Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Elaira tucked her hands under her elbows, held them clamped to her side to stop shaking. This one tiny victory signified little. At some point, she knew Prince Arithon must launch his attempt to wrest Fionn Areth from the armed cavalcade. Force or weapons would not deter him, nor numbers, nor the riled crowd in the streets. If those factors did not offer obstacle enough, in each small alley and lane along the cart’s labored course, Koriani initiates lay waiting in ambush. If Arithon escaped a lance thrust through the heart, he must find himself pulled down from behind by spring traps and spells of constriction.

  At the vat, the bent, wizened elder shifted her incantation to effect the cantrip of dispersal. Old fingers that had once worn delicate jade rings began the arcs of the six primal runes of unbinding. She completed the one to strike down by intent, then the second, for stasis. The third, with its spikes, for clearing tied energies, and the fourth, for stability and balance; the flash and flare of configured power streamed down like dropped tinsel, scattering ripples over the image clinging like film to the water. Next to last came the fifth, for containment of chaos, and the sixth, for grounding out backlash. A heat of freed energy cleared from the water as a burst of ephemeral steam.

  The spelled impasse set over the market square gradually came unsnarled. In trembling, distorted reflection, the wagon unwedged from the alley where it had been sidetracked for shelter. Bearing its toy figure prisoner, and flanked by the pennoned lances in the hands of its mounted escort, the cavalcade re-formed itself into a wedge and sheared on toward its appointed destination. That labored passage tacked an erratic course through the ragtag jumble of shanty stalls that sold used clothing to poor folk.

  Lirenda scrutinized each step and detail with a vulture’s fixated intensity. She waited, hands clenched, as the strayed vortices of spent spellcraft were wound in by the deft old enchantress. Those withered fingers knew their work well. Cadgia, Third Senior, had strung arcane power like knitting throughout her four centuries of life. Meticulous and neat, she grounded and tied off each loose end into harmless, entropic knots. Their residual force would gradually spin off and fade without raising accidental disharmony.

  The scene in the vat returned to stability, the cart horse settled, and the lancers moving in front and behind to clear the way for its passage.

  Lirenda straightened in tight-reined irritation. ‘Inform me at once of any changes.’ She transferred her survey from the vat to Elaira, her hair the immaculate sheen of black wing feathers, and her eyes the intent, unblinking pale brown of a polished tiger’s eye cabochon. ‘You will go nowhere without my permission.’

  ‘Your will,’ Elaira replied in street sarcasm, her own gaze wide gray and unflinching.

  Her senior would read past her pretense of indifference; yet the sword cut both ways. Neither was Lirenda herself immune to the slight slips that tension laid bare to the trained lens of peer observation. Her carriage was perhaps too fashionably flawless, her chin just a fraction high-set. She might have been a glass statue dressed out in silk, except for the fingers wound over both wrists.

  ‘Don’t bend your bracelets,’ Elaira said sweetly, heels drumming an insolent tattoo on the barrel. ‘Am I not safely muzzled by my initiate’s oath? Or Ath forbid, do you fear I might snap? What are the odds I might tip off the end play of your double-sided game of butchery in the square?’

  ‘Try.’ Lirenda smiled daggers. ‘Nothing would please me more than to see our Prime Senior strip your mind. I should find entertainment, watching you live out your days as a slavering idiot.’

  ‘If you want your boots licked, why not get a puppy?’ Elaira shot back, attacking words all she had to vent the unbearable pain strangled inside her. ‘Dogs never cavil at nosing through muck, but whimper and grovel for the privilege.’

  ‘You’ve a mind crude as cat dirt,’ Lirenda said. ‘A grave pity you didn’t lose your tongue as just punishment for begging before the Koriani Order took you in.’ She glanced toward the vat, snapped her curt order to carry on, then glided in aristocratic superiority through the doorway, where a second circle of seeresses labored to coordinate the movements of the enchantresses keeping vigil outside in the streets.

  Confined to her barrel, Elaira endured. Feelings warred in her, ferocious and hot. Too real, the prospect that temptation would lead to disloyalty and see her consigned to the order’s supreme penalty. Eyes closed, she took a deep breath and wound fired nerves back to patience. No question now, how her heart would respond. If the opening came to abet Arithon’s intervention to save Fionn Areth, she would act in sacrifice with no second thought.

