Grand Conspiracy (50 page)

‘Confusion to the enemy,' Bransian allowed, unconcerned as the raven hopped over his wrist and pecked at an ink splotch on the outer edge of the parchment. ‘Whose silken feathers did you ruffle?'

A wicked, hot gleam fired Keldmar's gray eyes. ‘The rat-faced clerk in the treasury who pays out the bounties for the headhunters, who else? He's now being tried for a turncoat.'

‘Well, you'd better have covered your tracks,' Mearn cut in, his tone all acidic clarity. ‘Lysaer's inquisitors are thorough. If the one posted at Etarra discovers your man's honest, he'll run down the list of his enemies until they have a confession and somebody guilty to roast.'

‘That slinker? Honest?' Parrien laughed, slit eyed and restless under Traithe's discerning regard. ‘The creep's the same clerk who sells captive clan children to horse knackers. He's also lined his pockets for years taking bribes to dispatch assassins for trade guilds. He's made enough enemies to mince him to dog meat, and anyway, Keldmar's only bone stupid when he wagers his best horses on one of Mearn's swindling card games.'

The sword struck the table with an outraged clang as Keldmar banged erect in raw temper.

‘Enough!' snapped Dame Dawr. The wise raven took flight and settled on a cornice, as, snake fast, the old woman brandished her stick. She thumped the one brother who lunged to recoup his maligned character by thrashing Parrien senseless and quelled Mearn with the withering force of her glare even as he drew breath to liven the conflict with a choice round of baiting insults.

While Keldmar recovered his blade and subsided, nursing a smacked wrist and grumbling, the grandame s'Brydion shifted her attentive glance to the duke and vented her acrid opinion. ‘I don't like what I saw in Tysan one bit. The merchants there have grown fat on their greed. They stockpile gold with no fear for tomorrow, apparently too busy to question the talk that makes policy in their prince's closed councils. I don't trust the quiet, or such honeyed prosperity. There are intrigues running so deep in that city, even the whispers are silent.'

‘Althain's Warden agrees with you.' Traithe snapped his fingers and recalled his bird, who unfurled jet wings and dropped into a glide downward to reclaim a perch on top of his hat. ‘Sethvir sent me to ask you to consider sending three children of your bloodline to be fostered in the Kingdom of Havish.'

Duke Bransian lifted offended eyes from the sprawl of plans in front of him. ‘These keeps at Etarra aren't even built yet, and to my knowledge, our walls and defenses are solid. We held our own through the Betrayer's last uprising, and watched
Lysaer's whole war host get tail whipped at Vastmark. Except for his sword-rattling musters at Etarra, he's stayed in retreat at Avenor. Merchant trade is now running the heart of his policy. What under Ath's sky makes Sethvir think us weaklings, that we should fear threats from such enemies now?'

Traithe regarded him, level and unblinking as the harbinger bird perched on his hat. ‘Because the very strength of your citadel here makes your family a sitting target.'

‘What's changed then?' Mearn was first to demand, his thin, vibrant frame outlined in lightning as the storm cracked and slammed at his back. ‘When I left Avenor, the lies were paraded in full daylight, the most glaring of them the false claim that Lady Talith's fatal fall was a suicide.'

‘The summer muster's all you've been shown in the open.' Pegged oak struts squeaked as Traithe shifted, perhaps to ease the pull of old scars. A snap of his fingers, and the raven hopped down and resettled on his raised forearm. An undefined tension pulled at his mouth, as though he chose words with reluctance. ‘Other developments are afoot, more threatening than these plans for new battlements. Lysaer's Alliance has been busy recruiting what gifted talent the Crown Examiner doesn't burn. Etarra will be gathering the library to train them, at first to hunt down their own kind. But a tool in the hand will come to be used. Such is the way of human nature.' His keen glance at Bransian showed earnest concern as he finished his threadbare conclusion. ‘Your walls will hold against arrows and steel. What of an attack launched in fire and light, and backed by the powers of dark spellcraft?'

Across a prickling, uncomfortable silence, rain thrummed in tantrums against stone and slate. Dame Dawr sat, bright eyed as a small, ruffled hawk. Mearn shoved back his chair and paced outright, while Bransian rubbed his wire beard with a thumb, his expression bearish and disgruntled. Parrien, in absently thoughtful unease, traced an intricate old watermark left on the oak table by a past visit from Asandir.

