Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Fionn Areth watched, dumbfounded, from the shadows, as a glib spate of oaths from the Shadow Master seeded a fist-waving argument. Smiths threw down hammers. The wood joiners left the steamboxes, sweaty arms wielding their hammers and pry bars, and their faces maroon with ill temper.

  ‘Everything, these,’ Arithon exhorted, his broken language styled in a desertman’s accent and his mood expansively unappeased. ‘Too little, like fry fish!’ His gyrating gesture almost bloodied a man’s nose as he flung wide his arm to explain. ‘Big! Big! I need a big round! Not these, no better than chick’s nests.’

  ‘You want to buy a wheel?’ asked the gray-haired proprietor, a horse-faced man with a squint, and huge, gnarled fists that wore scars like white scale from the forges.

  Arithon returned a look of exasperation. ‘No wheel, me.’ When one of the smiths grasped his arm to eject him, he exploded in furious dialect, each word of which carried the ferocity of a curse. ‘I am silver, me! Everybody gets paid.’ He emphasized his assurance by kicking the scrap bin. The resulting clash of distressed metal made even the deafest smith cringe.

  No one was left with the least shred of doubt, the customer demanded a wheel rim. ‘One with dents in,’ Arithon said with effect, his eyes rolled in baleful impatience.

  ‘He wants the biggest piece of scrap iron we’ve got?’ the apprentice hopefully translated.

  ‘Round! Round!’ Arithon corrected, bobbing his chin. The corners of his mouth turned up in a blinding smile. He burrowed a grubby hand under his jerkin and produced three gold coins, the mere sight of which rousted the wheelwrights to boot-kissing agreeability.

  As though in love with conspicuous display, Arithon assisted their search for a suitable rim. The proprietor allowed him the liberty, well aware that the worth of his coins could have bought his shop clean of stock. No matter how often the nosy customer got underfoot, or insinuated curious hands into cupboards, his antics were tolerated, then abetted for the sheer fun of watching him comb through every spider-infested cranny. Arithon made rounds with startling noise and coarse epithets. His sparkling, odd turn of humor finally had the most dour master craftsman folded over a stool, convulsed with laughter and blotting his streaming eyes with the back of his work-begrimed wrists.

  Three gold pieces the lighter, Fionn Areth and the Shadow Master emerged, the bent rim of an enormous dray wheel borne on their shoulders. A third apprentice was sent along to assist with the load, which was awkward fortwo men to handle. Yokedin cold iron, the trio passed the length of the avenue beyond, where the mayor’s guard now conducted an earnest search, and two Koriani stood vigil. Apparently the properties of the hoop frayed their spells, for as Arithon passed, whistling an odd, catchy melody in threnodies, neither one of the initiate enchantresses glanced once in his direction.

  In the alley behind the armorer’s, Arithonpaid off the apprentice wheelwright. For another two silvers, the fellow was induced to part with his tunic and jacket. Fionn Areth dressed in the armorer’s privy, while, in a rapid transaction without show or argument, the Master of Shadow bargained away his scrap iron. The bent wheel and an untold price in hard coin bought him a light, balanced sword and eight bone-handled throwing knives, and yet another craftsman’s hard-used cloak as a bonus.

  Back into the poured lead gray of the street, bundled into forge-scented clothing cut generously wide across sleeves and shoulders, Fionn Areth accepted the light sword and spare cloak. He arranged the new garment overtop the black mantle, too conspicuous for its color to be ordinary.

  While a little girl chivvied by a nursemaid paused to stare, and two roisterers roared past witha wineskin, Arithons’Ffalenn raked his youngdouble fromheadto footwith that disturbing regard that seemed to glean the most intimate detail.

  ‘You’ll do.’ Then he startled the goatherd near out of his skin by answering the unspoken question. ‘I gave up the wheel rim because the initiates we fooled were too inexperienced to realize its significance. What worked twice, the third time might just bring bad luck. The sword seems the wiser option. Does it suit you for weight and balance?’

  It did, to another unsettling degree. Too honest to be ungrateful for the gift of what he knew was a first-class weapon, Fionn Areth delivered his thanks by way of a breathless warning. ‘Guardsmen, four of them, moving our way.’

