Grand Conspiracy (68 page)

The image was not permitted to fade, but became blasted aside by an arcing explosion of light, this one a hard, electrical blue, and dazzlingly stellar in brilliance. Its call seeded a view of the crumbling Paravian ruin crowning the hill beside Mainmere. Yet even through the imbalance unleashed by a radical deflection of lane force, the stones of the ancient foundation sung to ward by the centaur, Imaury Riddler, remained silent under a velvet tarnish of frost. The rime of thin ice flicked to lit spangles as another discharge of white static raked the darkened sky overhead.

The vision in the pool slowly faded, rubbed to attrition by the flow of cold water until it became thinned to a gossamer cobweb that erased back into the void. The ponderous stillness settled deeper, the unmarked refuge of earth-enclosed darkness braided through by the tremulous trickle of droplets. The dustless space held the tang of wet rock and dissolved limestone; mirror-polished walls abided in the vast patience that endowed ancient granite its strength. Amid the drawn pause, the power of an unseen presence thrashed through a turmoil of conflicted debate.

Then another spark fell, this one a whispered imprint less seen than felt as a tracing of air onto a blank template of existence. Its directive unfolded the vantage of two bubbles of void space, written and defined by the secretive, bound power enchained by Koriani ciphers; one, very small, was sited over the quartz veins in the Skyshiels near the mountain settlement of Eastwall. Larger, more sinister in meddling implication, the other encompassed the entire walled city of Jaelot.

A snap of brisk breeze fanned over the pool, marring the water's limpid surface into a puckered lens of distortion. The lightless maw of the spell-circled town shattered like black glass, then relit to display the spider's web pattern of impact on the course of outside event. Fragmented imagery captured details. A thousand incandescent threads of connection unreeled over the night landscape. The will of the presence that dwelled beneath Kewar selected but three to trace back to their living sources.

The first captured impression showed a bonfire lit in the dockside shanties at Southshire. While white lightning portents snapped across the night sky, a chanting crowd of zealots led by guardsmen wearing sunwheel badges surrounded a ceremonial pyre. The victim for execution was no herb witch, this time, but the demonic straw effigy of a black-haired sorcerer, run through the heart by a rusty billhook and pelted by the screaming onlookers with salvoes of offal and garbage.

The next sequence to be mirrored in the rock pool revealed a desertman elder, crouched muttering on the black sands of Sanpashir. His thrown bones of augury blazed white as another blinding burst sheared through the heavens above him. Yet his voice as he cited his reading was steady. ‘Behold the truth! The son of Mother Dark will make landfall at the ruin and go on to try to avert an ill deed and a wrongful shedding of blood on the solstice.'

Last, a lone brigantine flying the leopard blazon of s'Ffalenn heeled on a close-hauled course, bearing due north across the ink waters of South Sea.

Then the pool stilled, singing its trickling melody of droplets within the underground deeps. The rune patterns ceased their manic flare of light. Within that womb of utter blackness, the draft whirled and whispered, restless. Through a taut span of minutes, nothing changed. The presence sealed in the isolate cavern whisked to and fro in unquiet cogitation. Nor could the surrounding earth offer help, or the nurture of grounding comfort. The needling burn of lane imbalance transferred through layered bedrock and caused the water to shiver and rebound through the fissure. The splash of runoff surged and dwindled, erratic, still distressed, but no longer abandoned to the forces of freewheeling chaos.

In the far-distant south, above a rimwall of Vastmark shale, a Sorcerer's raven soared through an intricate pavane of circles. A brilliance of energy trailed from its feathers, and its croaking call resounded through all four of the elements and begged help to renew Athera's upset stability.

The presence in Kewar heard, but did not bestir in response. One last time, the rock pool flared into a shimmer of rainbow light. Yet the final image showed nothing more than the momentary view of a large golden eagle unfurling broad wings and launching into steep, upward flight.

Autumn 5669

Under the massive, bare oaks of Halwythwood, Earl Jieret,
caithdein
of Rathain, broke out of his sprint and snatched a moment to recover his breath. The deep, hidden glen he chose for the pause was stitched through by a shallow streamlet, laced in glass panes of ice. The young scout who had partnered the extended patrol flashed him a glance of limp gratitude and folded, head down and panting, on the glazed-over bark of a deadfall.

‘How much farther?' he gasped to his chieftain.

