Grand Conspiracy (55 page)

Dropped back on his bench, green eyes lit to blazing, Fionn Areth spun in challenge. His glower was met, and matched, by a stranger who wore a brown cloak fastened with a battered garnet ring brooch. He had a broad, patient face and his sobriety cut a distinctly sharp note amid the brawling, raucous company of the taproom. ‘You're the young swordsman who fought Captain Jussey in the square?'

Fionn Areth nodded, distrustful. He managed the astuteness to hold back his anger while the man's mild eyes swept him up and down, measuring all of him without comment.

The man heaved a resigned sigh. His expression suggested he wished to be elsewhere as he finished his opening thought. ‘If
you truly want honest work for your sword, you need not look to Avenor to find it.'

Fionn Areth said, cautious, ‘What are you offering?'

‘A post as a guard on a caravan bound over the Skyshiel passes. We'll want good swordsmen at this time of year. The roads are less traveled before winter.'

Across the trestle, one of the garrison guards called out in knowing derision, ‘You're Reysald's road captain? Since when has that miserly, pink sack of lard risked his goods to bad weather and barbarians?'

The man gave a shrug. ‘No care of mine, but between all the hand-wringing, he complained he had promised the delivery of a consignment for the Koriathain.'

The guard raised knowing eyebrows. ‘Oath of debt to the witches?'

‘Seems so.' The road captain grimaced, displeased himself, but too steady a man for histrionics. ‘Damned details are none of my business.'

‘That's the trick, accepting the sisterhood's favors.' The guardsman glanced over his shoulder, then guffawed, a shrill note straining his humor. ‘They're women, and don't they
always
choose the most pesky time to collect?'

‘Are the passes that dangerous?' Fionn Areth broke in.

‘Captain Coreyn, to you, boy.' Introduction complete, he gave his blunt answer. ‘We charge risk pay for crossings made after equinox. That's as much due to storms as the increased chance we'll be raided. The work's not all swordplay. I've no use for a laggard who won't bend his back to free a mired wagon from a snowdrift.' Tired of shouting over the noise, he tipped his head toward the tavern doorway. ‘You want the details? Then why don't we both step outside?'

Without pause to see whether the moorland swordsman would abandon his company and follow, Coreyn displaced a cooper who pushed for a seat, and elbowed through the press toward the doorway.

Outside under moonlight, shivering from raw excitement and chill air, Fionn Areth heard through the terms of the hire. He accepted for a fee of five silvers, daily, with an eighth portion added for every fortnight the caravan traveled through dangerous territory.

‘No extra pay for armed engagements, mind. But if you kill a barbarian defending the goods, you can claim posted bounty
for headhunting.' Coreyn extended a hand, his grip banded wire over the untried flesh of Fionn Areth's offered palm.

‘Be at the eastside land gate by sunrise,' he finished, and disengaged his brisk handshake. ‘No excuses for lateness. The season's too chancy to waste even an hour stalling for damn fools and laggards.'

‘I'll be there,' Fionn Areth promised, his green eyes grave. Under the spill of the torches stubbed into the iron brackets by the doorway, he seemed suddenly young, and too vulnerable.

Coreyn masked his disgust in stiff silence and strode off into the darkness.

Long after the caravan captain departed, the hired sword whose face held another man's bane never thought to wonder if his gift of good fortune held the thread of a wider design. He lingered in the stone entry of the Cockatrice, marveling at his incredible luck, and whispering endearments to the ancient, chipped carvings that gave the old tavern its name. The fretwork on the facings and the interlaced coils of the serpents themselves bespoke work too refined for human artisans.

The world was a wide place, now his to explore. Excitement bubbled up and burst out in a whoop that slammed echoes off the gabled roofs, with their queer, rampant guardians crouched in their scales of shagged lichen. The cry rang over the icy gray cobbles and bounced through the arched columns that supported the massive, hewn beams of the balconies. More than one shutter slammed open, the rudely wakened sleepers inside howling outraged obscenities.

Fionn Areth did not care. Hand clenched in pride on the hilt of his sword, he yelled again for pure joy. A herder no longer, he was free, and at last on sure course for his destiny.

