Grand Conspiracy (82 page)

‘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 strewn 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.

‘Save your sympathies for the horse,' said the Shadow Master, well aware Fionn Areth choked back nausea. ‘In an hour you might wish I was the wicked brigand you imagine. If we find ourselves taken, remember, I didn't commit the sensible cruelty and fire the destrier's tail for distraction – oh, Dharkaron's bloody vengeance!'

That oath ripped out through a snatched pause, as another Koriani crossed their path and deflected them again from their preferred downhill course toward the harborside.

‘This way. Fast!' Arithon ducked left, then slipped through the trailing, dead canes of a rose trellis. Fionn Areth clawed after him, tearing his bloodstained bandages on the briar and sliding on icy rocks. The pair tacked a desperate, erratic passage through a garden of cast-plaster statues, winged swans and naked nymphs bearing birdbaths stuffed with rotted caches of oak leaves. A side stair at last let them up through a pigeon loft, where Dakar once held assignations.

Relentless, the scrying spells in the vat continued to track their least movement. Arithon's snatched reminiscence of a humorous escapade frayed into static as the thin flurrying of snow interfered with the sigils that sealed the connection.

‘Does that building have an exit other than the front entrance?' Lirenda demanded in glacial objectivity.

The seeress's reply emerged through the whiffle of startled pigeons, set flying across image in the vat. ‘The downstairs passage leads into the brewer's. The doorway's kept barred with an iron hasp and lock.' But she sounded unsure such ordinary measures could pin down their volatile quarry.

The next instant, the waterborne scrying went blank. ‘We're cut off by earth element,' Cadgia informed.

A subtle change in the quality of Elaira's leashed quiet prompted Lirenda to straighten and take notice. Eyes the flat gold of the hunting tigress surveyed the adversary perched with insouciant obedience on the wine tun. ‘What do you know?'

Elaira's pale features remained a closed book, unwritten with sign of dismay. Through the chill, dusty gloom, her regard in return held the same steely gleam as the finished gloss on a sword blade. ‘About rearing squabs? Very little. The ones I stole from the dovecotes in Morvain, we ate to get rid of the evidence.'

Lirenda returned a cameo smile, her voice like poison gloved in honey. ‘Don't waste my time. Believe this, for the effort, I'm going to see you pay dearly.'

Elaira shrugged, world-weary and indifferent. ‘What coin do I have that's not spent already?' But nonetheless, her hands stayed locked tight throughout her unflinching reply. ‘The brewer has unsavory habits in bed, and a wife who keeps ironclad books. To pay for his pleasures outside of the till, he takes silver from husbands and dallying wives and lets them keep trysts in his
cousin's dovecote. Beyond Dakar's hearsay, Arithon once said folk went in for a jar and came out looking much too exhilarated to account for the watered-down beer the mayor's bailiffs were paid bribes to ignore.'

‘A good thing the order has the benefit of your council. No other initiate has the low cast of mind for such sordid snippets of gossip.' The slide of layered silk skirts a poured swish of sound, Lirenda turned her back and resumed her vulture's survey of the scrying vat. While Cadgia and her handpicked circle of talent cast a fresh augury riddled with barbed sigils of seeking, the former first senior maintained her clipped interrogation. ‘Do you know how the brewer arranged for covert exits?'

‘I don't.' The bare bones of Elaira's honesty rang just as chill off the musty board walls of the shed. ‘Arithon was discreet for good reason. Dakar could have been flensed by any number of cuckolded husbands if the love nest became common knowledge.'

‘Cast a search ward over the brewer's,' Lirenda commanded. ‘We'll tag them as they come out.'

‘Who do we have posted in the neighborhood?' Cadgia asked, her rounded cheeks flushed with affront that her quarry had slipped her spelled shackles yet again.

A pause followed, filled by the sigh of tense breathing. Crystal chimed softly to crystal as the seeress dangled her personal stone within the etheric field of the main quartz focus. She then murmured a list of names set amid the arrhythmic verses of advanced incantation. Under Cadgia's painstaking, efficient instruction, a new net of sigils was woven. Through a sending unfurled through the core matrix of the amethyst, other directions were dispatched to the enchantresses stationed outside.

Elaira's short nails mined small crescents in her palms as the drawing spells sealed and, on Cadgia's release, deployed outward.

‘I still smell earth,' the scryer announced. ‘They've gone underground? A tunnel stair might be angled below the boards of the cellar.' Little else would account for the darkened, featureless surface reflected in the vat; only a specialized few sigils could carry binding influence through earth, and even those were uncertain, unless their powers were channeled through a quartz focus tapped to a flux line.