  ‘Mounted?’ On Fionn Areth’s nod, Arithon showed himself wily enough, or else by far too unnervingly trusting, by not glancing back to affirm. ‘They’ll be too arrogant to vacate their nice, warm saddles and manhandle what appears innocent. You look like a smith,’ he said in swift reassurance. ‘Just don’t limp. The jam seller’s shop is close by. When we get there, if you’re hungry, I’ll buy you a muffin. You’ll have time to eat it, I promise.’

  At Fionn Areth’s oath of outright trepidation, Arithon flashed a quick smile. ‘Don’t worry. When Dakar doesn’t want to be seen by town guardsmen, they’re more than likely to trip over their own feet and fall flat on their noses than find him.’

  ‘You don’t look like a smith,’ Fionn Areth pointed out.

  The smile vanished. ‘Then I’ll improvise.’

  They moved on, the pace too brisk for Fionn Areth’s slashed knee. He could feel the wound bleeding underneath its torn bandage, as the limp he could not successfully hide carried him careening from one side of the street to the other. This quarter of Jaelot had onceheld richmansions, degraded nowinto honeycomb tenements with sagging galleries and rows of ramshackle stalls. The wares seemed a jumble of two-pennymerchandise, moldering old scrolls, and the resharpened stubs of worn quills. Smells of cod warred with the grease stink of sausage, stitched through by the cries of the hawkers. While the guardsmen clattered past, Arithon haggled with a basket seller, then bought a white pullet from a goose girl. The basket and its squawking occupant explained Fionn Areth’s unbalanced stride well enough to buy them a few minutes’ grace.

  They ducked into a close. Rats fled, chittering, into the gloom. The wind creaked a shutter overhead. Two steps later, Fionn Areth slammed square on into Arithon, who had jerked to an unannounced stop. The pullet let fly with a deafening cackle. Her wing-flapping tantrum fluttered loose feathers out of the osier basket. The down drifted, unmoored, with the first sifted snowflakes disgorged by the lowering clouds. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Arithon tipped his head, his silence like death.

  Ahead, a violet-robed enchantress blocked their egress, ringed about by a purple aura of raised spellcraft.

  ‘Dakar won’t be at the jam seller’s, not anymore,’ said the Master of Shadow, expressionless.

  Fear slid like chill steel between Fionn Areth’s ribs. ‘Is he taken, then?’

  ‘If he’s not, I know where to look.’ Arithon reversed course, his urgency lending a palpable rush to his stride. ‘He’ll follow old habits. We’ll find him puking drunk at the tavern by Beckburn Lane, or else holed up at the bawdy house over the dressmakers’ lofts on Threadneedle Street.’

  Winter Solstice Afternoon 5670

  Cats and Mice

  In the fusty, closed dimness of the vintner’s shed, Lirenda reacted to Prince Arithon’s evasion with a nerve storm of targetless fury.

  ‘A wheel rim?’ She whirled and berated the seer turned informant, her expensive mantle and purple silk hems whipping drifts of eddied dust from the floorboards. ‘How painfully asinine! How obvious!’ Her scorn as vicious as the charge one fractional instant before lightning, she stabbed a perfect, manicured nail at the inept enchantresses who mishandled the scrying spells in the vat. ‘A bumpkin babe still in swaddling might have known to beware of that street urchin’s trick!’

  ‘These were first-year initiates,’ Third Senior Cadgia pointed out, her practical nature acerbic. Rawboned and capable, and immured to setbacks after centuries of critical service, she leaned on crossed arms, her straight silver hair rinsed to false bronze by the spill of the flickering candle. ‘Done is done. You can rail and cast blame, or let us regroup, mop up the spilled
milk, and recover what leads still remain. Or don’t we have two wanted fugitives at large, and strict orders from our Prime Matriarch to contain them?’

  ‘Only one of the pair need concern you,’ Lirenda snapped. The shocked silence that followed turned even her aristocratic head. The startled disapproval on the faces of her subordinates drew unwanted attention to her state of riled agitation. The rage that ripped through her in searing waves had always been strictly personal. If she failed to regain Koriani decorum, every sister initiate assigned to track Arithon s’Ffalenn would share proof she had lost objectivity.

