Grand Conspiracy (57 page)

Dakar felt a firm hand on his wrist. Then darkness enfolded him like soundless felt and swallowed his flickering consciousness.

Full awareness returned in the lucent chill of twilight. Dakar opened his eyes to the softened gloom of the stern cabin. The ship's wake unreeled like mother-of-pearl through the casement's salt-splashed roundels. The board that worked and squealed in the bulkhead and the taint of salt-fusty sailcloth informed him that Arithon had the
Khetienn
set under way and driving to sea once again. Through the hollow, dull repletion of illness, Dakar kicked his mental processes back into shambling order. Through
mage sense, he picked out the ship's course, due northwest, affirmed by the gravitational draw of the new moon and the faint, distant pull of the planets.

From strength he did not believe he possessed, he dredged up a breath and tried the first lie his befuddled brain could assemble. ‘You're not going back to the continent for the sake of a rockslide that maimed a few sheep and some unlucky shepherds.'

The soft voice he expected gave answer from the shadows somewhere to the left of his berth. ‘Drop pretense.' Arithon dipped a tin cup in a basin and trickled a stream of cool water to wet the Mad Prophet's lips. ‘Your raving already told me the truth.'

Dakar rammed up straight to the everlasting zeal of the demons still spiking his temples. He crashed into the cup. The contents splashed over his neck and tickled in runnels down his chest. ‘A nightmare. Don't believe it.'

A towel settled over the spill, backed by Arithon's hands, which rammed him inexorably flat. ‘No nightmare could possibly be that macabre.'

Defeat took the punch out of Dakar's struggle. ‘Then would you mind telling me what you heard?'

Hard fingers softened, then blotted, and whisked the soaked towel away. On deck, the bosun called the change in the watch. Bare feet drummed on wood as the sailhands responded. Forward, a young mother crooned a lullaby to her child, while the ocean, ever restless, wove in splashing refrain as the bow clove like smoke through the wavecrests.

Arithon stirred finally, retrieved the cup from the berth, and hooked its handle to the basin with a clink. He had not lit the lamp. His hair was ink upon shadow against the varnished interior of the cabin. Lapped in failing light, his expression was blurred, unreadable as a blank slate.

‘What did you hear?' Dakar insisted. ‘At least let's make sure we're drawing presumptions from the same list of unpleasant facts.'

The lean, ringless hands clasped taut on one knee, no doubt to lock down their shaking. Arithon said, ice laid over snow, ‘You saw the same future my lord Jieret dreamed and journeyed to Corith to give warning. My death on a scaffold, by sword and by fire. Except the vision foretold by my
caithdein
wasn't accurate. The victim isn't going to be me.'

Brooding stillness ensued, through which the Master of Shadow pondered, and Dakar glowered back with distilled rancor.

‘Your blurted prophecy wasn't pretty,' Arithon relented at length. ‘You said at winter solstice that an innocent boy will be sentenced for the crimes of black sorcery townsmen claim I committed over twenty-five years ago.'

Dakar swallowed, his throat gone sandpaper dry. ‘You can't imagine you're going to save him.'

Arithon arose, moved one step, and braced his palm on the sill of the stern window. He had found a fresh shirt. He wore another pair of dark breeches knotted at the waist with a scarlet sash sent him by Feylind. Wind plucked the loose cloth and feathered the sable hair silhouetted against the coiling foam of the wake. ‘Who is he, this boy?'

‘Who knows? Who cares?' Dakar shoved up on one elbow. ‘He could be the throwback of some ancestor's byblow. He had the accent of a moorland goatherd.' Hating the strangled desperation in his plea, the Mad Prophet tried reason. ‘Believe me, if he were close enough kin to carry the virtues of the s'Ffalenn bloodline,
the Fellowship Sorcerers would know him
!'

Arithon spun, a coiled spring of bleak fury. ‘Never mind who he is! If this fate overtakes him, he'll be frightened and alone, and condemned to a terrible death for an act even I never stooped to commit.'

‘He could be anywhere,' Dakar argued, horrified. ‘How will you know where to start looking?'