Jieret glanced sidewards, no less exhausted. Each heaving breath he drew into his lungs knifed through his chest like cold fire. ‘Three leagues, maybe.' He leaned on the gnarled trunk standing nearest, his forearm compressed against his left side to ease the nagging, first knot of a cramp. Each second of delay chafed at his overtaut nerves. He adjusted the hang of his deer bow and quiver to free his right arm for his dagger.

Another queer burst of lightning snapped across the dark bowl of the zenith. The discharge affected more than the high atmosphere. With each flaring bolt, Earl Jieret sensed a recoil jolt through the staid earth beneath the hide soles of his boots. The same disturbed current traced an answering prickle up the full length of his spine.

‘You don't think that's the sign of a Fellowship working,' stated the scout, perhaps touched to concern by the marked wariness he observed on his chieftain's weathered face, or else moved by the deep-seated instincts inherent in most of the old clan bloodlines.

‘No.' Jieret's certainty rang unequivocal. ‘Something's amiss. If the Sorcerers are involved, they'll be working to clear the source of imbalance.' He surveyed the frozen wood, locked in a bitter, windless silence, the blown ink tracery of limbs overhead crusted in a thin rime of snow fall. No natural feature appeared out of place. Aside from the marks of their own running footsteps crushed through the crusted ground, yesterday's game trails showed as dimpled imprints where the noon sun had melted the edges. Yet the deep, biting cold that had followed the storm front now and again showed disturbance. A sharp, fitful breeze stirred the high branches. Sudden and oddly contrary in nature, the spinning gyre of air was there and gone before his forest-honed senses could tag its direction. ‘We'd best move along.'

The scout arose from his perch on the log. He was duty bound to withhold his complaint, though the snatched interval of rest had scarcely relieved his wrung-out state of fatigue.

‘You'll be all right?' Jieret asked, as tired himself, but hagridden by pressing instinct. He could not shake off the overriding sense of some nameless, looming disaster. Though the chain-lightning portents that cracked the night sky had not gained in force or frequency, and the Companion he had chosen to take charge in his absence had well proved his cool head through a crisis, Jieret's mood stayed unsettled. The persistent, gut-deep conviction hung over him, that he stood at the crux of a cataclysm, as though the firmament around him had gone subtly unstable and subject to change without notice. Urgency drove him to near-reckless haste. He burned to rejoin the central encampment that sheltered the clan's elders and young children.

‘My wife and daughter are back in camp, too.' The scout slapped clumps of granular snow off his leathers and tightened the looped thong that secured the loose arrows in his quiver. ‘I'm ready.'

Yet as Jieret led into his first running step, he cried out, overset and bewildered. The foot that should have struck solid ground seemed to plunge into an abyss of
nothing
. Hurled into sudden, violent vertigo, he heard the scout call his name. Firm hands caught his arm, and still, he was falling. Earth and sky upended and cast him headlong into drowning disorientation. The scout's dismayed cries thickened like felt in his ears, until words became lost into noise that choked out cognitive meaning. Then all his five senses let go into darkness;
he was not in Halwythwood
, but hurled
through the heart of a maelstrom and into his gift of Sighted dreaming …

As though he looked down from a dizzying height, Jieret beheld the weathered barrens of Daon Ramon, the rocky leagues of deserted scrubland lit dismal gray under a scud of storm clouds. Bitter winds raked over the desolate dales. Driven snow mantled the ice-glazed heads of dead grasses and deepened the mounded drifts already snagged on the twigs of thorn brakes and thickets. Despite the cruel weather, the vista was not empty.

Touched by a prickling surge of foreboding, Earl Jieret beheld ragged companies of armed men braving the unkindly terrain and the freezing barrage of the elements. He could make out no banners. A harsh edge of fear scraped down his nerves, warning of pending danger. The cruel cold of deep winter bit into his lungs, as though his watching presence carried back to the detached awareness of his body. From the eagle's eye vantage lent by the dream, he searched the harsh land, but encountered no sign of opposing forces. Whatever quarry the troops harried in pursuit remained elusively invisible. Lacerated by concern for his people's safety, Jieret swept the thorn brakes and gullies. He combed every secretive cranny where a helpless band of fugitives might seek cover to escape the swords of an enemy war host.

