Grand Conspiracy (56 page)

If the site served her ends, the journey into high altitude was a curse.

No matter how many coverings she piled on, her hands stiffened, each knuckle a cold knob of glass. Imprisoned by frailty, tormented by her circling thoughts, she endured. The burden of the proscribed knowledge she safeguarded for the future benefit of humanity pressed on her shoulders like lead. Nor did companionship bring her relief. The obsequious lisp of the young woman she trained wore at her fragile, strung nerves. Solitude stung her with the trickling passage of seconds that chafed her like separate sand grains. She suffered each day, eaten raw by the unending cycle of hope and despair.

Sleep brought her nothing but nightmares and frustration. While Lirenda sought to redeem her past flaws and draw Arithon s'Ffalenn to captivity, the Koriani Order looked to a threatened future.

Morriel responded in pathetic relief when the seeress tapped for admittance.

‘Enter.' The word was a reedy, thin whisper, scarcely audible through the thrash of the gusts as the curtains were pushed aside.

Morriel tightened her grip on the fur quilts, wincing as the high, thin chime of star energies grazed through her sensitized consciousness. She had lived too long. The more her bodily senses failed her, the stronger grew the inner awareness, until even plain stone seemed to gibber impressions that spoke of the past flights of dragons. Moment to moment, the ancient Prime Matriarch had to fight for the focus to strain real sound from the untrustworthy chorus of phantoms unleashed in her mind.

The seeress announced on a bright edge of triumph, ‘Dakar's made landfall, just as you'd hoped.'

‘Oh, well-done!' Morriel propped upright and snapped her thin fingers.

A page groped from the shadows at the foot of her pallet. Blinking to shed the confusion of torn sleep, he stifled a yawn, then adjusted the pillows to settle the crone into a seated position.

‘I'll need the Great Waystone,' the old Prime directed. ‘Also the small coffer that's locked in the cupboard beneath the sedan chair.'

The seeress fetched and carried as the Prime requested, while the page followed orders and kindled the lamp. The shadows danced back as the flame caught. Lavender hangings sewn with silver seals of guard sparkled like frozen rain. The edges of cushions and the laced shine of braid framed Morriel's erect form like a kiosk.

‘I'll want the silk cloth that carries the seals for summons and dispatch.' Morriel accepted the covered burden of the Waystone and cradled it between her raised knees. ‘Set a circle of guard. Then light the tienelle tapers at the four directions and place the coffer in my lap.'

The loose, wispy fall of her unbound hair made her face seem a dry, wrinkled skull caught in a must of old cobweb. But her
hooded, jet eyes gleamed with burning, mad joy as she bade servant and seeress, ‘Now leave me. This night's work will be mine alone to complete.'

Left in the flickering spill of the lamp, and crossed in crawling shadow thrown by the sullen gleam of the tapers, Morriel drew a key from a chain clasped to her skeletal wrist. She opened the coffer, then sorted through the silk-wrapped packets inside until she found the one bearing Dakar's name.

‘Ah, well, my blundering beauty,' she crooned to herself, while the winds slapped and moaned through the pennons on the finials outside. ‘Your time is well come, is it not?'

White, spidery fingers untied the covering. Inside lay a tied wisp of curled, chestnut hair, purloined years ago by a harlot. The doxy had snipped her little keepsake while Dakar lay oblivious in one of his drunken stupors. No slave to sentiment, she had sensibly traded the trophy to the sisterhood for a potion to purge a malady caught from a sailor.

Morriel Prime laid out the deep black square of silk with its embroidered silver circles. Then she unwound the faded ribbon which tied Dakar's lock of hair. One strand, she placed on the stitched runes of the summoning seal. A second, laid crosswise, bridged the seal of dispatch. Then she unveiled the facets of the amethyst Waystone and positioned its chill weight inside the circle that joined the two points in opposition.