Arithon's quick breath sliced the night like a knife cut. ‘But I do know. Your mimicry was plain. You repeated the arraignment in the voice of the official who will come to pen the mayor's writ of execution. I know him, as you must. He's the Mayor of Jaelot's judiciary secretary, and that's twice now you've sought to obstruct me. What else are you trying to mask from my notice?'

‘You can't do this,' Dakar insisted in an obstinate change of subject. ‘To meddle with a chained prisoner in Jaelot––'

Arithon cut him off. ‘Then stop me with something more substantial than lies!'

A disastrous pause, while Dakar slumped back, each labored effort to breathe like suctioning liquid lead. He mustered his nerves, prayed that bare bones good sense could prevail against volatile s'Ffalenn temper. ‘All right. That dream didn't come through my channels of natural-born talent. The prescience was
tagged onto my aura by someone's act of forced spellcraft. Which means that boy won't land in Jaelot through blind luck. He's being set up as bait for a trap.'

He had Arithon's attention now, the unpleasant, ruthless focus of a mage-trained observer measuring an undesired obstacle. A small rustle of cloth as the hand not on the sill came to rest on the edge of a locker. ‘Lysaer wouldn't make use of children or innocents.'

‘You can't know that!' Dakar swore for the lack of a light. He needed to determine whether Arithon braced in shock, or if he was pitched for combative, hot argument. Left no tool but blind trust, he probed softly. ‘In the course of three decades, the curse could have changed the half brother you knew past all scruple.'

‘No.' Arithon shoved away from the stern window, his admission touched by an odd, heavy weariness. ‘By now, I recognize Desh-thiere's workings firsthand.' His clipped speech wove through his fidgeting steps. ‘Lysaer was claimed into thrall through his true gift of justice. Change that, and the Mistwraith's hold on him weakens.'

Dakar argued with bloodless honesty. ‘He slew children well enough on the banks of Tal Quorin.'

‘For a principle, yes.' Pain shot through, expected and sharp, as Arithon crossed through the diced patch of lamplight let in through the grating. His face contorted in recoil from that particularly harrowing memory, he explained, ‘Lysaer caught them killing. This execution you've forecast to take place in Jaelot isn't anywhere near the same thing.'

‘There aren't many factions who wouldn't choose mayhem, or consort with Sithaer itself to see you dead.' Dakar swore through the splash as the
Khetienn
knifed through a trough. ‘Don't forget, Lysaer's high priests now dabble in spellcraft.'

All the signs pointed toward disaster. Nor could Arithon hedge in denial. The warning delivered from Elaira had been unequivocally plain. Despite her concern, and her strong exhortation, the wise option of retreat had already seen the Shadow Master's emphatic rejection. Abovedecks, the bosun shouted to a thundering flog of canvas. Hands were aloft bending on topsails, sure promise of a drenching, fast passage that battered Dakar's brain and turned his gut inside out with seasickness.

Dakar tried futile argument anyway. ‘The boy will burn, no matter how blameless, and no matter how mismatched the evidence. You trod on the pride of the city dignitaries too hard. The
Mayor of Jaelot keeps a grudge like a champion, and whoever's behind the meddling this time is sure to have Koriani backing.'

‘Then they'll discover the consequence of manipulating me by using the fate of an innocent.' Wound into implacable rage, Arithon grasped the knob to the companionway. ‘The
Khetienn
makes landfall on the continent with all speed. Stop her, or me, at your peril.'

Late Autumn 5669

Unsettled by events outside Althain Tower, Sethvir turns the broad-ranging span of his earth-sense to gauge the uncertainties of time and distance that separate parties whose interests converge upon Fionn Areth's free movements: Asandir, still immersed in repair of the wards over the Sorcerer's Preserve in Tysan; Prince Lysaer, at Erdane, arranging a frantic fast passage to substantiate rumors from Daenfal; and Arithon s'Ffalenn, whose fleet has turned about under full sail for the mainland …

Amid worried speculation over breaking word concerning the Spinner of Darkness, Lord Koshlin, posted envoy to the Light, is handed a letter in Princess Ellaine's handwriting, with the contents addressed to her father outlining her careful inquiries into Lady Talith's death: ‘On return to Avenor, lend my daughter your assistance to dispel this spurious falsehood,' says Erdane's mayor, more anxious to satisfy Prince Lysaer and his handpicked captains who seek passage to the east with all speed …