Autumn 5669

By the hour that young Fionn Areth pledged his sword with Coreyn's road guards in the predawn shadow of Daenfal's eastern land gate, leagues distant, in Atainia, the night's reign had not faded. Against the swept hills of the Bittern Desert, the west-facing casement of Althain Tower's library still showed stars and a setting white sliver of moon. Its Warden was not caught napping through the moment when his earth-sense captured the caravan's daybreak departure. The rhythmic scrape of the pen nib he used to scribe records on sheets of fine vellum broke off. Sethvir peered over his shoulder, his mild eyes piercing, and his eyebrows bristled with sorrow.

‘Luhaine?' he whispered. ‘Stay with Verrain at Methisle. I've already checked. Nothing more can be done.'

Through the span of one heartbeat, the tower chamber remained quiet. No candles burned. The shadowy, carved dragons supporting the slab table stayed etched into gloom, stone frozen to snarls and bared fangs. Only the restive air shared the charge of a terrible, mounting urgency.

Sethvir elbowed his vellum and ink flask aside, warned by a cascading rush of disturbed wind that his plea had been disregarded.

The next moment, the discorporate spirit wheeled in uninvited, riffling a small tempest of papers across the table and clapping shut the board covers of Sethvir's opened books. ‘May those witches suffer Sithaer's seven fires of perdition for their incessant, unconscionable meddling!'

Luhaine's presence focused into a tempest that rocked the crock of spare quills into rustling agitation. Sethvir clapped out a cobra-fast hand and pinned them before they winnowed willy-nilly in the storm.

‘I've not become boisterous as Kharadmon,' Luhaine retorted in miffed response to the Warden's raised eyebrows. ‘When I throw a tantrum, at least there's a well-founded cause! The Koriani Prime has no morals, no compassion, and no shred of mercy!' Without need for a pause to recover his breath, his tirade rolled seamlessly onward. ‘May her black heart char for eternity, and her spirit twist in the lightless pits at the negative pole of creation. If I had to pass judgment, I would suggest the longevity spells that preserve her unnatural life have finally driven her insane!'

‘She's frightened,' Sethvir said quietly.

‘Well she should be!' Luhaine retorted, his fury transmuted to righteous indignation. ‘That dumpling she's chosen to train for her office won't survive the first trial of succession. She has to know. Lirenda's not fooled. But even a frustrating setback of that magnitude can't excuse her scheming manipulation of an innocent.'

‘You speak of Fionn Areth?' Sethvir sounded weary, the slope of his shoulders almost beaten as he released the quills battened under his hand. He retrieved the one still dipped wet for writing and blotted the ink against the marked edge of his sleeve.

Luhaine's uncontained angst wafted on past the aumbries, circling the chamber's perimeter. ‘They've set that boy up as a road guard, did you know, for a caravan bound into
Jaelot
!'

‘I saw.' The mapwork of lines on Sethvir's drawn face revealed all his agonized empathy.

Luhaine whuffed past the casement. The weathered board shutters swung and banged in complaint, dropping rust flakes from tired hinges. ‘Save us,' he whispered. ‘Don't say the boy's lost. We're craven if we don't lend him help to escape. The more so since this backhanded byplay of Morriel's was conceived to restore her unprincipled use of the Great Waystone.'

Sethvir shot to his feet in a driven burst that flapped a week's dust from his robes. ‘Who could be spared? Traithe hasn't been well. I dispatched him to Vastmark to map the new shale faults, since anything more taxing might kill him.'

‘Then Asandir's gone to Camris?' Luhaine stated, disturbed into mollified quiet.

‘He's rededicating the wards on the Sorcerer's Preserve, yes.'
Sethvir sat back down, his chin propped on gnarled fists. ‘There were instabilities in the bulwarks about to become holes, and this time, a cursory patch won't suffice. He can't leave prematurely. Not unless we want packs of Khadrim flaming caravans to cinders and marauding the crown territory of Tysan.'

Luhaine grumbled with predictable pessimism, ‘No one of us should handle those forces alone.' The powers involved were enormous and intricate, and utterly unforgiving of mistakes. Still worse, the barriers would require five arduous weeks to lay down and seal to stability.

‘The crisis couldn't be made to wait.' Sethvir sighed, pressed into silence by desperate tact, while Luhaine fumed in a mute fit of thwarted distress.