Singled out by the raven's unfathomable stare, Keldmar relieved his discomfort through speech. ‘We are clanblood, still.' He slammed his oiled sword back home in its sheath. ‘We uphold this town's charter in name for a high king whose ancestor swore your Fellowship a blood oath of service to rule under strict terms of the compact. Could we not ask you Sorcerers for help if an assault threatened to overwhelm our defenses with conjury?'

‘You could ask,' Traithe admitted. ‘Against misuse of power, our assistance is entitled. But a promise is worthless without resource to back it. The extended range of the Fellowship's responsibilities has left our diminished number sorely strained. If the Alliance moved with intent to forestall us, we might have no hand free to send. Sethvir was plain. His earth-sense reads patterns. He sees the hoarded wealth gathering at Avenor, laid against the new template for a fortress that will reforge Etarra into the dedicated sword of the Light. Spark and dry tinder, was his precise phrasing.'

No need to reiterate that Alestron might become the struck flint to ignite that volatile fuel to burning, not with Cattrick's craftsmen alive and busy building ships in the citadel's inner harbor.

Bransian spoke over the hammering roll as thunder rebounded from the hills. ‘Did Sethvir foresee trouble?'

Traithe matched his grim honesty, a shadow stamped out in silver and black against the rough play of the elements. ‘Not yet. He saw possibility, coupled with ominous warning.' The laugh lines at his eyes seemed expunged from his flesh, and the raven a more somber extension of his forthright concern. ‘Sethvir bade me remind you that Lysaer s'Ilessid bears the s'Ahelas gift of farsight through his maternal lineage.
Never discount what hidden
seeds that man might hold in his hand
. The Mistwraith's curse drives him. If he suspects you are Arithon's friend, he would hold that knowledge in close calculation. He might bide for years if he thought he could wring best advantage from arranging your moment of downfall.'

‘S'Ilessid already knows we've changed loyalty, I've no doubt left on that point.' Seated stark straight, her features sharpened with testy autocracy, Dame Dawr clasped neat hands over the ferrule on her stick. ‘At Avenor, I caught too many prying eyes at my back. The sunwheel initiate we put off at Tideport was young, but no fool. More than a spy, I would wager my last pearls that he was a natural-born talent sent to act as Cerebeld's informant.'

The raven swiveled its jet bill toward the inimitable old matron, its eyes as sharp as sheared gimlets. Before Bransian could inject a scoffing remark, or Mearn stab back to defend her, Traithe said, ‘That's a most astute guess. What made you draw that conclusion?'

Dawr expelled a derisive breath through her nose. ‘Raised the hair at my nape, that young man did. The woman's a born
simpleton, who mistrusts her instincts where the safety of her family's concerned.'

Traithe's startling, bright smile came and went through the flare of the storm through the arrow slits. To Duke Bransian, he concluded, ‘You would do very well to pay heed to your grandmother's hunches.' As though aware the audience had drawn to a close, the raven launched off and flew, then vanished on spread wings down the stairwell. The Sorcerer arose, the grace of each movement undone by the unkind ache of old injuries. He braced one palm on the table, leaned over, and swept the flat of his hand across the copied lines inscribed on the unrolled parchments. ‘The masons from Elssine know fragments of old lore?'

Bransian rested his massive forearms on the chairback he straddled like a camp stool. ‘Judge that for yourself. This tower was built by the master craftsmen's great-grandfather.'

‘Then Sethvir was not wrong.' Traithe gathered himself, well aware he faced a difficult night after a long, slow descent of steep stairs. ‘These new walls at Etarra are going to skew the free flow of the fifth lane, if our Fellowship doesn't walk over the ground there and give the earth her fair warning. At least one of us must go to reaffirm the lines that channel the subtle magnetics.' He tipped a nod to Dame Dawr, then clasped wrists with the duke. ‘Forgive my rushed parting. This round of ill news means I must send word back to Althain Tower and ask for a summons to Asandir.'

Autumn 5669

The Mayor of Jaelot had gout, which pained him to distraction at the first onset of cold weather. Each autumn, when the sea air off Eltair Bay raked its damp chill through his city, he muffled himself in flannel and took to his bed, his puffed ankles braced like bloated red sausages in the lace-bordered pillows his wife favored. His face above the pleats of his nightshirt bore a scowl; his pouched, bulldog jowls and narrow-set eyes became indelibly lined with distemper.