  To ensure their escape from Morriel Prime’s trap would be worth any cost under sky.

  The minutes crawled by in spring-wound suspense, with the reflection in the vat standing witness. The prisoner’s cart crept and rocked through the press. Elaira could snatch only glimpses of the scried image that measured its progress. More often, someone else’s hand or face obscured the critical viewpoint. Those moments, she was left to interpret events from the nuances garnered from the expressions of firsthand watchers. The vital details that destroyed peace of mind remained elusively past her reach: such as how Fionn Areth fared under the strain. Was he still weak and dizzy, or had the sigil to lend him strength as she left allowed him to regain his balance? Had his guardsmen vented their tempers and been cruel through the nerve-wracking delays imposed by Lirenda’s meddling? From her limited vantage on the barrel, Elaira caught only the occasional glimpse of bowed shoulders and a face resting in what appeared sheer despair upon the support of tied wrists.

  Two crossroads passed. No ambush happened. The order’s seeker found no sign of Arithon.

  Lirenda breezed back from her conference with the seniors who readied the spring traps and bindings. The serenity fixed on her cameo features implied a vexed mood for the kink in her plans.

  Yet the cart and its prisoner rolled inexorably onward without reprieve or intervention.

  The sky capped the scene in clouds like sheet lead, with a tireless north wind snagging at hats and ribbons and crackling the streamers of the lance pennons.

  ‘We’ll see a blizzard by nightfall,’ the seeress forecast. She touched another sigil to track the image more closely as the cavalcade wheeled around a constricted corner.

  Cart and horse reached the sharp, jutted angle where the justiciar’s house overlooked a three-way convergence of streets. A horse trough paned over with ice sat beneath a bronze statue of the galleyman whose vessel had marshaled the harbor blockade long years ago in the uprising. Gulls had used the figure’s hat for a roost, and decades of dropped guano streaked the shoulders and face, etching the verdigris patina. Past a brick-walled flower bed crusted with snow, the thoroughfare widened into the sloped descent of Broadwalk Way.

  The avenue extended like a wheel spoke from the mayor’s palace on the rise to the stone-cobbled square beneath the old harbor gate, where fleets of high-prowed Paravian ships had once docked. The stone platform that now staged Jaelot’s public executions, in another century and under a clanborn earl, had served as the dais for visiting dignitaries. The sockets that had originally stepped awnings and banners were now inset with iron rings. Two stout posts of oak had been erected in mortar for tying the condemned for the sword thrust. Around these, in tiered piles, lay the bundled pine faggots drenched in seal oil, which would rise into flames and black smoke at a spark’s touch.

  On a windless day, the fortunate victim might asphyxiate from the fumes before the cruel heat crisped the flesh from his bones, and he screamed his throat raw from blind agony.

  Elaira sat on the barrel and watched in the vat as the cart was reined to a halt. She saw soldiers, like toys, dismount from toy horses and ram back the overeager crowd. Men in black surcoats with Jaelot’s gold lions unlashed Fionn Areth’s wrists. He stumbled once as they dragged him out of the cart, and again, as his forced step caught on the slick granite stair. Half-carried, half-dragged, he was hauled to his fate at the posts
.

  Welded into a sealed silence of tension, Elaira scarcely noted Lirenda’s rapid speech. The slipstream of words reached her in snipped fragments, broken down by the ugly, defeated apprehension that her faith had been founded on vain hopes. Arithon had come, but had seen no opening to act; and Fionn Areth would die as the pawn whose crowning play might never happen.

  More than a Koriani conspiracy would fall in the ashes of this day’s defeat.

  ‘… can’t believe he’s not acted,’ Lirenda said, furious. ‘Of all the contingencies we worked and planned for, this one is the most inexplicable. If the boy’s death takes place uncontested, all of our theories are wrong. Every effort we make to find and take the Shadow Master henceforward must be done in deep cover and subterfuge.’

