Grand Conspiracy (72 page)

His rest proved short-lived.

Mild dreams of warm women and hot taprooms with beer tore away to the unmistakable raw thrum of potentized lane force.

Dakar shoved erect, skinning both elbows on the rock supporting his back. ‘Merciful Ath, I don't believe this!'

Just past his feet, the Sanpashir focus gleamed active, lines of old inlay rewritten in phosphor and smoke. The north to south axis lay darkened in places where banked sand still obscured the design. Three major interstices were choked in crabbed briar, but those buried fragments would scarcely impede the coiling flow of raised lane force. Dakar had seen Asandir come and go from Paravian circles sunk beneath tons of smashed masonry.

The Sanpashir pattern was proved intact, its ring wards and runes unimpaired. It would draw the earth's magnetic forces into focus in answer to the will that commanded the burgeoning scale of its resonance. Since Arithon's powers of mastery were blocked, he had to have accessed the gateway to deep mystery through his trained sensitivity to sound.

Dakar stumbled forward, bent on reaching the bard, who still played within the rim of the focus. The soft, seeking notes he recalled between catnaps were now wholly changed, re-formed and melded into a breathtaking fire of unity. This was no longer the known composition Arithon had used to waken the circle at Jaelot.

A fresh theme had been added, the original phrasing reduced to a fragile, high counterpoint, exquisitely rearranged to partner a countermelody refigured in a new signature. This one rang grander, darker, with notes that spoke of burning black sands and bladed rays of fierce sunlight. Set in starkly ranged measures and acid-bright chords that shifted in majesty through the major keys and grand sevenths, Arithon had reforged the original dance the Paravians had celebrated at Sanpashir.

No time left to wonder how that daunting feat was accomplished. If bardic sensitivity could cross the barrier of time, Dakar beheld its dangerous consequence as the pattern flared up into sheeting, hard light and rocked the still night with leashed power. By his flustered measure, the stars turned a minute away from the inaugural solstice flux at midnight.

Sethvir, with his earth-sense,
should have responded
. No exceptions were granted, no stays of tolerance. The compact's law was unequivocally stern when Athera's mysteries were channeled for use without sanction.

Yet no Sorcerer arrived to put down the lane's rising. Dakar watched in horrified consternation as the casually chalked ciphers
implicating him as Arithon's consenting accomplice flared also, branding the darkness into an actinic brilliance.

‘No!' he shouted. ‘Arithon, desist!'

His protest availed nothing. Mere words passed unheard. Around him, the circle responded in wild light, well beyond mortal power to subdue. Arithon's playing had successfully tapped the high mysteries. The upshifting vibration that portended a transfer already resounded through the energetic linkages of matter. The solidity of lines and forms lost their stasis, until the surrounding drifts of sand and the tumbled stone foundations appeared distorted by roiling heat waves.

The guiding tones from the lyranthe were no longer necessary. Athera herself now impelled the stepped measures of the song to a peal of meshed resonance and vibration. The confluence of roused energies interlocked with the ciphers that lent them guidance and intent.

Arithon sensed the instant his work stood complete. Alone at the cross of the central axis, he arose. Through the fountaining brilliance as the lane's flux thundered toward its inevitable crescendo, the Mad Prophet heard his hailing shout. Then he bent and laid down the heirloom lyranthe inherited from his past master. At least, Dakar saw, Rathain's prince retained enough presence of mind to place her beyond the radius of the grand arc. Since every grudge-holding citizen in Jaelot would surely recall the exquisite workmanship adorning Halliron's instrument, she would be left safely outside the coruscating threshold where raw power would lift into transfer.

Then, whipped by the uncanny forces he had raised, Arithon beckoned to Dakar. ‘Are you coming or staying?'

The Mad Prophet, worried fool that he was, stepped forward rather than back.

Asandir returned to Althain Tower past the hour of midnight that led into the morn of winter solstice. Ragged, exhausted, drawn hollow with worry, he materialized at the grand junction inside the focus circle. While the powers of the lane flickered and flared back to uneasy quiescence, he winced for chilled feet still numbed from exposure on Daon Ramon Barrens. When he glanced up at last, he found candles lit in the gargoyle sconces and Luhaine there to receive him.

