Grand Conspiracy (58 page)

The space between the brick hearth and the racked phalanx of tapped beer kegs was staked out by soldiers, mail-clad and imposing in dark surcoats. The ones finished eating shot dice or threw darts, or made laughing wagers with coin scattered over scarred trestles. The planks were marked with scratched targets for knives, or lines drawn for bouts of arm wrestling. On other occasions, the same rearranged boards served as the arena for cockfights.

The boisterous crowd at the Lion thrived on blood sport, and the inn's florid landlord turned no one away who carried the requisite coinage. A half silver secured Fionn Areth a tiny room in the attic, with a milk-faced maid to lug him a bath basin and soap. For a copper and a kiss, she brought him a knife from the kitchen. The favor included her chattering interest as she watched him scrape off a two-month rime of black stubble.

‘You'll want me back later?' she asked, and then laughed as he flushed ardent crimson with his bare knees poking from his bathwater.

‘Later,' Fionn gasped past the fire in his groin.

‘'Twill cost you another three coppers, then,' said the unabashed girl, then clattered out, leaving him deflated.

The towel was coarse as the nap on new burlap and smelled like wet dog from hard use. Fionn tossed it aside in disgust. He settled for tying the wet tangles of his hair in a thong stripped out of his sleeve cuff. Clad in his spare shirt, a fresh tunic, and the brushed-down wool of his breeches, he strapped on his sword and retraced his steps down a maze of tight stairways to the common room.

The soldiers still congregated, joined now by others with beards like filed iron and the scars of twenty-year veterans. Their rough, tight-knit company discouraged outsiders. The trestle adjacent stayed empty. Fionn Areth settled into the space and smiled, until a fair-headed bar girl brought him a plate of hot bread and cod stew. He topped off the meal with a tankard of mulled wine. Relaxed with fatigue and the comfort of clean clothes, he soaked in the welcome heat off the hearth, content for the present to listen.

Barracks gossip informed him the city pay was on time, but too low, and that overseeing convicts during seawall repairs was the unpopular duty on the roster. Loose comment ranged the
gamut from the favors of wenches to the irregularities of the aging mayor's effete secretary.

‘Etarra's new tithe put the pinchfist in a howling bad mood,' a man with a sergeant's badge grumbled. He sighted into his near-emptied tankard. ‘A stroke of the pen, and there went the allotment for upkeep. We'll live with that leak in the barracks until spring, and watch bats fly and roost in the rafters.'

‘Fatemaster's bollocks,' the guard with the sausage red nose chimed in. ‘Just let the tenderfoot recruits sleep there. First week they come in, they're too pissing scared to notice the slosh in the bedding.'

A veteran's dice throw clattered across the crammed trestle. The winner hooted his ecstatic victory and pounded the boards, jouncing the litter of tin spoons and crockery and all but upsetting the picked bones.

‘By the Wheel, you cheat,' the loser groused back. ‘Bedamned if you didn't jink the plank on that throw, and tumble a six down to one. Didn't survive Vastmark just to be felled by your flippity, swindling fingers.'

Fionn Areth leaned forward, his awed anticipation taking the lead from good sense. ‘You did battle against the Master of Shadow?'

The broad-shouldered mercenary opposite the war veteran twisted around on the bench. ‘Why should you care, boy?'

‘If a man can fight sorcery with weapons of steel, I'd like to hear how it's done.' Lent confidence from his stint as a road guard, Fionn Areth raised his chin. ‘Is it true that you marched in the Vastmark campaign?'

Preoccupied by his game, the burly veteran snapped his fingers for the dice. ‘That I did.' He spun another throw, showed his teeth in satisfaction. ‘Can't top two sixes,' he gloated.

‘Could match them,' the dicing partner shot back. The pieces were passed and sent clattering again.

‘Did you ever see the Shadow Master?' Fionn Areth asked.

‘Just once.' Still engrossed, the veteran held out a palm for the coin won back from his fellow. ‘I served in the mayor's personal guard on the night the fell sorcerer smashed all the glass in the feast hall.' Twas uncanny. And Vastmark? Like most wars, a drawn-out, miserable stint in the mud. The shadows froze bone something cruel. Cousin of mine lost half his fingers.' He glanced up at due length. One eye cast into a squint, he stared down his nose at Fionn Areth.

