Grand Conspiracy (51 page)

‘Yes, actually.' The clerk dared a smile. ‘I trained with a country scribe on the grass downs north of Daenfal, but herders don't require written records. I came east to make my start in the world. The ways of a port city are wonderfully diverse. Beats the plodding bore of counting out bales of shorn wool and verifying ownership on spring kids pastured out in the bogs.'

A grunt issued from the mounded ruckle of silk bedclothes; the mayor slapped down another offending pillow, his irritable mood turned expansive. ‘Well, the first time your cronies become garrulous with wine, they'll share what they know of past gossip. The name of the Shadow Master is forever accursed here in Jaelot.'

‘I don't like drinking,' the clerk prompted, his fresh features politely expectant.

The entrenched glimmer of ire returned, fanned to warning brilliance as the mayor crossed his arms over the gold-frogged closure of his nightrobe. ‘The ugliness happened twenty-five years ago.' He steamed with the memory of the event he had nursed to a virulent grudge. ‘The black-hearted mountebank they call Spinner of Darkness came to our city disguised as
a masterbard's apprentice. He stayed here six months. No one suspected. His innocent manner could have duped Ath Creator himself. Then on midsummer's eve, as a guest in my hall, the fell creature called down a whirlwind. His sorcery dismembered half the roofs and walls in the district to cover his tracks as he hid. Four days later, he escaped. Disappeared through the heart of a thunderclap. You can still see the marks in the palace hall, where the floor tiles had to be replaced.'

The rest, of course, had to be hyperbole. The clerk folded his arms, and admitted disbelief, that the tower by the east postern gate still showed cracks in the bedrock foundation.

The mayor drew breath, riled back to indignation. ‘That's a truth attested by witnesses, man! We still have a half dozen battlements bricked up where the walls are considered unstable. Not even the farmers in the countryside were spared. Their cottages and barns were shaken down in a swath that extends all the way to the Skyshiel Mountains. The destruction struck terror into every honest heart. Let me say, there's no one here in Jaelot who will
ever
forget the event. My council will not rest the case until this shadow-bending sorcerer and his barbarian cohorts lie dead. For myself, I'd stake all my fortune to bring the Light-accursed meddler to the faggots.'

‘I see.' The clerk cleared his throat, reshuffled his notes, and fastidiously crossed out the offending tick mark. ‘We'll borrow again from the tinsmith's guild. That should raise funds to meet the Light's tithe to refortify Etarra.'

Rapid footfalls sounded outside the door. The mayor flopped back, eyes shut in forbearance as the latch tripped and a maid whisked in, burdened with a tray containing a cup and several bottles of dubious liquid. ‘Your medicines, milord.'

The clerk received a gruff wave of dismissal. ‘Jaelot won't stay the worse for our effort, be assured. His Grace, the Blessed Prince has kept every binding promise ever made since our fleet went down in flames against the Shadow Master's spells at Minderl Bay.'

The clerk withheld comment, eager not to seem ignorant as he stowed his documents into his bulging satchel.

Jaelot's Lord Mayor gave the vials on the tray his jaundiced inspection, signal enough that the morning audience had reached a precipitous end. The clerk snatched his moment and nipped through the doorway as his eminence burst into another bellowing tirade.

‘I'll not touch that repulsive concoction again! Tell my wife! Yes! Say her wretched, bootlicking healer's an ass. Any more tisanes that taste like burned turds, and I'll risk oath of debt and call in a Koriani herb witch!'

Autumn 5669

Cloaked like a queen leopardess in a throw of white ermine, Morriel Prime extended an ivory finger. ‘See for yourself.' Her scrying basin of silver-veined marble stood braced in a copper tripod at the center of her rented room in Highscarp. ‘The hour draws nigh. The trap you have planned must soon be set into motion.'

Lirenda arose from her deep curtsy, each movement embedded in the feathery rustle of silk skirts. If she had not yet recovered the honorary eight bands which denoted the First Senior's high office, the passage of years had eased the worst stigma of her disgrace. She no longer dressed unobtrusively or shrank from the summons to present herself for Prime audience. For that day's encounter, she wore royal purple. Her trim bodice and full hemline sparkled with gold thread, laced in patterns of songbirds and vines. Mantled in her air of well-bred self-command, she scarcely nodded her acknowledgment as the upstart initiate who still usurped her place at the Prime's right hand stepped out in response to Morriel's flicked gesture of dismissal. The silent, matched page boys stationed at the door latched the panels for privacy.