  Yet her private stake in this contest of wills held the linchpin to restore her future; Morriel had set that penance to reclaim her forfeited rank. Lirenda smoothed down her ruffled composure, cat cool as she weighed her array of remaining resources. Only a fool would let underling colleagues know her reinstatement as Prime Senior hinged upon the Shadow Master’s capture. Nor should they realize Fionn Areth was her pawn, his life a mere cipher to discard or expend for the cause of the Matriarch’s directive.

  Lirenda flicked a stuck strand of cobweb from her skirts, her moment’s fussy attention to grooming a diversion to mask rapid thought. ‘The Koriani Order has interests that loom far larger than surface appearances. We are more than the keepers of mercy and charity. Our policy spans generations. If I admit I am not in the Prime’s inner confidence, I can reliably promise this much. If Arithon s’Ffalenn is not found and brought in, two decades of work go for naught. Resume scrying. Use every expedient. We know the boy with him is distrustful and frightened. He is the weak link. Reel them both in on the imprint in quartz that sealed his birth debt to our order.’

  Cadgia’s excoriating quiet held over, the ebony pins that fastened her hair stilled as flicked pen strokes against shadow. ‘Your will,’ she said finally. But her broad back remained disapprovingly stiff as she knelt and reframed a new construct of sigils over the water-filled vat.

  Too prideful to suffer the cobwebs and grime of a seat on a derelict wine tun, Lirenda herself remained standing. The bone buttons that looped the stays on her bodice seemed to nail in each self-controlled breath. Passing seconds fed her acid impatience. While the scryers’ wrought spells combed the town for available portents, she stifled her rampant vexation behind her enamel polish of deportment.

  For Elaira, stressed to the same private agonies of suppressed tension, soiled cloth came second to comfort. Still confined by strict orders to the barrel beside a winepress cobwebbed by the industry of brown spiders, she perched cross-legged upon the wadded folds of the mantle last used to blanket Fionn Areth. Its dungeon scent of rat and moldered straw set small pleats in Lirenda’s forehead. That petty vindication gave small satisfaction through a wait that leached at Elaira’s trapped spirit like slow torture. Elbows on knees, chin braced on clamped fists, she matched her senior peer’s masked dismay with deadpan humor. The opinion she held, but dared not express, was that Dakar had abandoned the jam seller’s because of unwarranted provocation. Some bungling enchantress had set nine amplified sigils of ward in overzealous effort to cordon the building.

  Lirenda’s obsessed drive was itself the disharmony that tipped the scales in Prince Arithon’s favor.

  ‘Don’t look so smug.’ Lirenda resettled her amethyst bracelets with a chiming, thin clash of wrapped gold. ‘You’ll play your due part before the day’s over. Or why should Morriel Prime have detailed your assignment to Jaelot in the first place?’

  ‘His lordship’s gout continues untreated, the longer you stay my release,’ Elaira agreed in testing provocation. ‘Or was the man’s suffering made the excuse for someone’s political expedience? How far have we drifted from the charitable concerns of our order’s founding purpose?’

  But Lirenda had all her exposed nerves back in hand. ‘You’re in no position to fathom Morriel’s long-range intent.’ Her glance slid away in permafrost indifference. ‘Nor can your limited vision encompass the danger this Shadow Master poses to civilized society.’

  ‘Well, that’s no dark secret,’ Elaira needled back. ‘His Grace might one day succeed in his search for the Paravians. Their living return would throw marvelous kinks in the order’s ambition to upstage the Fellowship Sorcerers.’ The old races’ presence would reaffirm the compact, with no human faction ever likely to regain the standing to challenge the sanctuary of the free wilds.

  But this time the baited innuendo of argument failed to upset Lirenda’s obsessive concentration. She stalked to the vat. Intently absorbed by some nuance within, she jabbed an imperious finger. ‘There! Go back. Show me a clear view of that side street.’

  Cadgia’s exhaustive competence picked up the two fugitives on the downhill slope above the quayside breakwater. Her assessment came sharp. ‘If they reach salt water, we’re done.’ Every sigil under the Senior Circle’s command would become ineffective against them.

