Grand Conspiracy (3 page)

Fionn Areth's adult future might rest on that razor's edge of possibility. She dared not entrust a replacement to act for her. Another initiate appointed in her stead might eclipse that slim chance for reprieve. Yet for Elaira to stand vigil to guard that small opening, she must first keep cold faith with her order. She must place both the child and the man in jeopardy to preserve her stake in the outcome. And if the s'Ffalenn gift of ingenuity did not prevail, she must in turn live out the appalling consequence.

Held firm by her street waif's obdurate tenacity, Elaira fixed her resolve.

‘I will trust you,' she murmured to a prince whose own burden of adversities drove him unhearing leagues out to sea. ‘Before my
own peace, I will not bow to failure. You must be the axis upon which Morriel's wicked plot stands or falls.'

Sucked hollow by a dread that threatened to break her, Elaira masked her face in chapped hands. For nearly an hour she listened against hope to the empty wail of the winds. No Sorcerer answered her silent appeal. The Fellowship had once given their promise that Arithon s'Ffalenn was qualified to withstand any dangers that might arise through her bound service to the Koriani Order. Yet their steady, wise counsel lay far beyond reach on this night. She must carry on alone and suffer the risk that their judgment at Narms still held true.

Outside the casement, a spill of washed silver reflected the first rise of the moon. Elaira exhausted every filthy word she knew, then mastered her bitter distress. She put aside the insidious dread, that the Teir's'Ffalenn might prevail; he might escape Morriel's snare and stay free, and never understand or forgive the betrayal she now chose to enact out of faith.

‘Ath's mercy on us both, if that happens,' Elaira whispered.

Worst of all, she feared for the agony she might inflict on a man whose strengths had been expended again and again in the desperate cause of necessity. Choked by hot tears that were useless to shed, she rummaged through her stores and boiled water to brew an infusion of valerian. Let her vindictive bustle of noise awaken the former First Senior.

Lirenda stirred, raked back onyx hair, and blinked like a milk-fed lynx. ‘There could be compensation,' she murmured as she measured the steel in the junior initiate's smoldering composure. ‘When Arithon's taken, you might ask to keep his shapechanged double for your servant.'

Elaira said nothing, the response to such baiting beneath her utmost contempt.

‘Well, I might ask for him then. Such a tempting potential for amusement and irony! He could bleach my soiled linens and brush my suede shoes.' Lirenda uncoiled from the cot in disaffected exasperation. Her feint had provoked no sign of insolence or challenge, disappointing proof that tonight the mouse was too wise to play for the stalking cat. ‘We'll need an hour to set preliminary wards and ready a circle for grand scrying.'

Elaira bowed her head and gave her, not words, but a curtsy that swept to the floor. There existed no half measures. Her irreplaceable integrity and the desperate plight of Fionn Areth's
future must rest in Arithon's hand. Her vindication now stood or fell on the strength of the Shadow Master's character, to defang the jaws of Koriani design and upset the Prime Matriarch's plotting.

Autumn 5653
 

As Lirenda had arranged by scheming design, on the one fated hour when the half-moon arose over the moors of Araethura, the Fellowship of Seven had no hand free to delve into her order's machinations.

Yet the boundaries the Sorcerers maintained to keep faith with the terms of their sworn compact were far from weakened or hamstrung. The wild lands under their charge remained free, and the ward rings they guarded held true. The Law of the Major Balance they lived by had never been breached or broken in two ages of recorded history.

Too often, past and present, the foundation of that integrity remained steadfast at punishing cost. As the presence of the Paravian races had waned, the Fellowship had been left as caretakers of Althain Tower, with all of its attendant perils and additional obligations.