Yet he found nothing hunted. Only more bands of headhunters armed with town steel, relentlessly tracking
something or someone
. The fir-clad mountains on the horizon could have been the rugged, high spur of Skyshiels, or perhaps the white teeth of the Mathorns, which rimmed Daon Ramon to the north. No feature of landscape affirmed the location. The flat murk of the overcast foretold of a blizzard and obscured the subtle, directional clues that might have been gleaned from a sunny day's cast shadows. Every other detail bespoke a massive Alliance invasion. Here, a swarm of support troops dragged laden supply sledges over a snow-covered watercourse. The flat, windswept channel could have been the dry bed of the Severnir, or else the ice-sheeted span of the shallower River Aiyenne, which snaked southward in meandering loops from the verge of the Mathorn Road. Whichever site the augury disclosed, a sunwheel troop captain ordered a lame horse killed to ease the privation of depleted provisions.

The vision forecast a multipronged Alliance campaign, yet yielded no key to unveil its directive.

Tormented by a stabbing, sharp wave of premonition, Earl
Jieret cried aloud for the boon of Fellowship guidance.
Someone
,
somewhere
, would soon be riding a suicidal course toward disaster. Clanblood, or close kindred, he had to know whom. No townborn war host would venture the barrens in winter. Not without threat of dire proportion, or an extreme source of provocation.

Then a sheet of light bloomed; a radiance like a honed blade cut through the dull steel of the overcast. Bearing due eastward another small force of headhunters rode out of Narms, led by Lysaer s'Ilessid himself and a train of specialized officers.

Dreadful certainty jabbed Jieret's vitals. He tasted futility bitter as wormwood. As Rathain's sworn
caithdein
, he understood that innocent blood would stain the snow red unless he gave orders and dispatched steadfast clansmen to stand in the breach.

Against townborn numbers, such defense would cost lives.

His torment tore an animal scream from his throat. ‘How do I know the grief of such losses will match the cost of the sacrifice?'

The cry of his heart ripped the dream's continuity. The image of Daon Ramon ran like spilled dye, churned to a whirling blur that burst into a flare of white light. Dazzled blind, struck deaf, Jieret lost all ties to the earth. Shoved through the eye of chaos itself, he sensed the pull of the sorcerer's blood bond he held with Prince Arithon of Rathain. Paradox ripped him, cruel as a jerked wire,
and he knew
: the liege lord who had won his trust like a brother walked into lethal danger …

The roaring noise in his ears became the splash of salt spume, sheeted off the bow of a hard-driven brigantine. Wind shrieked in gusts through tarred stays and taut rigging. Yardarms overburdened with close-sheeted canvas transferred the element's raw burden of violence into timbers that bucked and groaned in complaint. The craft's lean hull heeled, shining like foil with runoff. Defiantly flying the royal banner stitched with her leopard namesake, the
Khetienn
sliced northward at reckless speed, the clean lines of her strakes masked in smoking spray at each battering joust with the wavecrests.

The sodden, wrapped figure who manned the rank helm was no less than Arithon, Prince of Rathain. Where two men might have lent him assistance at the wheel, he muscled the pull of the wet spokes alone, drenched to the skin through his oilskins. The tormented flicker of the lamp in the compass seemed a match for his mood as the wind whipped the streaming, rag ends of black hair from the drenched planes of his face.

He turned his head. Something he saw changed his harried expression to a mask of reviling mockery. ‘Don't say you came out to get soaked for sheer fun, or are you earnestly expecting to stop me?'

The larger of the two men who approached responded in challenge, his clanborn accent infused with the mild vowels of country East Halla origins. Whether his ancestral background was farming, the hand lightly grasped to his scabbarded sword bespoke a chilling competence.

Arithon hauled the wheel two points to starboard against a pounding gust. ‘How touching. Why not use bare fists? As you see, I'm not armed.' He laughed in the teeth of the man's blond companion, who had dared threaten force if he failed to reverse the brigantine's troublesome heading. ‘Why trifle with talk? The hour won't wait. If you're going to try bloodshed, you'll need to draw swords. Best finish this well before we make landfall at Sanpashir.' A showering backfall of spray razed the deck. Arithon held his braced stance through the dousing, then resumed his razor-sharp sarcasm. ‘On my first step ashore, a half dozen desertmen are sure to be shadowing my back. They'd make my close friends into dart-riddled pincushions, if they ever once thought I was threatened.'