‘You look pale as a marsh wisp,' Asandir greeted in caustic sympathy, well aware of whose dogged, meticulous touch had
restrung the continuity of the third lane energies. That boon alone had allowed his prompt transfer from the ruins of Ithamon. As workworn himself, he stumbled a step, recaptured his balance, then brushed the lapse off with a question, ‘How is he?'

The reference was to Sethvir, who, amid breaking crisis, had shielded with spells of raw power to bridge space and time and protect the stability of the grimwards.

‘He's resting.' Luhaine's presence drifted at the edge of the focus pattern, too distressed to try even the pretense of his usual fatuous dignity. ‘You should be warned. When the lanes went unstable, his earth-sense was marred. He said he could see and feel nothing across the entire breadth of the continent. That set him back to plain augury and scrying. He had no choice but to use his personal resources to buffer every one of those wards from the backlash of magnetic turbulence.'

‘He did all that
earthblind
?' Asandir understood that disaster had struck. He had not imagined an impact of such broad scope and depth. ‘Then all seven lanes on the continent deranged?
Even
the ones in the west
?
' Given Luhaine's whispered affirmative, he balked to imagine what the effort had cost Althain's Warden in sacrifice.

Asandir pushed back his cuffs, the frayed hems scorched ragged from bare-handed encounter with forces inimical to flesh-and-blood contact. ‘How many lanes are still left to reconfigure?'

‘Three.' Luhaine said, his maddening habit of lectured detail this once cut away to terse urgency. ‘Ath's adepts are helping. They set anchors into the first lane on the hour of Morriel's intervention. The second and third lanes are now retuned and stable.' Not modesty, but embarrassment caused the discorporate Sorcerer to pass over his prodigious accomplishment. Perfectionist to the core, and resentful his work came too late to prevent the Khadrim from escaping into free flight, Luhaine rushed on with particulars. ‘As we speak, Traithe sits on a peak in the Cascains. He says he can hold the wobble in the fourth lane in check until one of us can be spared to assist.'

The fifth, Asandir had set stable himself; quelling those wildfires of rampaging energies had left him drained to a husk. His own stopgap spells of balance set over the sixth
should
have lasted. Although his rough seals had not been tempered for a cataclysm, the warding rings held safeguards enough to contain the worst of the damage.

Luhaine dispelled that niggling doubt. ‘Your construct over the
Skyshiels endures.' Kharadmon, he affirmed, yet labored at Athir to reset the frequencies of the seventh, with Ath's adepts on the Scimlade peninsula standing anchor to keep the fields of leaked energy stable.

‘Damn the interfering witches and their bothersome urge to manipulate.' Asandir flexed his hands and winced at the sting as the movement pulled at his blisters.

‘They intended much more. We were lucky,' Luhaine amended.

‘Now there's a pessimist's warped sense of logic.' Asandir glanced up, bemused, then laughed aloud at his colleague's convoluted opinions. ‘If perversity matters, then on one count at least, you've scored a telling point.'

The Koriani powers were based in spells of forced mastery, enacted through direct transmission and contained inside the boundary of linear time. By remorseless intent, Morriel had designed to cut into the planet's magnetics. On one count, she miscalculated. The seals she configured into steel-bearing thread could not span the breadth of the oceans. Not while whales and dolphins ranged free to intercept and realign those warped frequencies into harmony by resonance. Their songs could compensate for destructive shifts in vibration, and salt waters by their nature absorbed and dispelled the energetic ties which drove conjuries whose powers were amplified through the spiral of quartz crystal matrices.

Asandir shook his head, by turns grieved and grateful. The Prime never shifted her adamant stance, that human interests reigned supreme. Her prejudice rendered the study of elements and fish an insignificant afterthought, and for that oversight, the lanes whose channels ran outside the continent had escaped her debilitating mischief.

On thrifty, past habit, Luhaine moved from sconce to sconce, neatly snuffing out wicks. Darkness followed on cat feet. For each flame that died, the cold, steady light of the Paravian circle hazed a glow like rinsed silver on the satin-veined marble of the walls.