Not the first fortress built, but among the oldest, and by lengths the most well defended, the tower had been raised at the dawn of the Second Age. Those times had seen the world's brightest hope plunge awry, when the primal purity of Ath's song of creation had turned, and the maligned power of the dragons' true dreaming had spawned new life out of discord and conflict. The Paravian races sent to the world to bring healing had been met with slaughter, the shining grace of their example brought down in sorrow and bloodshed. Ripped raw with wounds and punishing grief for a triumph undone in doomed
war, the Ilitharis Paravians had fitted and sung the keep's mortised stone with grand conjury. Antlered heads bent, torsos and haunches straining to shift half-ton blocks on log ramps, they raised the blunt-fisted height of this turret at the edge of the Bittern Desert. Here, where the winds still sang their laments for a grasslands spoiled by drakefire, and the spring rains fell too seldom to ease the imprinted horror of the dead torn down in battle; as if the land itself refused to relinquish its pain for the unicorns who had held the front line. Pure spirit made flesh, they were the promise of Ath's unconditional redemption. Conceived as a gift, they had died as a sacrifice, unable to contain in pure love the aberrated creatures that had, for need, been cleansed from the face of Athera: a graceless expedient of survival last enacted by scouring conflagration.

Now the old, warded granite housed the records of those all-but-forgotten years: the Names of those Paravians slain, and the memories of their passing by sword and by fire; by claw and cruel fang; and never least, loss, and bloodshed grown too overwhelming to endure. The tower's fast vaults held ancient wonders. Here resided the bright and dark threads of Athera's history – the faded maps and primal ciphers; the arcane keys to earth's mystery – a detailed body of knowledge that could unlock the bound gates of time. Through the years, as the Mistwraith had choked out the sunlight, the Paravians departed from the continent. On leaving, the eldest centaur guardian had oathsworn the Fellowship Sorcerers to safeguard the legacy of Althain Tower's contents.

That trust had endured for five centuries. Nor was the tower ever left untenanted those beleaguered, rare times when its Warden passed beyond reach of the earth link. The mighty endowment of vision he possessed had been ceded by the last Paravian. Its tied power married Sethvir's awareness to all that transpired in the world. Few could have endured that grand flux without losing their minds to insanity. Sethvir had done more, had embraced and encompassed the whole by surrendering every aspect of his being to address the needs of Athera.

Forgiveness for an unspeakable past had come to him in that moment, that his heart had mastered the challenge.

On the night hour Fionn Areth fell prey to Koriani design, the discorporate Sorcerer Luhaine kept displeased vigil. His ingrained penchant for fussy detail could never match Sethvir's broad perception. A cast-iron pessimist, Luhaine grumbled. He
had never loved solitude; his natural preference bent toward comforting lectures when he faced untidy loose ends. Nor would he compromise his innate, plodding accuracy, a trait that often abraded his colleagues to fits of exasperation.

Had Luhaine still been enfleshed, he would have vented his stress by stuffing himself on muffins and butter. Left to life as a shade after a catastrophic mishap, he could only shed aimless static, his frustration built to a fulminating crescendo by the second month of his tenancy.

‘Far better for everything if those meddlesome Koriani had never set foot on Athera!' He hissed past a balustrade in the Second Age library, goaded to a brisk, snapping breeze since the Prime Matriarch's instructions had dispatched Lirenda to Araethura.

Elaira's renewed role in her sisterhood's affairs boded the worst sort of trouble. The Fellowship Sorcerers were already spread thin. Their concern now redoubled since the Koriani had failed in their first attempt to take Arithon as their order's string-puppet captive. Luhaine knew best of any: their ancient Prime Matriarch would not abide her defeat. The enchantresses' current intervention in Araethura gave warning of a new strategy, with no Fellowship Sorcerer at hand to track their intent through surveillance.

Nor was Luhaine complacent. He spun drafts of chill air down seven flights of stone stairwells, whipping the settled dust of two ages into tight, frenzied spirals in his wake.

He stormed past the landing, a miniature tempest that shrilled through the cracks in the strapped oak doors to the storeroom, which held the Second Age talismans and artifacts. Among the locked coffers and shrouded sword hilts, alongside the ash shafts of arrows with points of chipped crystal, and the gem-studded shields whose arcane properties included wards for the banefire of dragons, he sought the one item fashioned by Fellowship hands.

The golden hoop had been wrought by Ciladis the Lost shortly after the Mistwraith's invasion. The gentlest, most sensitive of the Sorcerers had endowed his creation with a cipher of scrying to forecast the revival of pure sunlight.