His mouth opened. For an eyeblink of time, he froze in stark horror. ‘There! That's him!' The stupefied surge as he shot to his feet sent the bench flying over behind him. ‘Save us all!
There's
the Master of Shadow himself!
'

‘Man, are you crazed?' cried his dicing companion.

A metallic scream answered. The veteran hauled killing steel from its sheath and surged ahead, bent on murder. Two startled guardsmen sought to restrain him. Their belated grab missed. He charged, clambered headlong over the trestle top to skewer the source of his outrage.

Fionn Areth flung sidewards, barely in time. Crockery and bones and tankards pelted airborne as the sword impaled in the struts of the trestle and overturned both by raw force.

‘He's just a fool boy!' cried an incensed bystander. ‘One packing a grasslands accent thick as the hair on a goat.'

‘It's the Shadow Master, I tell you!' The veteran pursued as his target rammed backward, unraveling chaos through the tavern's packed company like parted thread in a knit. ‘Might look like a boy. Illusion's his specialty.' The longsword tracked his quarry's terrified retreat, steady and waiting for opening.

‘You came into Jaelot before to make mischief,' the veteran accused in low fury. ‘That time you looked like a minstrel's apprentice, with quiet ways and brown hair.'

‘I didn't,' gasped Fionn. He ducked scything steel. Once, twice, again, he skipped backward. His hip rammed something hard, and a caroling chime of refined metal splashed at his back. The cardplayers his mishap had disturbed reviled his idiot clumsiness. He had nowhere to turn. The murdering attack of the veteran came on, before his numbed fingers remembered the sword and the reflexive training to use it.

‘Ath's mercy, please listen!' He ducked under the trestle, came up with drawn steel, somehow prepared for the stabbing downstroke he had been rigorously schooled to anticipate. Through the tangling brunt of a parry, he pleaded, ‘That man wasn't me.'

Blade drawn and guarding, he evaded entanglement in the upset table and stools. Displaced patrons cursed him. Coins and cards jostled to each hampered move as joined swordplay erupted in licking, fast strokes across obstacles. Around him he sensed the undermining panic as other onlookers saw he was armed. They shouted and gave way, shoving themselves clear of chance injury.

The gamblers cut losses and swooped to claim their threatened cache as the duel snaked through their midst. A barmaid dropped her tray of filled tankards, screaming outrage. More heads turned. Fionn Areth's protestation became swallowed in bedlam as the Lion's jammed patrons avoided the clangor of bare steel that scythed and snarled in damaging proximity.

A clashing tight parry and a shallow slice splashed blood down Fionn's exposed wrist. His wrenching, taut cry rang through the noise, convincing in petrified innocence. ‘This is my first journey from Araethura's moorlands!'

‘Put up that fool steel!' The Lion's swarthy landlord cupped his chapped hands and bellowed gruff warning from the bar. ‘The city justiciar gives stiff fines for brawling! You brutes fight here, you'll sting for it later when my fee for damages reaches the purser at the barracks.'

‘Let be, fellow!' called a concerned comrade. ‘Make peace and come back to your beer.'

Others hooted in derision for what seemed the disorderly conduct of a drunk baited into a harebrained attack. ‘Why draw blood for a pittance? The boy just wants to sit himself down and go back to scratching his nits!'

From the dimness between lamps, bare sword clanged on sword. The deep, throaty boom as a wine tun tipped over ground into a soprano shatter of smashed glass.

‘Soldier, listen up!' A resigned officer on the sidelines muscled forward to intervene. ‘Don't make me take you down for a stint of forced labor.' He flipped a hand signal to his off-watch guardsmen. ‘Close in. Make an end to this folly before there's a public embarrassment.'

But this scrap was no mismatch between rage and innocence. The glitter of poised blades wove and feinted in deadly, incongruous control. While the mailed guardsmen formed a baffled circle and sought in vain for an opening, crossed steel belled again. Like a hiccup in a torrent, their sympathy canceled to the clanging crescendo of a strikingly expert train of blows.

‘But you know swordplay, don't you?' Breathing in gasps, the veteran spoke through that indrawn, poisonous hesitation. ‘Did the goats teach you that?' He matched a stunning, well-executed riposte in smooth stride and lunged back. Steel wailed across defending steel, and a wave of freezing consternation swept the onlookers.

‘Come on,
show them!
' the veteran taunted. Gut-shaken to fear,
he ducked a low-hanging lamp. Hot candleflame burnished his taut, sweating face. ‘You fight
astoundingly
well for a yokel raised up in the grasslands.'