The disaffection between the young woman and her displaced predecessor had deepened to mutual antipathy. The new candidate had the gift of raw power, but no brilliance. Though she had grown to three decades of maturity, her lack of imagination made her clumsy and slow, which faults she buried
in stiff self-importance when her rival's keener wit left her threatened.

Had the reversal in roles been one whit less devastating, Lirenda might have been amused by the woman's baffled efforts to grasp the nuance of power and authority.

Quite soon, the issue would become a moot point. From the moment Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn was taken captive, the onus of old mistakes would be rectified. Lirenda arose to the occasion with unassailable confidence. Skirts neatly raised, she crossed the inn's wooden floor, scarred by the hobnailed boots of the Etarran troops who now routinely patrolled Rathain's coast.

She knelt on the throw rug beside the filled basin. Since water was not her favored element, she cupped the quartz crystal on the chain at her neck as the focus to access her powers.

For all her pretension, the past still left scars. A wretched sense of gratitude still dogged her each time she accessed her heightened awareness. Her memory of shame and helplessness seemed entrenched since the miserable interval when the crystal had passed from her possession. The branding awareness of just what she stood to lose gnawed at her yet, until the succession to prime power obsessed her, waking and sleeping.

Left with Arithon's freedom as the obstacle to surmount, Lirenda bent her will to the task of arranging his downfall.

She settled her five senses, tuned out the distant, slanging argument between the drudges who swept out the downstairs common room. The swirl of cool drafts and the creak of the inn's cedar shutters faded and dissolved before the strictures of discipline. Immersed within a core of pent stillness, Lirenda laid her hands on either side of the basin. She let her unfocused gaze diffuse into the depths. Slowly, gradually, her passive mind assumed alignment with the subtle energies that coiled through the volatile template of the water.

The liquid clouded, darkened, resolved: she beheld the vast, auburn sweep of the moorlands at the heart of Araethura. Under the bowl of a clear, autumn sky, two men sparred with the longsword. Lunge and parry entangled in thin scrolls of sound. Lirenda first recognized the grizzled old garrison soldier with the lightning hands and the unforgiving jaw as the man hired from Backwater to train young Fionn Areth.

The student he opposed circled over the rough ground in steady, sinuous confidence. His body was shirtless despite the
brisk chill, his boy's frame fleshed out into a young man's tigerish fitness. The rhythmic response of parry and riposte bespoke a flawless concentration. Paired shadows flowed over ocher grass, while testing blades snicked and clamored, dipped gilt and cerulean in sky-caught reflection. The dance-step exchange of attack and defense cast shivering, metallic echoes across the swept crests of the downs.

Then the culmination, a blinding fast disengage followed through by a bind. The herder's son whooped and wrenched. His mentor's blade flew through a pinwheeling arc and thumped in the grass, a shimmer of stilled steel in the crisp clarity of the afternoon sunlight.

‘That's the fifth time in a sevenday you've disarmed me.' The older man rubbed his chafed palm, measuring his charge with rueful satisfaction. ‘Well-done.' His gruff clap on the shoulder was earnestly meant. An aging soldier could not but take pride in a youngster who mastered the skills he had gained in the course of a lifetime. ‘Not another trick I can teach you, boy. What learning's left will be found in experience. No man of the sword's fully made until he's blooded his blade and survived. Or else roistered with wenches. There lies another test that'll bring you to maturity. Sure's deep frost, no sparring can match a lively tumble in the hay.'

A smile turned the lips of the victor, who saluted his teacher.

‘Don't let my oldster's maundering mess up your head.' The veteran laughed. ‘Lasses round these hills have brothers with fleecing shears. You'd get yourself well blooded all right if you sport with a skirt in the bracken.'

‘It's the skirts who invite me I worry about.' The young man retrieved the forfeited sword. He straightened, flushed with exertion and praise, and the wind whipped black hair away from a face whose clean angles had no place amid families who raised goats on the moors of Araethura.