  The seeress at the vat turned her head to reply. The opening between her elbow and the seeker to her left let Elaira see clearly as Fionn Areth was lashed spread-eagled between the oak posts. Tears blurred her eyes. She blinked them away, unwilling to separate herself from even one second of his agony. The guilt tore her open, stopped her thought and her breath, that she had been part and party to the atrocity which brought him at last to the stake.

  The men-at-arms tore off his thin shirt. As the seeress steadied the image in tight focus, the remorseless detail showed that Fionn Areth was shaking.

  Elaira bit her lip, the pain shared, and the relentless strain of dreading the inhumane spectacle yet to come.

  A soldier arrived with a pine pitch torch propped upright in a bucket of sand. He set the cresset down alongside posts and faggots, then glanced over his shoulder in unsettled deference and made way for someone beyond him.

  Behind the miserable, bared back of the condemned, the executioner mounted the block, cloaked head to foot in coal black.

  He was not a large man, but the escorting men-at-arms gave his arrival wide berth. Nor would the stoutest of them meet his glance or acknowledge his human presence. Tinnily faint in the etched stillness and dust, the crowd screamed their crude appreciation. The executioner strode into his place in the tableau, the hood of his trade riffled against his cheek by the sea wind, and the face underneath obscured by a mask of cut silk. Wrapped in dark cloth, Jaelot’s paid killer carried the longsword that would pierce the condemned sorcerer through the heart.

  Elaira’s stunned gaze fixed on that weapon, morbidly unable to tear free of the horror that must follow when its silver length was drawn and laid bare. The gloved hand on the hilt seemed too easy, too slight, for the rending act of its office.

  That instant, time stopped. Something caught at Elaira’s attention and slapped all the air from her lungs.

  Those fine, supple fingers, surely she knew them? A tug of wild hope, in the carriage of those black-clad shoulders, and perhaps, the listening tilt of the head. Though he was cloaked and masked, she felt the shock of stunned recognition pass between the executioner and herself.

  Then Lirenda’s voice, imperative, shattered through her raced thoughts. ‘I’m speaking to you!’

  Elaira flinched and looked up, the inescapable truth betrayed beyond any hope of concealment by the love and desperation in her face.

  Koriani trained in the arts of observation, Lirenda seized on that opportune exposure. ‘Ath’s deliverance, he’s there!’ She spun toward the vat in an agitated whirl of rich silk. ‘Which one? Which one is he?’

  But in the end, she need not ask after all. Given the sure cue of the Shadow Master’s presence, his assumed identity became obvious.

  Lirenda’s shout pealed through the dead air and touched off an explosion of movement. ‘By the power invested by Morriel Prime, we must act fast to confine him! Send word to every initiate we have. Direct them to raise banners of guard across every door, every lane, every shop front and alley that leads away from the main square!’

  Winter Solstice Noon 5669–5670

  Trace Magic

  Far south, worn by a bone-stripping ride in cold winds up the West Shand peninsula from Earle, Asandir leads his blown horse through the salt pools of West Fen, then enters the grimward which guards the remains of the great drake, Eckracken; and for the hours, the weeks, or the months he will need to refigure the seals of protection, neither man nor mage might reach him …

  In a gabled mansion off Spinster’s Alley in Jaelot, an aged woman sits in darkness, attentive to the ranging, dissonant tones that run through her home’s stone foundations; in disturbed concern, she addresses the servant who waits, deferent, at her right hand: ‘Jasque, I suspect Koriathain have set wards to cause harm. Go out, will you please? Find out if someone’s in trouble …’

  Upon solstice noon, the power of a Paravian mystery released by a masterbard’s melody peals down Athera’s sixth lane; tuned tracks across latitude become reawakened, vibration singing down lateral channels, to skew off the damaged axis of Rockfell Peak, then to peal frustrated, through bedrock, and bare trees; a whisper of that balked resonance doubles into itself, and spills into faint imprint over the ghost track of another spell, the left remnant of a construct that once recalled a Sorcerer from a perilous quest between stars …

  Winter Solstice Afternoon 5670

  XIV.