If the experienced servants knew well to stay clear, the new clerk standing in for the municipal secretary droned away in pedantic oblivion.

‘Our treasury is still grossly in debt from the last annuity granted to the Alliance. Two raids at sea caused setbacks to trade. We can't tax the merchants' lost profits.' His lecture lagged as he fussed with his parchments, ticked a mark with his pen, and wagged a vague finger toward the bundled invalid on the bed. ‘With our city finances on the verge of collapse, the cost of sending state funds to Etarra in support of Prince Lysaer's proposed war host would seem an imprudent extravagance.'

The mayor lost his last shred of equilibrium. He rammed his fists in the quilts, tore a seam in the lining, and shouted through the resultant explosion of goose down. ‘Damn your advice past the Wheel to Sithaer! And damn the expense to perdition! I've waited fifteen years for the Divine Prince to tire of pandering to the whiners on his council back in Tysan. His heir's all but grown.
Do you think a black sorcerer who bends darkness itself will wait while we bemoan the theft of a few cargoes? Jaelot will pay this new tithe to raise arms! Our delegates will endorse Lysaer's call for better fortifications against shadow if we have to beggar every last one of our craft guilds.'

The clerk looked up, blinking. While the Lord Mayor still glowered, hair raked up in tufts, the young man under scrutiny tipped the feather on his quill and made casual effort to scratch an itch underneath his wool collar. ‘Surely, your lordship, other cities than ours could underwrite the burden of routing such evil from society.'

The mayor choked, rendered speechlessly purple. Through his stertorous rasp as he struggled to recover, the door to his chamber flew open. The panel rebounded from the wainscoted wall and trembled every silken tassel on his bedhangings.

A wire-thin woman in pearl ropes and ruffled taffeta sailed through, spouting distressed imprecations.

‘Oh dear,' sighed the mayor, defensively mollified.

His wife, her ladyship of Jaelot, stalked up to his bedside, her dark hair rammed up like a ship's prow with combs, and her pointed chin cocked for a tirade. The first victim became the guileless clerk.

‘What have you said to upset my lord? He's ill, can't you see?' Wafting a breeze of patchouli, she thrust her beaky nose in the shrinking man's face and snatched his ordered parchments from his hand. ‘Get out! Take these and your nattering back to the countinghouse and use them to balance the ledgers.' She slapped the sheaves of parchment against the man's chest, driving her point home as he frantically snatched to save his notes from cascading onto the carpet.

‘Where the capture of the Shadow Master's cohorts are concerned, no man questions the mayor's will.' Her ladyship sniffed. ‘Jaelot's depleted revenue will scarcely come to matter if the s'Ffalenn bastard returns and levels half our walls by means of fell powers and sorcery.'

Through the clerk's rankled mewl of protest, the mayor howled back. ‘Where the enemies of this city pose a threat, I can speak for my own affairs, woman!'

His wife ignored him. ‘You're ill and in pain.' Her brisk, jeweled hands tugged and prodded at bedclothes, oblivious to his winces as her efforts jostled the tender flesh of his ankles. ‘You ought to be sleeping, dear, and not driving yourself to a lather
over the treasury's state of debt.' A decisive last slap plumped the pillow beneath the Lord Mayor's tufted head. ‘I'll send one of the maids with a posset.'

Pearls clicked and spattered muted points of light as she flounced the elaborate, trimmed layers of her skirts, then pinned bird-beady eyes on the clerk, who still cowered behind the clutched leaves of his tally sheets. ‘You had better be gone when the medicine arrives.' She gave a chirp of exasperation and marched out.

Perfume gusted back and rippled the lion-bossed hems of the hangings as she snatched the door closed behind her.

The mayor crushed down the pillow, which poked him in the groin, and shot a whipped-dog glance sideward. ‘Nobody ever crosses her without spoiling their day.'

At least wise enough not to answer, the rattled public servant bent his storkish frame into an upholstered chair. Leather squeaked and horsehair stuffing rustled as he evened up the corners of his notes. ‘The way you carry on, a man might believe the Master of Shadow was demonkind.'

The Mayor of Jaelot blinked his couched eyes. ‘You must be quite new to your post here.'