  ‘Bar their way.’ Lirenda rejected all second opinion, but drew her next strategy with staccato self-confidence. ‘A timely appearance by one of our initiates should haze our quarry away from the docks. Don’t show our hand strongly. They must not be flushed into flight prematurely. Take them back into custody too soon, we’ll have Arithon’s extradition hampered by the magistrates on Jaelot’s high council. The mayor and his cronies must now be cut out. Let them believe the Master of Shadow won his escape by dark sorcery.’ Eyes narrowed, her expression ruthless as picked bone, Lirenda patted the jeweled combs that secured her coiled jet hair. ‘Henceforward, each step that the Shadow Master takes must be orchestrated to our Koriani design. My hand will personally close the last trap. Fionn Areth and Prince Arithon will fall into my sole custody to seal our final success.’

  ‘By our Prime’s will.’ Senior Cadgia signaled the seer, then bent to the scrying vat and began the cat-and-mouse chase, with the fourfold sigils for domination chained into ranged force and pitched against the Shadow Master’s astute cleverness.

  A harsh flash of purple splintered the gloom as the construct unleashed, then crossed into the volatile ether that bounded the second grand division of the veil. The vintner’s shed stilled, sealed into a tension chisel-cut to the dictates of spelled ciphers. No one exchanged speech. Like ghosts set into that frozen tableau, each enchantress shouldered her part. On a flicked signal from the seer, the initiate in charge of telepathic communication clasped thin hands to her amethyst-and-silver circlet and dispatched urgent instructions. Her sending was picked up by a peer senior in the street, who wove a spell of confusion to cut off the fugitives’ course. Then power filmed the vat, a rainbow chaos like an oil slick, as Cadgia reengaged the mighty array of tuned tracking spells. The image in the water spun and reoriented to reveal Arithon and Fionn Areth turned downhill, framed by the sepia boards and wet cobbles of the narrow back lanes behind the fishmonger’s. A bone-skinny cat fled yowling from a crate. Unstartled, the exposed figure of Arithon s’Ffalenn grasped his double’s wrist and slowed their precipitous flight.

  From her perch on the wine tun, Elaira just caught Arithon’s half-breathless admonition. ‘No, they’re driving us on, can’t you see?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ The disheartened herder crumpled against the hacked post of a lamp, while the prince swiftly sorted their options.

  ‘To the fox? I would say so. If we don’t lead the chase, then we’ve wasted an advantage without putting up any fight.’ Arithon’s expression did not look taxed, but instead, showed the intent focus of a man mage-trained, who engaged every facet of his faculties.

  Elaira stifled untoward elation. From her seat on the barrel, she recognized the fleeting, bright smile that emerged, then the inquiring, sharp lift of his chin.

  Lirenda’s muttered oath affirmed the fresh setback, that the tight maze of alleys lent prime ground for invention, with their piles of cod baskets, their staved barrels of salt, and their refuse carts laden with fish guts garnered for compost. The enchantress entrusted with orders to pursue found her tracking spells fouled by st
rewn flurries of rock salt. Her running effort to give chase was confounded by six guardsmen, raised by someone’s untimely shout. They drew swords. Charged in blind haste from a side street, they skidded into a clashing knot of stopped force against a dray filled with cod heads their quarry had left wedged broadside across the alley’s arched egress.

  Lirenda’s fuming silence grew brittle as the fugitives scuttled into a weed-grown courtyard, dark heads masked under the weathered mesh of two purloined fish baskets. The pullet in the crate was abandoned in the dim close, where it tripped the one agile swordsman who managed to claw past the wedged slop cart. His mailed coif threw back a scaled gleam of light as he turned his head right and left in baffled annoyance.

  A matron whose careless servant left an unlocked back door gave the Teir’s’Ffalenn and his double passage through a washhouse, and clear of the belated hue and cry.

  Arithon’s breathless comment carried clearly from the spelled maw of the dye vat. ‘If anything good came from six months in Jaelot, it’s the fact I know the poor quarters of the city as well as my milk tongue.’ A sly sidewards glance caught Fionn Areth’s wrinkled nose. ‘Don’t balk at the cod stink. If someone sends tracking dogs, the scent will do nicely to throw them off of our back trail.’

  Fionn Areth’s rejoinder was lost, or ignored, as Arithon vanished into the hemp-scented gloom of the ship’s chandler’s and reemerged with a firkin of lamp oil. The next lancer who spurred his charger upslope came to grief, his mount skated into a shoulder-down sprawl on the cobbles. Mail and slicked stone collided, screaming. Then the fallen man added shrill cries to the bedlam as he tried to rise on a snapped ankle.