Grand Conspiracy (76 page)

Through the damning roll of echoes, the Koriani seeress shouted back in support. ‘Who else would divert us with mayhem and portents, except the true Master of Shadow?'

Lirenda turned right at the first crossroads, the officer of the guard steered like a shambling bear toward the barracks. ‘Levin bolts aren't the work of the boy you hold in your dungeon, I can swear to that much. Since last night, we've had him laced into wards against magecraft not even a fly could slip through. Even if you won't take my word without proof, dare you risk being caught in the wrong?'

One hand half-raised to scratch his chin with incredulity, the watch captain shook his head. He squinted, though the thick
scud of cloud threw no glare. Before thought, for no reason, he found his mood charged to a queerly exhilarant capitulation. ‘All right. Suppose for the sake of brevity your unlikely theory holds weight. If the real Sorcerer's still running free, what remedy do you suggest?'

‘A cordon, and swiftly! Seal off the main square. Have guardsmen posted at the mouth of each street, each alley, and in the doorways of all the shop fronts.' Lirenda turned aside from the roiling blast of another gust, then sidestepped the buffeting elbows of four merchants racing to secure locks on their warehouses. ‘To safeguard your men from acts of foul sorcery, I'll have my enchantresses back them with watch seals and powerful talismans of banishment.'

Upon the captain's clipped word of agreement, she released her set rune and left him beneath the looming eave of the barracks. While the sky split and snapped through a third discharge of spelled lightning, she resumed the interrupted course of her business and snatched at the seeress's sleeve. ‘Send my summons! Except for the circle who stands guard on the walls, and the sisters Cadgia's got scrying, every other initiate we have is to gather in the main square.'

The concussive shock wave of thunder rolled on, slamming echoes through the deep strata of bedrock beneath the justiciar's chamber. The bowels of the mayor's dungeon shook also. Rust flakes pattered off the stained iron hinges, and rumbling vibration shocked ripples across the puddles on the floor. Roused from foul dreams, his senses still sluggish from a drugged sleep, Fionn Areth rolled painfully onto one elbow and blinked the crusts from his swollen eyes.

‘What's happening?' The grate to his voice clamped his throat in a cough, half-masking the nearby rustle of skirts dragged across musty, damp straw.

‘I can't say for certain,' Elaira replied from the darkness. ‘But if I had to guess, I'd lay odds that someone unleashed the quadrangle runes of wild power. The result has raised the free elements into a vortex of chaotic force. Dangerous magic,' she added in afterthought. Despite the warning implied by her words, the lilt to her voice sounded pleased.

‘Never mind,' said Fionn Areth, too sore and bleary to decipher the jargon of magecraft. ‘My head is mush anyway.'

‘Since you're aware enough to talk, how do you feel?' The enchantress stepped closer, a formless shape against the filtered
blush of torchlight fallen through the steel grate. Above, someone's boots scraped a volte-face and banged across the planked floor of the guard's room.

‘How do I feel?' Fionn Areth lapsed back into his noisome nest of straw. ‘All pocked and hammered as if six dozen goats stamped their rutting hooves over my carcass.' More thumps from above, broken through by hysterical shouting and the singing chime of long-bladed weapons being unracked. ‘Why are you cheerful? The noise from upstairs seems unfriendly.'

‘If I'm pleased,' said Elaira in low, tensioned caution, ‘it's because I believe we've been granted an upset in someone's unsavory plans.'

Her supposition gained force with whirlwind expediency as the bullroaring surprise of the mayor's warden racketed down the stone stairway. ‘Fetch the prisoner
now
? But his dance with the sword's not supposed to take place until sundown!'

A reply, modulated by jagged hysteria, yammered something clipped too short to hear. Then the warden, through another floor-shaking stampede, howled for his roster of guardsmen. ‘You cud-chewing cattle! Roust up from your dice. We're going to need manacles and chain, the good steel ones. That's orders. Can't have the fire melt down the rivets.'

‘Not friendly,' Elaira whispered, her flare of exuberance unraveled to threadbare worry. She groped in the straw for her satchel of remedies, then latched boyish fingers around Fionn Areth's left elbow. ‘Let's not test their mood. I think you'll do better if you're up on your feet when they come.'

Through the horrible, sweaty interval while the boy fought stiff muscles and the constraint of tight bandages to rise, the warden's henchmen descended the stairwell. They were armed. The pair in the lead bore a chiming length of forged chain between them. Grotesque shadows flittered over the walls, tossed by the flare of pine torches.