The device had never been observed to perform its prime function. Sethvir had banished the sunloop to storage on the sorrowful hour when Ciladis had passed beyond contact, his search to locate the vanished Paravians ended by his disappearance.
Sore grief remained. Despite repeated efforts to trace Ciladis's whereabouts, no Fellowship Sorcerer ever learned what fate had befallen him. Althain's Warden had shelved the sunloop out of heartache, an inadequate gesture to distance the agony of an unresolved mystery. Remembrance still haunted, of the small-boned, walnut-skinned colleague who had immured himself for silent, futile hours, sifting phantom auguries and combing the infinite loom of existence for reprieve from the fogs of Desh-thiere.

Luhaine sought the sunloop now for reasons of acid efficiency. In that hour, the device's fine-tuned spells of observation offered his best means to trace the events that might threaten the land held in trust by the Fellowship's compact.

Through the advent of midnight, the first-level storeroom lay cloaked in darkness, its sole arrow slit masked by the board ends of shelving, and Sethvir's scrawled spells against rot. Cold air poured in, an invisible black current that sheared like a blade across Luhaine's purposeful presence. The tidy, round chamber held no trace of mice, only the bracing, spiked scent of frost riming the stalks of dried meadow grass. Sethvir might disregard his personal appearance, but his catalogues and antiquities were maintained with immaculate care. No dust layered the floor. Ancient records did not molder, and the oiled leather scabbards on ceremonial knives did not deteriorate from dampness.

Luhaine wended his way between the bound coffers and wrapped armrings, bagged in flannel against tarnish. Here lay the massive, gold-banded horns once carried by centaur guardians, the rims chased in runes with Names of forests that remembered the first song of Ath's creation. Amid crowns once worn by Paravian high kings, and the crystal and bone flutes the Athlien played to honor the rise of summer stars, Sethvir kept the jeweled scepter that had belonged to the brightest of their kind, Cianor, who was named Sunlord. But in this hour of the world's need, the fire-wrought bronze dragons that bore the spoken powers of prophecy lay dormant, sleeved in pale silk. In passing, Luhaine shared the echo of memory, a sigh out of time for past glories.

Even he must bow to the history enshrined in this place. The treasures housed at Althain were the stuff of past legend, with their marvels and wonders, and their uncanny perils to entrap the unguarded mind. Luhaine ranged the collection in wary respect, despite his hurried passage.

He found the sunloop in its mother-of-pearl stand alongside the whistle the Masterbard, Elshian, had carved from a tine of
Shehane Althain's right antler. The placement gave testament to Sethvir's remorse. One blast from that whistle would frame a note to defy time and space, and dispatch help from the tower's current Warden. As if, in hindsight, the Sorcerer who normally shouldered the post regretted not sending the artifact with Ciladis against the perils of an unknown journey.

Too late now, to wish past mistakes might be salvaged. The Fellowship Sorcerers themselves were shorthanded, with one of them crippled, and another, even now, gone past the veil into mystery. Blunt-nosed, ever-practical Luhaine settled, a viselike well of cold coiled around the sunloop's filigree stand. A nimbus of light clung and shimmered off the delicate metalwork. The cast-gold circle still held the unearthly elegance that set Ciladis's character apart. Abalone inlay threw off misted rainbows where the far-flung spells of vision ranged dormant, a whisper of suggestion smothered within a cruel and unanswering silence.

As always, the radiant grace of the sunloop made Luhaine feel coarse as old smoke. Still worse, the faint sense of shame and betrayal, as he tapped into the gossamer web of fine energies and changed the significating rune from a figure of joy to one that harkened to discord. Light plunged into darkness as the spell's focus reversed its original polarity.

The scene that formed in the loop's clouded center showed him the prelude to ruin …

The visioning revealed the white-marble floors of Avenor's grand hall of state, rebuilt from ruin in Tysan. Under the costly, clean glow of wax candles, two high officials conferred.

One hulked solid as weather-beaten rock from his hard-bitten years of field service. An unshakable presence, with his clipped beard and wedged forehead, Lord Harradene had served as Etarra's Lord Commander at Arms since the death of his predecessor at Valleygap. The other beside him, who flourished a sealed requisition, was dark haired and neat as a ferret. His gold-trimmed surcoat might be cut fine as a courtier's, emblazoned with the sunwheel of Avenor's royal guard, but the sword and steel dagger that hung at his waist showed the battered, dull scars of hard fighting. Young for his high position at court, he spoke with a brisk, sharp-tempered confidence, to which the older veteran deferred.