The wind muttered off the peaks, stirring and stretching the flames in the drafts. Morriel Prime no longer felt the bite of the cold stabbing through her aged joints. Immersed in the throes of dire art and high spellcraft, she mastered the focal matrix of the Great Waystone for the unprincipled purpose of playing Dakar's power of prophecy as her personal puppet string …

Many leagues over the Cildein's waters to the southeast, the risen sun blazed high over the sands of an atoll lapped in the aquamarine shallows of the tropics. The small string of islets capped a volcanic ridge uncharted by previous mariners. If Paravians had ever set foot there, or if dragons had alighted to rest in their flights on the thermals as they crossed the vast waters between continents, none knew. The islets were too sparse to sustain any settlement. Even the records at Althain Tower held no vellum with an inked position for the cove where Arithon's brigantine, the
Khetienn
, currently nestled at anchor.

Sethvir's earth-sense linked the site with the flight of nesting
petrels, or touched on the dry land through the chambered veins of magma flowing underneath the deep sea floor.

The volcanic cone held a rainwater lake. The outflowing stream offered one of nine springs where Arithon's fleet put in to replenish its water casks. Here, also, it took on stores shipped from the mainland. Such stops for provisions never observed a fixed schedule. The inbound vessels to restock the brigantine's hold came and went by the whims of winds and weather. Sometimes the seagoing crews matched their landfall. Other times, rimed with the salt crust of unbroken passage, the
Khetienn
and one or more companion vessels might ghost in through the reefs to find the idyllic cove empty. Their spare lines and nails, their sailcloth and barrels of salt meat and ale would be left, stashed in a dry cave near the shoreline. Over the years, routine became set.

Each hull would be careened and inspected. Between hours of hard labor and needed repairs, the crews would ply the rank jungle to snare birds, then spit them and feast on the beaches. Some years they brewed palm wine. Shipboard discipline dissolved to a bedlam of celebration, while children born to the clan wives at sea would scream and race through the shallows. Replete with fresh meat or a meal of purloined eggs, men would argue and wrestle, content to snatch reprieve as they could, while Arithon riffled through his sealed packets of correspondence. At need, he would open his affairs to discussion, penning out cryptic replies to be left in the cave for the next ship to dispatch to his contacts back on the mainland.

Dakar's requirements were simpler. Resigned from his years of privation at sea, he curled in the sheltered shade of a palm tree and drank himself senseless on spirits. He would dream of women and silk sheets. When he awakened, he kissed the dry ground that stayed warm and solid, with no prank, heaving waves set to trip him. His hatred of seafaring had not lessened with time. The miracle left him dumbfounded, that his heart had not yet shirked its weary task of pumping his bored blood through his brain.

This morning's nap started more pleasantly than most, with a gentle west breeze wafting off the biting flies who viewed Dakar's sprawled flesh as a banquet. He slept with his hands laced over his belly, while the fruits of the tropics gave painless relief to three months' steady diet of jerky, squeezed limes, and hardtack.

The first whisper of danger broke in a dream, arrived without fanfare or warning.

His undisturbed sleep became wrenched out of peace. Dakar
was consumed by a sickening sensation of falling through bottomless darkness. His senses were locked. As though his awareness was throttled by wound thread, he could not break free or wrest back the will to awaken. The whirling, downward spiral into vertigo presaged no ordinary nightmare. Dakar battled the gripping pejorative of his unchained gift of prescience.

‘No,' he whispered, even as his futile fabric of protest became dashed into fragments of light. Power flamed through him like volatile oil, and he saw past the veil that sealed Ath's creation to the constraints of linear time …

Against the wind-ruffled waves of a lakeshore, a rider sat laughing on a moorland pony. He wore a plain longsword strapped to his waist and the cross-laced felt boots of a goatherd. Yet when the wind tossed the black hair off his cheek, the profile stamped in the morning's raw light had the bone structure of a blood s'Ffalenn prince
…

The scene snapped like a cobweb rent through by a gale. Sprawled in trance on the black lava sands of the atoll, the Mad Prophet stirred and moaned. A chill breeze of destiny blew straight through him, and beyond any question he
knew
. That rider signified the break in the peace Althain's Warden had foreseen fifteen years ago. Dakar fought the dream. His hands spasmed to fists, and his paunchy flesh shuddered, yet waking perception eluded him. The reeling onslaught of visions resumed, pinwheeling in wild and vivid disorder across his inner awareness …

