Grand Conspiracy (35 page)

For the disastrous details should have reached Avenor by courier well before a galley could row the long way around the outthrust reef spurs and chains of jagged islets sprawled off the Korias coast.

Through the ensuing stiff silence, Parrien's commands to his crewmen rang across the inked darkness. Alestron's port rowers backed oars. With a cool that brooked insolence, they spun the
duke's galley in a froth of kicked spray, then drew her abreast and matched pace with the sunwheel flagship.

Her flanking course made the royal fleet's flag captain edgy. The close quarters forced him to cease stroke to avoid an entangling collision. Amid the blundering noise made by other ships manned by less polished crews, he hailed back, ‘If our dispatch riders were waylaid, then where were yours? The duke's family blazon might have seen the news past the clan raiders who caused the delays.'

Through the slap of the bow wake, and the rumble of wood as oarshafts were raised and run in, the companionway door squealed open. Raiett Raven stepped out, trailed by Avenor's justiciar, who minced no words, but shouted across to the lamplit rogue who commanded the s'Brydion galley. ‘Or are you too late for the royal wedding because Alestron has joined in conspiracy with other renegades who favor the Shadow Master's packs of barbarians?'

Against every precedence, Parrien failed to take umbrage. ‘I know there were vessels deliberately foundered.' Across the heaving span of light chop, he strode up the rambade and took position beside a slimmer figure, until then unobtrusive as a wraith. Both men were armed. Nicked glints of orange gouged up by the stern lamp played over the chain mail on shoulders devoid of a surcoat.

‘You make a grave mistake, if you accuse s'Brydion,' Parrien added, while the man at his side remained silent. ‘Arson and sabotage against Tysan's crown interests are not any folly of mine.' While the distance between galleys closed to the jostling nudge of the rip currents, the duke's brother seemed more interested in the faces which inhabited the flagship's decks than in defending the slur just leveled against his family honor. Nor did he mind the predatory circle of vessels which maneuvered to cut off his escape.

The flag galley's captain belatedly realized his autonomy had gone with his elbow room. Raiett stood silent vigil on his quarterdeck, and Avenor's high councilmen now crowded en masse from the companionway, Lysaer s'Ilessid among them.

The Prince of the Light had small patience with delays. He pursued the charge of s'Brydion disloyalty in the imperious manner he used to freeze his trade ministers in mid-argument. ‘Your brother's representative missed my state wedding.'

‘I was late,' Parrien amended. While the figure at his side held
the queer, lethal stillness of a cobra gauging its distance to strike, he added in silken patience, ‘My reasons are forthright. I expect the gift I bear strung from my yardarms will fully exonerate the lapse.' His following gesture to an unseen crewman caused a lantern to be unshuttered and tipped aloft.

From amid the pack of brocade-clad officials, one of the trade ministers gasped. ‘Ath's own mercy! Are those corpses strung up there?'

Hats and feathers flurried as necks craned to see.

The Prince of the Light simply raised his right fist and let the brilliance of his gift shatter the obscuring veil of darkness.

Light flared over ships and men with swift and revealing brutality. There were indeed bodies noosed to Alestron's squared yardarm, eight of them dangling, and each of them over a day dead. Rigor had left them. Their slack-limbed remains hung by the neck and flopped to the roll of each swell. The victims had not danced overlong in their agony. Each had been dealt the Wheel's swift passage with a ballast rock lashed to the ankles.

Nor did the evidence stop at execution: each body was encrusted with bruised wounds, the dried blood on slack flesh like rust stains too vividly rendered.

‘Mercy, do you see?' Raiett Raven murmured. ‘All of their fingers were broken.' Beyond Lysaer's stance, a fainthearted councilman laced his hands on his belly and retched.

‘Your wedding gift,' Parrien stated, flat as a whipcrack across the hellish reflections chipped off the waves between hulls. He grasped the shoulder of the figure beside him. ‘My brother Mearn has spent a busy winter in behalf of Alliance interests. You might thank his vigilance, since you see before you the cut heart of the Riverton conspiracy.'

In stark truth, for those with the stomach to look, the bloated gray features of the corpses were known. Nearest, the recognizable brown hair and blunt jaw of Cattrick. Beside him, the face with the half-toothless rictus was Ivel the blind splicer. Next in the lineup, the plump joiner who had fitted the ships' brightwork, and after him the master sawyer and the yard's wiry caulker, who would harry his laborers no more with his fits of perfectionist temper.