The matching reflection in Asandir's eyes was unforgiving, gray steel. Braced for a fresh onslaught of rapid-fire bad news, he tackled his colleague's delicate omission with all of his sledgehammer bluntness. ‘Tell me what else has gone wrong with the sixth? I know well enough the wards I left there were not shaped to withstand an assault of this magnitude.'

They had reached the open stairwell. Luhaine's presence ascended
the narrow turnpike with the whipping agitation of a dust devil. ‘You won't like this one bit.' He paused, moved to powerful, knowing compassion.

Asandir stopped. With one hand braced against fitted stone, he took painstaking care and again reviewed the brutal array of stark facts. His dread ran the gamut of encroaching possibilities, since two Ages of experience with natural forces had taught him the flux of Athera's magnetics could never be a dissociated phenomenon.

Life formed a vast tapestry, with each myriad thread of consciousness interconnected. Birds in their seasonal migration moved the fine energies of creation here and there in the deep, knowing harmony of their existence. To a Sorcerer's sight, their flight paths traced glowing lines through the element of air, and spun subliminal links of harmony from treetop to treetop. The land's disparate mantle of quickened awareness was not an unstructured chaos of live forms, but a whole cloth meshed into a fine, lockstepped balance, and tied by vibrations of light.

Plants, trees, and fungi interfaced air and earth in a blanketing tapestry of tuned energy. Nor were minerals inert. Their frozen imprint of individual signatures could be mapped through refined mage-sight. Even in their most humble manifestation, stones and sand acted as placeholders, keeping in timeless, faithful trust the calibrated tones which anchored the chord of world life force. Rivers, rain, the oceans themselves moved the grand currents of elemental power. Weather cycles cleansed the world's firmament and refreshed the planetary aura.

By wracking the frequencies of lane force out of true, the Koriani had wrought a cascade of damage past the range of mortal perception. Led by Morriel's spiteful pride and a vengeful bid for supremacy, their spellwork this night had bled chaos into all things under sky and rocked the root of the Major Balance.

Asandir reviewed each unraveled loop in creation. The implied enormity of one possible slipped thread made even his iron nerve falter.

‘Don't hold back. I can guess well enough where the trouble lies.' He let his grazed knuckles fall loose to his side, grateful nonetheless for the one thoughtful moment of reprieve.

Luhaine broke the news gently. ‘Arithon used music to reawaken the Sanpashir focus. Dakar provided the sigils of passage in rash certainty that Sethvir would be free to intervene.'

‘Of course, Morriel timed her ploy with that end in mind. Then
prince and prophet will reach Jaelot before daybreak?' Asandir resumed his interrupted ascent, to all outside appearance restored to equanimity. ‘Best say where Lysaer is, and quickly.' His stride lengthened. Worn features seemed lined in lead by the daylight filtering down from above.

Luhaine grappled for means to lighten the ominous portents. ‘Sethvir says the s'Ilessid will be crossing the strait to Atainia.'

‘Bound on to the Kingdom of Rathain?' Asandir's words spiraled away into echoes as he emerged through the narrow trapdoor.

‘He'd expressed his intent to seek passage to Narms before the lanes misaligned,' Luhaine huffed, spinning over the polished floor between statues.

‘Then count on his landing inside the next fortnight. He won't stay ignorant of Arithon's return. The witches will make sure of that.' Already Asandir's thoughts leaped ahead. ‘Which brings us to Arithon's untimely choice to wake the Paravian mysteries. I suppose we're left to gauge the measure of his prowess if he reaches Jaelot without mishap?'

‘We can't access that knowledge,' Luhaine contradicted. ‘Lirenda's on-site with a circle of senior initiates, and they've set the whole city under seal.'

Under the stone gaze of carved centaur guardians, the two colleagues shared the silenced, sharp anguish, that spellbinder and prince would spring Morriel's trap with no hope of outside assistance.

‘Mercy on us,' Asandir said at last. ‘The fall of Dharkaron's aimed Spear surely would have been kinder.'

Athera was in crisis. By the terms of the compact, the Fellowship's first charge remained clear: the needs of the land must come first. Bound to that priority, the Sorcerers were already too pressured to divert every critical disaster. Losses were happening, moment to moment, each one a small sorrow with far worse pending if immediate steps were not taken. The smashed links of the containment spells the vanished Paravians had left to hold drake spawn would require the most desperate attention.