He, too, was hamstrung. Ever since Morriel Prime had recovered the strength to command the matrix of the Great Waystone, she had wasted no time schooling a circle of senior initiates to meld their talents through its focus. She now had twelve, with as many more in training. Each initiate added meant an exponential increase in the scope and strength of her power. Pitched alone against such a force, no disembodied Sorcerer dared attempt even subtle intervention. Lacking a dense matter body as anchor, the refined energies of spirit could become fenced and trapped, spellbound to the matrix of the Koriani master crystal and set under a chained seal of binding.

Only one other discorporate Fellowship mage remained at large with the cunning ingenuity to guard a colleague against the dangerous, drawing powers of a trance circle fused through the amethyst.

‘I already tried the last avenue of resort.' Sethvir shook his head, sorrowful. ‘Davien's shade still won't answer my summons.'

‘Serve the Betrayer right if we fall, then,' Luhaine groused in black pique. ‘He'll poke his nose out of Kewar Tunnel one day and wonder why sunlight's been swallowed by wraiths and Koriani are running the planet.'

‘You'd quit so easily? That's not your style.' Sethvir stroked his beard. A sly spark kindled deep in his eyes. ‘The season's our ally. Do you think an early blizzard in the Skyshiel passes could delay that caravan's arrival?'

‘I'm already gone,' Luhaine grumbled. His acerbic rejoinder shimmered through the static that marked his hasty departure. ‘Though I'll ask you to recall that bedeviling kinks in the weather is more Kharadmon's preference than my own.'

‘Trade places with him, then,' Sethvir suggested to the air.

A snort of disdain wafted back across a widening veil of distance. ‘Oh no! Let him stay in the vacuum communing with stars. An indefinite stint of boredom attending cold wards might lend him a refreshed perspective on the fine points of civilized behavior.'

Alone once again, Sethvir arose and reset the slipped stay on the shutter. He tucked his unfinished page under a vase filled with the sunflower seeds, acorns, and beechnuts he saved for the birds and small creatures who visited his windowsill. Then he leaned on his elbows and gazed out, while the winds nipped and tangled the ends of his beard, and the gray well of daybreak erased the night's constellations.

The telling facts he had not shared with Luhaine left their pain like thorns in the heart. For
if
a diverted storm in the Skyshiels might stall Morriel's plot through the five crucial weeks to let Asandir try an intervention, other forces remained still at play, every one of which set a dangerous spin on an unpredictable future. The earth link presented every deadly and volatile nuance for review.

Even as the sun rose over the frost-powdered moors of Araethura, Sethvir tracked a courier westbound on a barge flying downriver toward Halwythwood. His dispatch satchel held a letter from one of Raiett Raven's agents, addressed to the nearest officer of Lysaer's Sunwheel Alliance. That missive would reach Morvain inside the next fortnight. A fast galley to Dyshent would bear word into Tysan that a man bearing the Master of Shadow's description had been seen plying swordplay for wagers in the public market of Daenfal.

Sethvir stirred at last as the first brown sparrows chirped from their roosts and took wing. Touched gold by dawnlight, he left to make tea in vain effort to quiet his ominous dread. For naught could halt fate, even if Asandir could effect a last-minute deflection. Fionn Areth's carefree innocence now led him into dire straits, with no surety set on the outcome.

Only one consolation could be wrung from the earth link's converging train of bad news: Arithon s'Ffalenn and his crew aboard the
Khetienn
were far removed from the center of conflict. Three thousand leagues of chartless ocean lay between their logged position and the disastrous affray now setting up on the continent.

Autumn 5669

The snarl of cold winds over stripped stone kept Morriel Prime from her sleep. The frame of the palanquin where she lay wrapped in furs shuddered to each veer in the gusts, and the incessant pain which gnawed at her joints twinged to each tiny movement. Of all possible sites where she might need to winter, the mountain citadel of Eastwall ranked among the most miserable of choices. Yet there, as nowhere else along the sixth lane, the spine of the earth thrust upward, the great slabs of dark granite veined in white quartz. The stone of the Skyshiels formed a natural amplifier for Athera's magnetic currents. In Eastwall, Morriel could lay her thumb on that pulsebeat, and fuse the all but limitless wellspring of raw power into chains and seals of her making.