‘He's telling the truth,' one of his dicing companions exhorted. ‘Black sorcerer or boy, that's no fumbling greenhorn.'

Another bench toppled. The veteran caromed through a stew of spilled food and recovered. ‘I
know
him, I tell you!' His next cut snatched whining through air yet again. The boy's style matched his skill with a chilling display of confident, practiced experience. ‘He's the very same felon our mayor wants dead! Dharkaron avenge us all for blind fools if we let him escape justice this time!'

‘You're mistaken.' Shaky and strained into white disbelief, Fionn Areth shook back the hair fallen free of the thong tie. ‘I'm no sorcerer.'

‘We'll let the mayor's aldermen decide that.' The veteran pressed in, now flanked by two guardsmen. Their combined efforts hazed their beleaguered quarry backward into the vestibule where the aristocracy engaged private rooms.

Cornered, now desperate, Fionn Areth deflected a lethal cut to the head. He countered another lunge with a close-pressed parry, then blazed back, focused by rage. His following stroke whined past blocking metal and broke through.

One of the attackers took a slice in the shoulder of his surcoat. His mail shirt spared bloodshed, a useless distinction. The doubters saw only further evidence of culpability in a stripling who could best a seasoned fighter.

‘Save us all, it
is
him, the Master of Shadow!' Panic erupted. Alarmed citizens bolted to escape, their pandemonium sliced by jangling steel and a salvo of hysterical shouting. ‘Take him alive! There's a bounty on his head!'

Fat to the fire, an alderman added, ‘Don't trust his youth. They say he won't age, the sorcerer who brought the massacre at Dier Kenton Vale.'

‘Are you mad?' Pressed at bay as a dozen men-at-arms shoved through to harry his stance in the hallway, Fionn Areth despaired. ‘I wasn't even born when the war host marched into Vastmark!'

The hampered fight thumped against the closed doorways. Fionn Areth grasped the first latch within reach and flung wide its gilt-trimmed panel.

A wailing scrape of disrupted melody informed him the room was in use. He turned anyway. Cornered now beyond hope of
redemption, he plunged in pounding flight through the heart of a discreet social staged for gentlemen who kept fancy courtesans.

Two steps, and he collided headlong with a vielle. The instrument shattered to a jangle of burst strings and a squawk of dismay from the musician. The bass fiddle crashed to a boom of split wood. Guests peeled away in a flutter of ribboned silk as the fugitive burst into their midst. Bloodied and exhausted and stripped of finesse, he elbowed his way through a cloying maelstrom of perfume and gold-braided velvet. A froth of feathered hats batted his face. He battered, rammed with the flat of his blade, and wrenched clear of the ringed hands which snatched at him. Breathless, bewildered, he shouldered by main force between dandified bluebloods, groomed and prinked and screaming imprecations under a dazzling brilliance of candles.

Fionn Areth tripped on the fringe of the carpet. He skidded on waxed wood, hit the wall, and despaired. The room had no windows and no rear exit. He spun, sword raised and eyes wild, braced for the smashing attack that must come from the guardsmen who pounded behind him.

‘Bedamned!' cried a cultured, baritone voice. ‘I know that man! He's a criminal!'

Exposed to the fluttering light of the sconces, the severe angled features and sable hair of s'Ffalenn drew a storm of aghast recognition. The effete society of Jaelot hoarded their grudges like heirloom jewels. No infamy in memory was more venomously nursed than the Shadow Master's ploy, enacted one past summer solstice. Under the guise of fine music, his tricks of low sorcery had shamed the city's best families. The diversion he spun to mask his escape had shattered the glass in the mayor's mansion, then razed buildings, gutted roofs, and flattened stone walls in an unhinged surge of wild conjury.

‘Dharkaron avenge!' screamed a city councilman, roused from bemoaning his torn lace. ‘The Spinner of Darkness has come back! That man's none other than Arithon s'Ffalenn!'

A vase crashed from a niche, torn down by the rush as vengeful guardsmen piled in from the vestibule. Their advance was coordinated. A ranked captain screamed orders. Men-at-arms fanned out and formed an unbroken line of advance. Still brandishing bared swords, they tore the cloth from the feast table. Crystal toppled and shattered. Flung food and dishes smashed to the floor, to the yammering dismay of a servant.