‘They were tortured,' Lysaer said, revolted by the unrecognizably swollen appendages that once had served as human hands. Through the distant, flint scent off the cliffs by the shoreline, wind wafted the clinging miasma of putrefied meat. Murmurs
of disquiet ran through the oarsmen stilled on the benches, while on the bunched galleys adrift with the tide, Lysaer's light beat down like the molten flare of poured steel.

‘Well yes, they were tortured,' Parrien agreed, his bear-stubborn features surprised. ‘How else to be sure we had caught all the ones who were guilty?'

Lysaer's fury broke in a wave that fired his gift to white static. ‘How
dare
you take these men's lives and usurp my right to administer royal justice?'

Limned in unbearable, silvery glare, Parrien s'Brydion laughed. ‘Why trouble to split hairs? Shouldn't you thank me? Or are you and your councilmen so in love with due process that you'd rather spend your wedding week haring off south to wage an unnecessary war? No need to put all of Riverton to the sword. The bunch swinging here are your criminals.'

The diamond clasp on Lysaer's white cloak spat ice to his indrawn breath. ‘I cannot know that for certain.'

‘Then you'll just have to trust me.' Parrien's smile turned wicked. ‘Or not. I see you have envoys from Erdane and Hanshire on board. They can bear witness if you want to show your
gracious
ingratitude and cast public doubt on the validity of s'Brydion honor.'

‘Oh, he's very good,' Raiett Raven observed softly. To the nephew slipped up to stand by his side, locked to hard-breathing frustration, he added, ‘How does your prince handle stalemate?'

Lysaer's blue eyes shone with volcanic rage. ‘No man in my kingdom should be condemned without trial, or die before my royal seal authorizes his execution.'

‘Oh, that's rich!' burst out Mearn. ‘As a prince who rules Tysan without legal sanction, take care to recall that we're clanborn. The mores of town law can't constrain us, as allies. On the matter at hand, our own scruples bind us. No man of mercy could keep these conspirators alive once they had delivered their confession.'

‘He's right.' The mouse-timid minister of the weaver's guild dabbed at moist lips with his handkerchief. ‘To have held these for trial would have prolonged a vile and unnecessary suffering.'

The council delegate from Erdane offered argument. ‘That's a glaring assumption. Would men like these have acted in conspiracy without ties to the Master of Shadow?'

‘Never so lofty an evil as that,' Parrien rebutted. ‘Look closer
to home. This lot was disgruntled after two years of scant wages.'

Exclamations from the councilmen, with the trade minister's outcry the loudest. ‘But we sent them three hundred coin weight in gold!'

Mearn shrugged in that boneless way which set townborn teeth on edge. ‘If your prince sent bullion, the payment you specified never reached its destination at the shipyard.'

Through mutters of consternation concerning mislaid funds, with more blame and imprecations heaped on the heads of Maenol's clansmen, other factions expressed their relieved complaisancy.

‘To think all of Tysan could have mobilized for war where no real threat of shadow existed!' sighed the trade minister to the coterie of Avenor's guild councilors. ‘Imagine the expense saved, not to mention more losses to revenues for the crown to levy more troops.'

At Sulfin Evend's shoulder, Raiett Raven looked amused. ‘His Grace won't shift them now. Threat to profits will keep all his armies at home. I wish I could hire on the duke's younger brother as strategist.'

Mearn was speaking again, his ultimatum to Lysaer hurled over the water in a voice the whole gathering overheard. ‘Believe us, or brand the s'Brydion liars, then swallow the consequence of that.'

Still etched under the perilous threat of Lysaer's gift, Parrien signaled to seamen he had kept on station in the mainmast crosstree. ‘Cut the carrion down. This vessel has served Avenor's interests as a gibbet long enough.'

‘Why are we drifting here arguing, anyway?' Mearn snapped. His mercurial gesture of impatience encompassed the lightless horizon to the north. ‘Presumably there's a bride ashore pining for her absent prince. If all of the wine in this kingdom is drunk dry, Avenor serves her allies a muckle-poor welcome.'