Elaira draws rein on the verge of the road flanking Daenfal's lakeshore, overcome as she senses the compassion in the man who steers his brigantine in a driving run northwestward across the Cildein Ocean; and tears fill her eyes, for a warning, unheeded, that brings desperate fear for Prince Arithon's endangerment, and renews the wild, outside hope of salvation for young Fionn Areth …

L
ate in the season, the caravans bound over the Pass of Sards exchanged their wheeled drays for sumpter mules at the Standing Rock on the southern border of Rathain. The site had been a crossroads since ancient times, when the lean, painted boats of the sunchildren plied north and south through the golden hill country of Daon Ramon. A crumbling stone bridge still spanned the dry chasm where the sheet silver waters of the Severnir had once thundered into the east narrows of Daenfal Lake. Now the winds howled unpartnered through that corridor of sheer rock, fluted into dissonance where the tireless frosts chiseled fresh outcrops and cracks.

If the river was silenced by the industry of townsmen who maintained their dam at the headwater, a snug inn still prospered where the road crossed the dry and boulder-strewn gulch. Legend yet brooded over the cliff walls, folded in frown lines where rains had carved gullies in the rims. Dragons had once winged aloft here for mating. In a later age, Riathan Paravians had danced to heighten lane force when the yearly sun cycle crossed the stations of balance and change. The lyrical traces remained on the land where the rituals had enabled those mysteries to be tapped and drawn to span latitude.

Where the road left the shore and snaked into the foothills, centaur guardians had erected a quartz standing stone. The
marker was incised with spiraling knots and still overlooked the high bluffs. Travelers who stayed through an equinox or solstice might hear the stone speak as its mighty axis captured the magnetic pulse of the fifth lane and channeled its peak current to resonance.

‘Site's haunted,' insisted the inn's lanky horseboy as he hefted a packframe onto the last mule to outfit Reysald's caravan. ‘If you stand there from sundown to sunrise, you'll see unicorns passing, all ghostly gray in the moonlight. Some men go mad. Some see past the veil. For certain, they say, if you wish on that stone, every shadow in your heart will come true.'

Huddled in the brisk dawn air of the stable yard, Fionn Areth watched the clouds scud like dirty ice above the brown flank of the hill. The stone was a slender, milk obelisk at the crest, mottled with shag moss and lichen.

The horseboy adjusted the crupper, then slapped begrimed knuckles on his breeches. ‘Still, you'll wish you were staying. Snow could be flying by midday, and the caves where you'll camp don't offer wenches and ale.'

‘I don't mind the cold,' Fionn Areth said, neutral, lest his imagination on the subject of women embarrass him into a blush. He grasped the mule's reins and led it into line to be loaded under the expert eye of the head drover.

The goods bound for Jaelot required twenty mules, with another ten to pack food and fodder for the train's master, three hired muleteers, and six outriders. The horsemen went armed, ostensibly to guard, but in fact each one carried a stiff leather prod to drive balky animals at need. This turned out to be most of the time on a trail that snagged like shorn thread through vicious black crags of sheer rock. The scarps in between were not steep in these foothills, but strewn with the tumbled debris of old slides and spiked by the stripped limbs of deadfalls.

Accustomed to goats, Fionn Areth did not balk at handling animals. The destination was agreeable. From talk at the inns, he had learned that the Mayor of Jaelot kept a field troop of mercenaries oathsworn to Prince Lysaer's Alliance. The force was committed to guard against Shadow, wherever such conflict might call them. Stirred by the accounts of the earlier wars against sorcery fought at Tal Quorin and Vastmark, Fionn Areth resolved to enlist.

The trail switched back and climbed from the Severnir valley, flanked to the right by the forbidding summits of the spur that gave rise to Rockfell Vale. The rugged knife ridges and
dark, fanged peaks were perpetually snarled in cloud. Mornings shook the ground with the distant rumble of avalanche as the slopes shrugged off the night's snowfall. Those few stands of fir which clawed leaning hold against southbound winds off the barrens wore jagged scars from the onslaught of each winter's storms. Steep-sided valleys arrowed from the crests, zigzagged and forked as the imprint of frozen lightning.