Lirenda caught her breath. The impact of
just what
she had made slammed through her and raced the staid beat of her heart. Nor could she tear her hungry gaze free.

Framed in the depths of the scrying bowl, Fionn Areth returned the sword to his master. He exchanged laughing comment with a mouth never made for humility. The bright irony of an innocence never seen in the man whose face had been copied made her gasp.

‘That's uncanny!' Indeed, those features lacked for nothing but
the stamp of Arithon's experience. Except for that one, trifling detail, Daelion Fatemaster himself might be taxed to distinguish that boy from the prince whose face had provided the model. ‘He's perfect.'

‘He's now twenty-one years of age, and itching to seek his promised destiny,' Morriel rasped. ‘No discipline of his parents can hold him in obscurity for much longer.'

‘Then my hour is come.' Lirenda straightened up. Excitement flushed her cheeks like sunrise on snow. ‘Why wait? The season is fortunate. Autumn storms will hamper the swift passage of news.'

In fact, like the neat mesh of gears in a winepress, the events of the moment aligned remarkably in her favor. Lysaer s'Ilessid was at Erdane, lately returned from minding his affairs at Etarra. He would soon ride the last leg of his journey to Avenor, with his court unlikely to gain word of the disturbance she planned before the onset of winter closed the passes.

‘Snow and ice in the Skyshiels will forestall any deployment of Etarrans to the eastshore well enough. How could we choose a better hour?' Lirenda crossed the narrow chamber to Morriel's chair, hands clasped to contain her raw eagerness. ‘The only difficult hurdle we face is a decoy to divert the Fellowship Sorcerers.'

Ensconced in white fur, Morriel blinked eyelids thin and naked as a songbird's halved eggshells. The sultry spark which lit her black eyes seemed to feed off the fluttering candles. ‘You have something in mind?'

The answering smile on Lirenda's lips could have been carved from rose coral. ‘A magnetic disturbance of the sixth lane would cast a veil of static over Sethvir's earth-sense. If we placed a circle of twelve seniors wielding one of the order's major crystals in the Skyshiels, they could spin resonance into a quartz vein. That would be enough to excite the lane's energy into a random flux.'

‘You'll have what you ask, and by my own hand.' Rare satisfaction thrummed through the reedy timbre of the Prime Matriarch's reply. ‘Through me, the powers of twelve sisters will be raised through the Great Waystone's focus to shield you. Also send summons through the scryer on lane watch and recall Elaira from Morvain. The Mayor of Jaelot suffers from gout. She'll do very well assigned to his household as healer.'

Lirenda's instinctive jerk of resistance hitched a whisper through rich layers of silk.

Morriel raised porcelain fingers to her lips to forestall a dry snort of laughter. ‘Dare you forget? Through Elaira, you possess the sure key to bring Rathain's prince to his knees. He'd empty the very blood from his veins before he saw her take harm. Keep her close, by my orders. If aught goes amiss, her Koriani vow of obedience will provide you with sure means to force his Grace of Rathain back to heel.'

‘Your will.' Lirenda curtsied to the floor, her displeasure offset by an uncontained, dangerous joy. The slow years of waiting had ended. Concerning Elaira, the Prime's logic was flawless. Lirenda would not let the Matriarch's interference cloud her moment of overdue retribution. The clarity of mind left unbalanced by the Shadow Master's influence would be reclaimed in sweet vengeance on the hour he knelt at her mercy.

The heavy, paneled door clicked closed on the heels of Lirenda's departure. Morriel Prime sank back in her chair, one finger crooked in summons to her pages. The boys were well trained. They came in response to even so subtle a signal.

‘Move the scrying bowl to my right hand,' the Prime demanded in her scratchy whisper. While the boys did her bidding, she fumbled beneath her furs. Her wasted, claw hands shook with alarming palsy. The breath rasped in her throat, grown labored of late, through even such minimal exertion. Moment to moment, she lived in raw pain, held to life through indomitable will.

She located the box she kept for her remedies, gasping for air as one of the pages assisted with unfastening the latch. The other boy uncorked the syrup-based tonic she used to ameliorate her most alarming onslaughts of weakness. She sucked greedily at the bottle, then lay back, hands flaccid, while the drugs and strong spells took effect.