Grand Conspiracy (18 page)

A silence weighted with terrible memories settled between the two Sorcerers. The brutal wind howled, while its freight of barbed ice tapped and bounced off the spears of browned sedge, and the frost-turned canes of wild briar. For a time, the only living sound in the world was the grate of the stallion's shod hooves against the glazed crust frozen over the primordial slabs of scoured limestone.

However the Fellowship mages might be tempted to use power to stop the abuse of a child's innocence, they had no grounds. The Law of the Major Balance disallowed any choice which obstructed the course of free will. Unless Fionn Areth came to ask their assistance, the Sorcerers could not act, could never engage the force of grand conjury against the informed consent of the spirit.

Sethvir regarded the knuckles of his hands as if the streaks of unforgotten, past bloodstains remained branded into wet skin. ‘We cannot step back and resume our old ways. The boy's fate is Arithon's, now.'

Though his agonized whisper seemed masked by the storm that whined over the barren landscape, Luhaine heard. ‘You're shivering.' The discorporate mage asked a permission of the elements, and shifted the brunt of the wind. ‘Have you given a thought to finding shelter for the night?'

Sethvir regarded the slow slide of moisture from the crusted rime on his sleeve cuffs. This time the grain of a desperate weariness let all his sorrow break through. ‘There's a farmwife nearby who hid an herb witch from crown soldiers. If she knows me for a Sorcerer, she won't turn me out.'

For her kindness, Sethvir could set wards of concealment on her cellar. He might lay a blessing over her livestock that would encourage them to bear twins for the next five years. The small comforts he could bestow for a night's hospitality chafed
against sensibilities left outraged by other, immovable bounds of restraint. Timeworn wisdom granted no comfort. Against the entanglement planned for Arithon s'Ffalenn through the fate of an innocent child, the uncertainties ahead posed too graphic a peril to dismiss. At least Luhaine chose tact and suppressed his need to list the appalling facts: that Arithon was no match for Koriani plots, not since the hour of the atrocities at Tal Quorin, when he had gone blind to mage-sense in remorse. The Mad Prophet could remain at his side to protect him only so long as his spellbinder's powers could be spared by a Fellowship caught critically shorthanded.

‘You'll return to Althain Tower to regroup?' Luhaine asked.

‘Not yet.' Diminished by the desolate landscape, Sethvir squared his shoulders against the flaying edge of the wind. ‘For the sake of the Etarran men-at-arms still spellbound by the dreaming of Caithwood's trees, I intend to demand a state audience at Avenor.'

On that point, the compact gave the Fellowship Sorcerers clear entitlement to act. Balked as they were on all other fronts, Althain's Warden resolved to wring merciless advantage from that narrow chink of opportunity.

Midwinter 5654

Just past his seventh birthday, the herder's son, Fionn Areth, returns from a scuffle with a peer, one eye bruised black, and a cut on his lip; and is dispatched to his blankets in the loft without supper while his father snaps to his goodwife, ‘Well who wouldn't pick fights with him? No child in this valley, nor even his own brothers can bear the arrogant look that boy's learned to wear on his face …'

Far south of Araethura, a wizened desert seer recasts his third augury in bones on the sable sands of Sanpashir, and his reading affirms the arrival of Shadow, and the living future of his tribe; his instructions to his people carry the weight of action as he concludes, ‘We go now to the ancient ruins to stand guard …'

On the east shore of Melhalla, a galley flying the scarlet bull of Alestron embarks for Avenor, where the duke's brother, Parrien s'Brydion, will attend the wedding of Prince Lysaer s'Ilessid and post an ambassador to relieve Mearn, whose appointed service to the Alliance of Light has kept him from home for eight years …

A
t Avenor, the victims of the Caithwood campaign were tended in a string of dockside warehouses donated to the cause by the city's disgruntled trade guilds. The arrangement proved far from felicitous. Always before, the rich sea trade through Havish had ensured steady profits through the lull while the passes in Camris lay snowbound. Other years at midwinter, those same buildings were crammed with the fruits of industrious commerce. The fact this season's goods were summarily displaced by a misfortunate company of sick men raised a clamoring chorus of complaint.

Where bribes had once sidestepped Havish's crown rights of enforcement against galleys manned by slave oarsmen, now the wide-ranging deterrent of a Fellowship ward seal put closure to the market's furtive evasions. With eight illegal craft snared outright by spellcraft, and no sign of reprieve in sight, the merchant factions sweated in their lace and brocades, and argued the dearth of alternatives. Their options were choked, they knew well enough. No palliative could salvage high losses. Not with the less direct route to the south closed by hazard, the land passage through Caithwood turned haunted by trees raised to wakened awareness.

In boneheaded fury, the most determined guildsmen attempted to bypass the forest. These dispatched slave galleys up Mainmere
Narrows, or outfitted others with free labor at perishing expense to access the trade road beyond Ostermere. Few arrived there unscathed. Barbarian raiders roved the sea-lanes under sail, outfitted in the selfsame hulls the Spinner of Darkness had stolen from Riverton.