‘Men die in this pass at this time of year,' the road master cautioned after Fionn Areth strayed beyond sight while foraging wood for the cookfire. ‘Storms can whip in off of Eltair Bay with terrible force and no warning. Just a mess of black cloud will come howling down the notch. These peaks trap their fury like a witch's funnel. Never be more than ten steps from your horse. Your life could depend on her instincts.'

The onslaught of two such blizzards delayed them. The first one they weathered in a string of small caves, one of the uncounted fissures that branched from the caverns of Skelseng's Gate. The second storm caught them at the end of their supplies, with no choice but to batter ahead. They made punishing progress against shrieking winds and blundered through chest-high drifts. One mule was lost, and two men suffered frostbite before the caravan struggled to shelter in a wayside posthouse jammed into the oblique cleft of a valley.

There, they waited the fell weather out. The road master grew short-tempered on beer as the days wore past one by one. ‘Bedamned to Koriani and their idiot priorities.' He glared at the mule packs piled in the corner, and cursed in complaint of the chimney smoke wafted back down a flue in neglected need of a sweeping.

Fionn Areth tried dicing. He lost a week's silver and his father's skinning knife before he learned not to play fast with the men in the taproom. Holed up in the loft with the horseboys, he fared better. They staked only copper, or broom straws for sport. There, his shy smile won him the attention of a freckle-faced potgirl. Dicing lost favor before the sheer fascination of her teasing, warm kisses and hot eagerness. The hours melted into a swift passage of nights, while the high drifts subsided to glaze ice. Surefooted mules could be trusted to compensate, but horses required caulked shoes.

Fionn Areth spent his last coin in the smithy, then mounted his newly shod pony as the caravan rousted to resume delayed passage to Jaelot.

The trail climbed like a stair through a narrowing gap. The Pass of Sards tucked like a fold in the vast, forbidding fault line, where the continent had buckled in an age-old cataclysm and raised up the Arwent plateau. The spur of the Skyshiels ranged to the north, hammer to anvil against the glittering southern summits. Peaks jumbled one on another against the washed blue of the sky like a giant's clutch of dropped knives.

‘Whole of Sards Pass was a dragon's eyrie, once,' the head drover confided in a dawn that splashed the upper snowfields to a riot of carmine and gilt. He squinted, skin creased like old leather, and pointed out the inky, glass scars where the balefires of drakes had melted the granite to slag. ‘The creatures had claws big around as your leg, if you can swallow the tales the herb woman told in my village.'

‘Light holds they tell lies,' an outrider groused as he mounted his horse.

The old drover slapped the dusty rump of the mule he had just hitched into the traces. ‘Light or Shadow, who cares? Old dragons are three Ages dead.' He winked at Fionn Areth, then whistled through his teeth to signal the wagoneer to start his vehicle rolling.

For eight days, the mules skidded and scrambled and made backbreaking work for the drovers. Nights passed to the moaning misery of the gusts, rampaging down from the heights to box and batter the tent canvas, and flutter the cookfires ragged. The caravan suffered no attack beyond boredom. Men-at-arms pinched their frost-numbed fingers sanding rust from their chain mail and passed the slow hours in complaint.

‘Nothing alive could be worth this accursed unseasonal delivery,' the master despaired. His second-string horse had shied into a gulch and gone lame when an iyat infested its pack straps. ‘Winter's no time to be crossing these mountains. Whatever Reysald did to invoke a Koriani oath of debt, remind me next time to brain him. He'll never again foist a late trip like this one on a fool old enough to know better!'

He returned a solid laugh to Fionn Areth's question. ‘Oh, aye, trouble like this is usual enough near the solstice. Accursed fiends always travel in packs, besides. You'll see more, or mark me for a dead man.'

For two nights running, the predicted plague of iyats turned the camps inside out and bedeviled the livestock to bedlam. A storm moved them on, with horizontal snow that yowled like a
chorus of hags. Progress through the passes slowed to a crawl. Along the valley floor, the pack train inched forward, each day made perilous by potholes and chancy footing where hot springs leached under the sheeting, white blanket of drifts. The men drew scalding water to launder their clothes. One of their rough company, Fionn Areth combed ice from the bristles on his chin and exalted in his newfound sense of accomplishment.