‘Patience,' urged Cadgia. ‘Hold strong. The snowfall's still thin, yet. We'll have our quarry nailed down the instant they cross back under the biddable influence of air.'

‘Wait,' whispered the seeress. ‘Wait. There's something. I sense the boy. Yes, that
is
him. He's broadcasting fear.' Eyes closed, her consciousness sealed into trance, she rocked to a rhythm of perceptions tuned far beyond range of ordinary hearing. ‘Look for a dray filled with fuller's earth, I think. The mare in the traces won't settle. She's unnerved by the tension she picks up through the hands of an anxious carter.'

‘Fuller's earth? The devil!' Lirenda stalked to the vat, her immaculate grooming cobwebbed in sickly light as Cadgia's swift adjustments to the spell seals charged the water, and resurged to a glow of pallid phosphor to keep pace with the seeress's shifted perception.

A new image unfurled, steady and clear, the moving chaos of street traffic marred by a scrim of flurrying snow. An unpainted wagon centered the scene, heaped with a tarp-covered load of dry clay. The gray horse in the shafts moved head high and snorting, her flanks crowded by a troupe of rollicking gallants wearing gaudy cloaks sewn with ribbons. Their party was trailed by two trollops, equally blithe under billowing mantles of peach silk and daffodil yellow.

The unwieldy cart made balked progress in the press. Ahead, a merchant's lacquered coach tacked a lumbering course down a thoroughfare clogged with confused throngs of foot traffic. In due course, a farm wagon bearing crated pigs jostled alongside in a hub-to-hub jockey for position.

‘What street? Give me bearings!' Lirenda brooded over the image in the vat, nails rapping an impatient tattoo on the aged wood of the rim.

‘That's the back wall of the exciseman's yard. No place else has iron spikes and gold finials set into capstones of mortar.' In unruffled precision, Cadgia deciphered other details half-masked by the turmoil and the murky, gray weather. ‘Our party is northbound.'

The seeress sent precise word of that bearing to her counterparts stationed on watch in the streets. ‘The fugitives will soon be picked up by a search point. The garrison guard has posted lancers and pikemen screening traffic at each major crossroad.'

‘Very good.' Cadgia raised a glance lit to triumph. ‘Unless your two renegades want that clay for their grave shrouds, we'll have them exposed and back on the run.'

‘Let the guard flush them,' Lirenda decreed, confident the carter who transported live contraband would turn aside rather than
submit to a thorough inspection by nerve-jumpy garrison forces.

The wagon inched forward. On the wine tun, fists jammed to shut lips, Elaira all but stopped breathing. Her insane, almost suicidal plea to let the worst happen, and make an end to her harrowing dread won no pity from Ath Creator. The scene in the vat spun itself out with an agonized, detailed caprice that might have spurred humor had the prize stakes not been flesh and blood.

Nor was reprieve likely. If the dray bearing fuller's earth sought to turn down a side street, the farm vehicle and its bawling cargo of pigs cut off that small chance of escape. Ahead, the broad, satin bulk of the carriage blocked sight of the approaching checkpoint, where a rising altercation unraveled to shrill shouts as the reveling young men in their ribbons and exuberance picked an argument with the mayor's guardsmen. The footmen who attended the coach proved more biddable. When challenged, they stepped off the running board in long-faced resignation and opened the gleaming door on command of the burly sergeant. A broad-shouldered guard with a scar on his chin jammed his torso into the compartment and began a belabored search under cushions and lap robes, to the bilious contempt of the occupants.

The two whores amused themselves as they could. One flirted with the grizzled drover of the pig cart. The other, in her frothy cascade of peach skirts, grew bored poking straw at the snout of the sow in the crates. With her mantle bundled up to her ears in disdain, she sailed on ahead, determined to insinuate herself among the uproarious pack of drunk dandies.

The sergeant, meantime, disengaged from the coach and seized the bridle of the gray draft mare. ‘Gotta be searched, no exceptions. Mayor's orders.' He beckoned on his compatriots to attend to the drover, who nodded rather than risk his quaking liver to somebody's excitable pike.

The rabble-rousing dandies flowed aside in a whirl of wild color, divided by the departing coach and a liveried driver who held no compunction against laying the whip on his team in close quarters. Through the grind of iron wheels, and a plowed swirl of snow, two surcoated lancers broke past. They swarmed over the dray, their drawn knives slashing the cords securing the sun-faded tarpaulins. They then grasped their pole arms and used the bladed ends to stab and stir through the load of dry clay underneath.