  Bait

  Stripped for the sword thrust to claim his young life, Fionn Areth resisted the fear that battered him toward mewling degradation and weakness. Bitter winds off the bay lashed his hair and reddened the bare skin of his torso. The scent of volatile resins and pine intermingled with the thick, oily smoke from the torch. The fumes clogged his lungs and laced his gut into nausea. Never in his life had he felt so alone, nor so crushed down by despair. No mauling pain left from bruising and cuts could compare with the agonized terror that spurred the raced beat of his pulse.

  Around him, the people of Jaelot screamed revilement. They heaved and pressed, a pack of wild animals ravening to tear at live flesh. Their passion to see bloodshed beat the cold air with an almost palpable force. From the cordon of soldiers set around the stone dais, to the craftshops and mansions which fronted the square, fury held him surrounded, an inimical mass of strangers’ faces stamped into all range of expression. Those not engrossed with their sick fascination were chillingly ugly with spite. Man or woman, nowhere could the condemned on the block see one who showed sorrow or pity.

  In that absence of mercy, all hope drained away. Fionn Areth coughed smoke from a paper-dry throat. Youth and adventure and the lure of a prophecy had brought him to this. He would leave life as the hapless target of hatred, damned for the crimes of the Shadow Master he had once cherished dreams of pledging his sword to suppress. Nothing remained of his bright fabric of ideals. His shared union with the girl at the inn in the Skyshiels seemed the fragmented wisp of a dream. He owned no goatherd’s identity and no fate. Only the cruel, hard certainty of death a handful of minutes away.

  The four men-at-arms posted around the piled faggots were all gray-haired veterans, survivors of the legendary defeat arranged by the Sorcerer at Vastmark. Their creased eyes beheld the condemned with etched purpose and the granite satisfaction of a vengeance too long delayed. Nearer to hand, the executioner’s enigmatic, wound patience seemed aberrant as forged steel given the breath of life in human form.

  Fionn Areth clenched his jaw, unable to quiet his chattering teeth. He endured through the drawn-out, thoughtless delay, while the mayor’s wife and entourage pulled up in a black-and-gold-lacquered carriage. Assisted by swarms of liveried footmen, she and her guests were whisked off the street and settled in comfort behind the ornate iron railings of an open-air gallery across the square. Musicians arrived. After them, two more gilded carriages plowed through the press and disgorged their peacock array of wellborn passengers.

  While Fionn Areth suffered in tormented suspension, the select innercircle ofthe mayor’sacquaintances flockedin polite company to share the event of his death. Their servants dispensed wine and refreshments. Ladies in fashionable hats and fur muffs exchanged small talk behind the stolid backs of their hous
e guard, brought along to quell rowdy antics or the unplanned small mishaps that might arise in a crowd of mannerless commoners.

  From the railed second stories of the merchants’ mansions, parties rollicked in similar gaiety. The highborn of Jaelot would enjoy their sensation at safe remove, where velvets were not likely to be spattered with splashed blood, nor the ladies be troubled by noisome stinks and rank smoke.

  A herald’s horn blared. The state carriage bearing the mayor made its ponderous way through the press. Black plumes on the horses’ headstalls nodded in lockstep with the ribboned helms of the city’s elite guard. To a second blast of trumpets, his Lordship of Jaelot emerged and ascended the block, attired in his court robes and jeweled ermine hat, his chains of office and emblazoned state finery. He was followed by the city aldermen and the high court magistrate, then a double-file procession of footmen, who spread a carpet over the cleared end of the dais. More servants arrived with upholstered chairs to accommodate the titled circle of state witnesses.

  The magistrate stayed standing, and read out the long list of charges. While the wind snapped his parchment and rouged his mournful nose, the howls of the crowd swelled into a clamor. Barely one word in ten reached Fionn Areth, who scarcely knew which malfeasance had caused his arraignment.

  Assaulted by the thunderous wall of raw noise, by the fumes of oiled smoke, and by the sick, sweating nerves of a bottomless terror, Fionn Areth fought to keep loose knees from buckling while the warrant recording his death for city archives was rolled, tied in ribbons, and sealed by a black-robed secretary. Second to second, he forced back the screams of outraged self-pity that beat to escape from his throat.