The wharfside taverns brewed up angry talk. Seasoned galleymen refused well-paid berths for fear of bloodthirsty predation. Clan crews lately reclaimed from chained slavery were likely to choose vengeance before mercy toward oppressors who had shown them the brand and the whip.

Alliance retribution would stay paralyzed until spring, when the royal marriage with Erdane's daughter brought the dowry to launch the new fleet. In the dockside climate of snarling frustration, and the clatter of the mounted patrols sent out by Avenor's Crown Examiner to redress the complaints against sorcery, one man handled the upsets of fate with ironclad equanimity.

In the wind-raked, cavernous warehouse jammed with stricken invalids, Avenor's royal healer made his daily rounds in shorthanded resignation. He was a gangling man, given to brusque speech and a harried expression of perplexity. One cot to the next, he lugged his worn satchel with its chinking phials of remedies. An emetic prescribed here, and there, a soup of barley gruel and butter where one of his charges had lost flesh; the passing weeks had produced no improvement in the condition of Caithwood's victims.

Their affliction followed no ordinary pattern of malady. Sprawled comatose on straw ticking, the body of the man he currently examined had lost neither tone nor vitality. The suspended state was unnatural. Muscle should atrophy from disuse, and the organs slowly fail in their function. Yet of the ninetyscore Etarrans afflicted that autumn, not one wasted from starvation. Wrapped in an uncanny hibernation, their heart rate and breathing had slowed. Their life signs languished, faint to near nonexistent, as though their animate function stood in abeyance. Somehow, they subsisted on infusions of broth, with most none the worse, while their bodily needs were tended in infantile helplessness.

Winter let in the damp drafts off the harbor, a seeping cold that defeated even the thickest wool stockings and waistcoat. The healer's charges lay oblivious, muffled under blankets in thick quiet. A half dozen volunteer wives and a brace of overworked junior apprentices shuttled to and fro in the gloom, bearing trays of broth and hampers of soiled bedding, with the crown
surgeon's authoritative presence marked out by a bobbing circle of lanternlight.

For the twentieth time in an hour, sleeves rolled up and his cowlicks pushed back from his forehead, the royal healer peeled back the blankets and examined the next cot's occupant. This one was a burly troop captain whose scars were by now familiar territory. He counted the man's pulse rate and pinched slackened, papery skin for the first warning sign of dehydration. When the intrusive shadow fell over his shoulder, he barked from reflexive habit. ‘Please don't block the lamp, boy! I've said so before. If you've stuffed all the cracks in the sea-side shutters, I need well water drawn and heated. We've got twenty more who need bathing today. No one gets supper till they've been groomed and dried.'

‘The wick in your lamp just wants trimming.' That deep velvet tone belonged to no whining apprentice. The light brightened, set right by the same individual's quiet touch. ‘The ladies in the factor's office know your needs very well. You'll find the tubs have been filled and heated already.'

The crown healer straightened, both fists knuckled into his aching lower back. He blinked, as if overstressed vision could be made to explain the mischievous old man waiting patiently at his left hand. ‘You're here to help? That's a gift and a miracle.' Disbelief yielded to practical authority that would grasp and secure even chance-met opportunity before it slipped through the back postern. ‘We have women to manage the washing and towels, but the boys will be needed for the litters.'

‘They're still busy stuffing the cracked boards with rags,' the strange elder replied in his whiskey-grained baritone. Spry as a cat, his diminutive frame was doused in a shapeless old coat, cut from what seemed a ragpicker's leavings, and mismatched swatches of worn blankets. Crimped white hair spilled into the riot of beard he contained in the grip of sensitive fingers. ‘I can manage one end of a litter well enough.'

The healer's dubious glance met a pixie's bright grin and turquoise eyes folded with laugh lines. ‘Did I not haul your water and roll in the washtubs?' Then, in afterthought delivered with irreverent distaste, ‘Your magnanimous ruler might have provided something better than vats bought used from the dyer's.'

‘They often have terrible splinters, I know,' the healer apologized. ‘We're pinched to the bone for expenses.' Too honestly overworked to dismiss his good fortune, he tucked the blankets
over the prone hulk of the captain and gestured toward the ramshackle shelving erected against the far wall. ‘Litters are stored over there. Our work's laid out. A council delegation's due here this afternoon, and the Prince of the Light won't like their report if his former crack veterans are shabby with a week's stubble.'

The old man retrieved the lantern in mild deference. ‘We're trying to impress someone?'

‘You didn't catch wind of last month's proclamation?' The crown's master healer snorted his disgust. Granted the boon of unburdened hands, he stowed his loose remedies, hiked up his scuffed satchel, and threaded his way through the rat's maze of invalids installed on their mismatched cots. ‘Avenor's recruiting its own talent, these days. You know that snake-tongued Hanshire captain who's been given the post of Lord Commander? Well, he's pushed through a change in policy.'