Before the magistrate at the prisoner's dock in Jaelot, the same boy stood in chains, pleading innocence. His back moorlands accent quavered with tears, but none heard. The wheels of due process ground on unchecked, until a struck look of terror transfixed his green eyes, and an arraignment for black sorcery was read out by a nasal secretary
. Then that scene ripped away, replaced by another:
of the accused, chained to a scaffold, stripped for a ritual execution. The sharpened sword waited, and the bundled, oiled faggots. Nearby, a cowled headsman mounted the stair, while a mob shook raised fists and clamored for redress in blood against the Master of Shadow. The vision rippled. Townborn faces contorted and screaming with hate condensed and dissolved into one: that of a bronze-haired enchantress who wept
…

Dakar snapped awake, gasping and soaked in runnels of terrified sweat. He could not reorient. The palm fronds and blue sky over
his head seemed a jumble of meaningless color. For an interval he squeezed his eyes shut and trembled, raw dread like the tang of flaked rust on his tongue. Something had just gone terribly amiss. His spurious gift of prescience never touched him like this, nor left him with the hollow, used feeling of a discarded old boot. The nausea that racked him carried a taint, as if the violating fingers of a spell had just tickled the length of his aura.

Another chill swept him. An instinct, chased by fear, let him suspect that someone powerful had meddled with his gifted prescience. The unnatural, acidic fragments of his dream stayed lodged in his memory like impressions stamped in smoke and sulfur. A spell seal based on forced mastery would impose such unpleasantness, not a working drawn from the Fellowship's craft, laid down in harmony with the Major Balance. The rare intervention sent by Ath's adepts would be gentle, a feather touch channeled from the prime source that anchored the weave of the firmament.

‘Lie under a palm tree, annoyed as all that, and you're sure to get whacked by a coconut.'

Dakar flinched and looked up to find Arithon s'Ffalenn standing over him.

‘Go away,' he said in a gritted, forced croak.

Arithon's teeth flashed in a perverse, airy smile. ‘Poor man. Has the fruit left you griped?'

He sat down. Clad in dark breeches and a loose shirt with laces left open at the neck, he was enviably vibrant. The effects of seafaring had always agreed with him; his presence held a stunning, charged vitality gained back through his years of free sailing. Sun and wind had reduced the deep shadows in his eyes. The nightmares came less and less in sleep, robbed of their venom by the distance in leagues from Desh-thiere's curse-driven urge to seek bloodshed.

Dakar clamped his jaw through another wretched spasm. He racked his churned thoughts for some telling rejoinder that would send the s'Ffalenn prince safely packing.

Too late; the green eyes now fixed on his face. In a tone very changed, the Shadow Master said, ‘Dakar,
for mercy, what's
wrong
?'

The Mad Prophet turned away. Even slight movement upset his equilibrium. The spasm returned, steel claws in his belly, and he curled in whimpering misery with his cheek pressed into the sand.

Hands gripped him, found his head, and raked his loose hair away from his gasping lips. He was raised up, supported through the ugly, sick spasms that emptied his last meal in raw violence.

‘Hang on,' said Arithon. The whipcut awareness of just what was happening had already dissolved his carefree note of light banter.

Dakar felt swift fingers loosen his belt. He was laid back, gasping, against something soft: Arithon's shirt, folded into a pillow to ease his spinning head. A shadow raked over him, then returned. Cloth soaked in seawater streamed over his forehead, damping the pounding, fierce pangs of a headache.

The Mad Prophet blinked through a salt stream of runoff. ‘Too bad I'm not female. You'd have me swooning.' He swallowed the lingering burn of heaved bile and forced the charade a step further. ‘Such fuss, for a commonplace hangover.'

Arithon knelt in his smallclothes, still arranging the compress made at need from his breeches. ‘Don't speak.' The lame effort at deflection had left him unfooled, the opposite in fact. Dakar sensed the fearful effort in his calm as his exquisite schooled voice tore past the veneer of pretense. ‘Whatever string of prescience your talent has uncovered, the news can wait. Lie still. Just breathe 'til you're steady.'

A child shouted inquiry from somewhere down the beach. Through the whisper of palm fronds and the curling lisp of the waves over sable sands, the treble cry jarred the air like tapped glass.

The Mad Prophet held on to his reeling senses, saw Arithon turn his head and call answer. ‘I need the simples chest from the brigantine. Now! Also, find the watch officer. Tell him I want a man sent back with a litter.'