Eighty grueling leagues, and two months from Daenfal, the caravan wound downward from the heights. Along the narrow strip of lowlands against the Eltair coast, the footsore mules were prodded northward on the trade road, squelching through wheel ruts paned over with ice and splashed by galloping relays of post riders. Slowed down by the traffic of lumbering wagons, they closed the last miles onto the head of land and arrived to stand shivering before Jaelot's front gate.

The caravan's captain doled out final portions in silver and dismissed the men hired as road guards. Fionn Areth could scarcely contain his wild joy. Granted his coin and his freedom under the sky-rimmed shadow of another great city's black walls, he stood with his collar muffled up to his ears, and said his farewell to Reysald's drovers. The outriders clapped his back in goodwill and accepted his wish to part company. They, too, had been young, and remembered the yearning for adult independence.

Fionn Areth sat his moorlands pony, alone and felt as if the whole world turned in his grasp.

Here, in a momentous past hour of conflict, the Master of Shadow had revealed his black heart and called down a barrage of dark sorcery. The event had shaken down solid stone walls. In the intervening years, the signs of that havoc had been bricked over, the rubble long since cleared away. The trappings of old wealth and grandeur remained. This town was larger, more prosperous than Daenfal, set as it was at the junction of two land routes and served by the sea trade as well. Under a sheeted ceiling of low cloud, Jaelot's slate roofs and octagonal guard towers commanded a hook in the shoreline. The setting was favored by a generous harbor, loud with the unraveling thunder of spume hammering seawalls of granite. Beyond, the rough waters of Eltair Bay heaved lead and pewter, sliced by the oars of an inbound galley with bright streamers flying from her masthead.

Commerce came and went through the gates, even in the late day. Couriers on fast horses spurred past, bearing dispatches. Ox wains rumbled in from the quarries and sawmills, interspersed
by the wagons that rolled north and south, hauling cloth goods and barrels, and sacks of ground meal lashed under oiled canvas. Trappers and farmhands plodded on foot. The gilt-trimmed carriages of aristocrats rumbled by, attended by liveried grooms. Under the feet of the Skyshiel Mountains, the gloaming of twilight fell early. A lampsman bundled in fur made his rounds. Torches set burning in steel baskets on the revetments hissed and snapped, harried by a thin snowfall.

Shivering with cold and excess excitement, Fionn Areth steered his shaggy pony from the verge. He wended his way through the city gates behind three chattering servants who returned with cut greens for the solstice feast. The keeps on both sides were Second Age remnants, laid of quartz granite and emblazoned with a gaudy escutcheon of embossed, snake-bearing lions. Tin talismans for fiend bane jangled and chimed. No less than ten sentries stood guard by the windlass, sure enough sign the Mayor of Jaelot maintained a vigilant garrison.

With pay in his pocket and dreams of enlistment against the fell forces of Shadow, Fionn Areth loitered in the cobbled gloom of a side lane. When the horn blew for the sundown change in the watch, he trailed the knots of soldiers released from their posts, trusting their lead to locate the wineshops preferred by the off-duty garrison.

The onset of full darkness found him stabling his pony under care of the Gold Lion's hostler. ‘Two pence a night, he won't eat like a war-horse. One if you groom and muck the stall for yourself.'

Fionn Areth paid for full care, weary as he was, and starved for hot food and new company. He handed the pony off to a horseboy, gripped his cloak against the wind, and crossed the rutted snow of the coach yard. Inside the iron-studded doors, the taproom of the Lion was packed. The heavy air held a redolence of fish stew, oiled pine, and wet wool, underslung with the heated aroma of humanity. A man who wished lodging must brave the crush of patrons clumped in camaraderie beneath the sooty lamps slung from the ceiling beams.

In Jaelot, by stiff custom, the wealthy dined apart. The commons of the tavern served those off the street, from women dressed in motley who sold cakes in the market to tradesmen with stained leather aprons. Shopkeepers in neat broadcloth contended with dockside fishsellers for seats at packed benches and trestles. Mule drovers rubbed sweating elbows with couriers still wearing
their emptied, mud-splashed satchels slung on shoulder straps.