A pause through a stop to adjust a slipped pillow, then a laugh that stabbed for its sarcasm. ‘Sulfin Evend's said, for straight tactics, we need to sign mageborn into Alliance service. Use talent to divide and conquer the ranks, then make the ban against sorcery stick when all disloyal spellcraft's eradicated. Now, every mageborn offender hauled in is offered a blandishment to practice for the Light. The one who can lift these Etarrans from ensorcelment will be awarded a paid crown appointment.'

The healer's lips thinned to harried distaste. ‘The trials are held here. Stay and witness the farce, if you've got a fancy for uproarious entertainment.'

‘You don't sound appreciative,' the old man observed, his interest engaging, and his dreamer's gaze grown astute.

‘I don't like dead men. Or broken bones. Or amputations, or holes carved by arrows, not for any misbegotten cause made in the interest of crown politics.' The healer secured the strap of his satchel and hoisted the pole handles of a litter, still talking. ‘Seen too much cautery and too many splints in this campaign to throw down the clanborn.'

The old man secured the lamp in a niche and stooped to bear up his share of the burden. ‘You don't fear shadows?'

‘I should.' The healer gave back a gruff, barking laugh. ‘Maybe I will, if I see any. You ask me, what we have is a crisis in trade that began with the bold-as-brass theft of crown ships by a scoundrel. I don't see any Spinner of Darkness storming the kingdom by sorcery. His clan allies are left as convenient scapegoats, dragged in to vindicate the old hatreds.'

‘Strong words,' the elder murmured in peppery provocation.

‘Men don't burn in Avenor for opinions. Not yet, anyway.' Arrived at the end of the near row of cots, the healer lapsed in his tirade. His scrutiny turned critical until he observed that the oldster knew how to raise and move a helpless man without causing careless injury. ‘Whoever trained you, you're good with your hands.' Then, the ultimate compliment, ‘Can I call you by name?'

The request raised a mumble drowned out by the scraping scuffle of footsteps as the litterborne man was conveyed toward the tiny, partitioned room that had formerly served as the warehouse factor's day office. Sudden light knifed the gloom as a woman in a farmwife's loomed skirts threw open the door to admit them.

Steam billowed out, spiked by a ghost taint of apricot brandy, and a drift of female chatter. ‘Bring the dearie in here. Aesha's got balsam to sweeten his bath, and Ennlie's cousin's new babe needs a wee syrup for the croup. Could you mix her the dose? We'll see to your work with the razor.'

‘Have I ever refused you, love?' said the healer, absorbed as he maneuvered the burdened litter through the constraint of the doorjambs, careful not to scrape the chapped skin off his knuckles. He added in snatched explanation, ‘These are widows of the men lost on campaign back in Vastmark. They're all volunteers, and we would be paralyzed without them.'

‘I can prepare cough syrup,' the old man offered. His quick smile reassured the redheaded Ennlie; the healer was given his calm list of the herbs in proper proportion for the recipe. ‘If you haven't any cailcallow, fresh wintergreen will do.'

‘Ath,' said the healer, amazed. He braced the litter on a tabletop, planted his stance, then eased the heavyset occupant into a waiting tub brimmed with suds. ‘Wherever you came from, we could use six others just like you.'

‘Petition the crown to stop burning herb witches?' the old man quipped.

The healer's solemnity gave way to the first belly laugh he had enjoyed in long weeks. ‘Now, that might see me arraigned for collaboration with evil.'

‘Surely not,' the old man argued. ‘Avenor's palace pages could scarcely fill your shoes as replacement.'

‘Well then, definitely don't brag on your skills while you're here. I'd rather be sure this court gets no leeway to decide my sharp tongue's a crown nuisance.' Smiling, the healer offered his
satchel and the freely made gift of his trust. ‘Everything you'll need for that remedy is inside. Just rummage away. Oh, and shout if you can't read my labels.'

The morning streamed past in camaraderie and hard work, with the harried master healer relying more and more on the old man's competent assistance. If the fellow seemed given to peculiar silences, his lapses of woolgathering seemed not to affect the compassionate skill of his hands. Nor was his remark about arcane connections entirely the lighthearted artifice of humor. He had a gift, or else an empathic touch that wrought an uncanny string of small miracles. Those victims whose vitality had faltered through their prolonged and unnatural sleep seemed to stabilize under his influence. When
yet again
the royal healer felt a man's fluttery pulse rebound and steady for no reason, he glanced up.

The oldster was only washing the unconscious man's hair, his hands wrist deep in dripping lather, and his expression vague as a daft poet's. Except that no mind could decipher his reticent secrets, nor read into eyes that held the innocence of a spring sky.

The healer stared over the rim of the washtub, a swift chill of gooseflesh marring the skin of the fingers still clasped to the guardsman's limp wrist. His attentiveness this time demanded the courtesy of a straight answer as he said softly, ‘Who are you?'

The old man in his whimsical coat of sewn rags turned his head. He smiled, disarming, then tipped his chin toward the closed door, a half beat ahead of a disturbance arisen outside of the warehouse. ‘You're going to know very shortly.' As the commotion resolved into the scouring rumble of cart wheels, and the clatter of a sumptuous company of outriders, his seamed features kindled into beguiling delight. ‘We have company? Your party of councilmen has arrived two and a half hours early.'