latched boards of the casement. One lit candle burned on the sill, the hazed edge of the flame upright in the dust-laden air. Its halo fell like dipped brass on the heads of the three women stationed over the rim of the vat once used to pulp grapes.

  Each enchantress held her spell crystal in hand. As one, their gazes stayed trained on the water filling the wooden vessel to the brim. The surface was ironed to rippleless stillness under the influence of their spellcraft. Across that sheened mirror, in animated miniature, the choked confrontation in Dagrien Court played itself out in reflection. The crowd clamoring to witness the blood and fire of execution rolled and surged like stirred cloth scraps, while the cart which bore the condemned to his doom wedged the mouth of the spindler’s alley, circled by beleaguered guardsmen.

  One of the lancers lost hold on his horse. The creature reared and struck out with its forehooves. Hecklers caught too close scrambled back. An opening gaped through the thronging mob behind, ragged as a snag in torn knit.

  ‘Spell seal has weakened,’ the seniormost seeress murmured in a tranced monotone.

  The sister initiate to her right closed her eyes, and intoned a rhythmic binding to sharpen her flagging will. The resonance of intent carried through her quartz matrix, amplified and heightened into focus. The fingertip she raised to renew the sigils of confusion glowed faintly scarlet in the dimness. Her scribing moved over the scene of obstruction, trailing faint, sifting streamers of energy over the spelled vat of water.

  In Beckburn Market, the lancer cajoled his charger back down on four legs. The crowd flooded behind like a breaker against a dam, and his shouted oath reechoed, whisper faint, through the dust-filtered stillness of the shed. ‘Fiends alive, it’s as though the whole town’s been possessed to go mad and run riot!’

  The conjuring enchantress sealed her dire work, face sheened with a fine dew of sweat. ‘I can’t keep your victim exposed for much longer without risking a serious mishap.’

  As the senior in charge, Lirenda looked on, her skin like old pearl inlaid into gloom, and her oval face loftily dispassionate. ‘Hold firm for as long as possible.’

  The wispy, thin elder who stitched sigil after sigil of seek-and-find over and through the gaudy surge of onlookers remained unimpressed by such staunchness. ‘If our quarry hasn’t taken the bait by now, chances are he’s not going to.’

  ‘Keep searching.’

  Under Lirenda’s iron command, the three enchantresses bent back to their scrying. They wove spells of stay and of manipulation, courting the thinnest edge of raw danger. No one of them harbored undue expectations. The fine, wrought line of spells they maintained skirted the brittle edge of peril. If an accident happened and caused the least bloodshed, the balance would irrevocably tip. An incensed, frustrated, volatile mob would outrun all their careful constraints. Fear and anger would spark an explosion of violence. The
lancers trapped in that spelled pocket of entropy might not understand why the populace hazed their position. Yet professional instinct grasped pending danger. They gathered in a roiling, nerve-jumpy mass, their pennoned weapons leveled to stand down a crowd who pressed in like riptide, screaming insult and imprecations.

  Lirenda uttered a breathless epithet, resisting her need to pace out her frustration. Backed by the honeycomb rows of wine shelving that now harbored cobwebs in place of corked bottles, she fumed, ‘Damn the man for irrational stubbornness! He’s lurking inside the city walls, somewhere, or why mock us by tweaking our ward spells!’

  ‘He’s Torbrand’s descendant,’ said the stout, gray-haired seeress. ‘His inborn nature as Teir’s’Ffalenn won’t hold to the straightforward course.’

  ‘Don’t harp on the obvious!’ Lirenda turned her profile, backed by the cloth pinned over the shutters. Faint light leaked through, curling like silver smoke amid the raised dust stirred by her agitation. ‘Tell me how long we have before the reinforcements come through from the garrison.’

  ‘They’ve already crossed into the north side of the square,’ the seeress advised, softly neutral before her senior’s simmering temper.

  ‘They’ve sent in armored horse. Heavy cavalry from the field division.’ The one initiate with the nerve to interrupt stated fact, fearlessly cold as etched carbon. ‘If you maze these poor people to hamper their war destriers, innocents are going to be trampled.’

  Perched on an overturned barrel in the corner, all but overlooked in the tension, Elaira awarded the exchange her own stamp of acidic practicality. ‘If Arithon tries his attempt at a rescue against a quarter company of lancers, he’s far more likely to get himself skewered than we are to pull him out whole.’

  ‘Spare us your impertinent opinion, if you please.’ Lirenda spun in pettish irritation and stepped to the side of the vat. ‘Let the seals go,’ she commanded. ‘Release the confusion and allow the garrison escort to get the prisoner’s cart moving again.’