On the decks of the flagship, the beribboned city dignitaries subsided, content. Never disposed toward seafaring in the first place, they seemed more than eager to grasp the excuse to fare homeward. Since the captain could not order the fleet to put about without royal authority, they regarded the bejeweled prince in his white-and-gold silk with unified expectation.

Lysaer withstood that nailing regard, his eyes darkened sapphire and his coinface profile expressionless. While the misting night airs riffled his filigree hair, the corpses of eight traitors
splashed into the sea, one on the heels of the next. His gaze moved to Parrien and measured; then surveyed Mearn in turn. No more accusations passed between ships. The Prince of the Light kept his right to hold judgment in suspension, while the fires of his gift singed the rigging overhead and wafted the rank taint of carbon.

He had been stood down. Raiett Raven would have laughed for the irony; except something to the quality of Lysaer's bearing stopped the mirth cold in his belly.

Danger walked in that magisterial stillness.

The fire of human pride was a powerful force. Temper, frustration, and hostility must lend fuel to an explosive desire for reprisal. Tension spun out like the pent force of the arrow nocked and held to the drawn bow. The strength of one thought could see Alestron's state galley in flames, as every discomfited councilman realized. Lysaer might seize a mortal ruler's satisfaction. He might ride the moment and indulge in his temper and set off his politically desirable war with Alestron; or he could accept the peace thrust into his hands by s'Brydion intervention.

He could relax his strict point of principle and allow the invigorating campaign he needed to expand his resources for warfare to become disarmed by the spurious lynching of eight disgruntled conspirators.

A drawn second passed, while the moist sea winds collided with raised light and spat ghost trailers of steam at the interface. The swell slopped and heaved against the timbers of stalled hulls; gear creaked aloft to their rolling. Raiett Raven's lips were a sealed, strained seam; the councilmen sweated in abeyance. The Erdani, Lord Koshlin, clamped his jaw in sour fury.

Only Sulfin Evend appeared unaffected as the fair prince he served resumed breathing, deep and even.

Lysaer brought his seething fury in check, the change as effortless as the sheathing of killing steel into silk. His exacting, fair character raised a majesty that burned, and choked throats. As though all of time must bow to his disposal, he bent his bright head and opened the fist held aloft. The spattering, star brilliance of his gift of light dimmed and released its harsh grip on the night. His presence reduced by the glimmer of mere lamp flames, he smiled with the lucent diplomacy that riveted men to allegiance. ‘For your services to Tysan, then, let me welcome s'Brydion to the crown's hospitality at Avenor. My new princess shall arrange for your public commendation.' A signaling flick of one finger,
and the flagship's captain shouted orders to run the war banners down from the masthead.

While movement returned, and captains received orders to regroup into fleet formation, Raiett Raven watched Lysaer s'Ilessid retire with eyes gone panther wary. ‘Never mind whether he's the world's divine savior,' he murmured to the nephew at his elbow. ‘He's dangerous beyond compare since no one alive can guess his preferred agenda.'

Sulfin Evend unglued his fingers from his sword hilt, the gesture a running flare of chain links touched orange under the lamplight. ‘He'll go on to Riverton. Care to lay coin on it?'

Raiett's chuckle came warm in a darkness that felt inexplicably empty since the Prince of the Light had ceded the deck to his fleet captain. ‘I'd ask instead, how much gold would it take to bring you back to your father's service?'

‘No coin on this earth could buy that,' said the man sworn heart and spirit to the cause of the sunwheel Alliance.

When Raiett replied, his honesty rang bright as ruled brass. ‘As Hanshire's First Counselor, I don't know whether such loyalty will become the world's grace, or if it's the most frightening thing I'll ever witness inside of a lifetime.'

As the scried image delivered by Sethvir's powers tore away, Dakar reeled, unsteady and confused through the shock of restored awareness. He forgot where he was and shot to his feet. Rammed crown first into the unforgiving edge of the
Khetienn
's upper deck beam, and suffering a bitten tongue, he yelped, bent in half to avoid further mishap. Every hatred he bore toward the hazards of seafaring revisited with venom enough to stop thought.

‘Fiends plague!' Collapsed on the bench by the chart desk, he agonized to Sethvir, ‘Never mind that those meddling brothers averted a war.
How do I tell Arithon that his most loyal shipwrights
were tortured and killed by the hand of Parrien s'Brydion?
'