Arrived at the cell, the rough, bearded warden pressed his chin to the bars and hailed the Koriani enchantress. ‘This be no lynch mob, lady. Requisite orders are sent from the mayor. Can't be a stay now, for trial or argument. Stand down, move aside. We're taking the Sorcerer for his due reckoning with the steel and the fire of retribution.'

Elaira squeezed the trembling flesh of Fionn Areth's forearm, by her touch urging him to bear up. ‘I'll walk by his side. He's not steady.'

Keys jangled. The doorclashed openand boomedflat against the damp wall. Two burly guards shouldered through, ducking under the five-foot lintel. Both were armored in field helms and mail, and two others at their heels brought the chains.

‘Those irons are not necessary,' Elaira protested. ‘This boy can't run anywhere. He's injured, you blind dolts! To bind wrists that are bandaged over stitched gashes is an inexcusable cruelty!'

‘Won't matter, lady,' snapped the warden, a safe distance removed outside the barred grille of the cell. ‘He'll be ash inside the hour, and all your fussy needlework gone to Dharkaron along with him. Cry shame, or cry tears, you won't do a damn thing to stop the sword the mayor wants run through his heart.'

Soiled from the straw, the deep auburn hair she had braided that morning hung straight as oiled bronze between her shoulders, Elaira held her ground. ‘By the principles of mercy my Koriani Order was founded to uphold, beware. I will protest every act of undue harsh treatment. By your own mayor's word, my life stands as surety for this prisoner's untimely escape. Leave off the chains! He can go well enough in my custody.'

Fionn Areth, from behind, could not see her features. Small as she was, and weaponless beyond the two little daggers sheathed in her satchel of remedies, something about her determination raised fear. The men-at-arms who carried the chains stalled outright, while two in the lead cringed and found cause to stare elsewhere.

The mayor's warden lost patience. ‘Carry on, and no shirking! The orders we have are to bind him.'

‘Then use a nice, soft rope.' Sweet reason etched in acid, Elaira tapped her foot. ‘We can all smile and wait while you fetch one.' When nobody moved to fulfill her demand, she let fly with the scorn of the streets. ‘What do you fear, you cringing, limp daisies? That this poor wretch will walk and haunt you in flames,
after
the sword's let his heartsblood?'

Fionn Areth gasped. Reeling faint, with his gut clenched with nerves and his head split by the pain of a crashing headache, he swayed. A savage rush of vertigo seemed to upend the floor. The enchantress's cool hands and unyielding support were all that held him upright while a shambling sergeant with bad breath and chipped teeth stepped in with a rope and bound him.

‘Mind you don't tie too tightly,' Elaira snapped. ‘Chafe those dressings in your clumsiness, you'll tear open his wounds.'

The man hawked and spat. ‘Who's to care on the matter, when he's bled like a pig on the faggots?'

Elaira bristled. ‘Leave that work to your mayor's paid butcher. Do you understand threats? For every small drop of his blood shed beforetime, I'll lay your bollocks under curse as repayment.'

The knots were made firm, but without undue pressure. Elaira insisted on checking. Through a sucking ebb tide of dizziness and fear, Fionn Areth felt an unsettling tremble invade her touch. The change close to unmanned him. She was not one to quail. Through the difficult hours spent stitching and setting the spell seals to heal his gashed knee, she had been unflinching as rock.

‘Buck up,' she whispered. Her hand pressed his shoulder, guiding, before his impatient escort could tug at his bonds and drag him out.

Fionn Areth completed the first steps without stumbling. When he faltered, the enchantress held to his side, her grip firm and sure as she braced his failing weight upright. Through his swimming, drunk effort to manage the stair, she railed like a virago, haranguing the guards for their goatish mismanagement and threatening to leave them in a state unfit to breed children.

Had Fionn Areth not been so wretchedly frightened, he might have measured his length from sheer laughter.

Too soon, the stink of rat urine fell behind. Dank, dripping stone gave way to linenfold paneling, and the close jangle of mail opened up into the loftier reverberations off varnished wood floors, gouged white from the hobnailed tread of authority dragging prisoners to the upper hall for trial. Today, no candles burned on the justiciar's dais. The caryatids trapped in suffering support of the massive table seemed a stamped huddle of frozensouls in the gloom. The stagnant air wore the fusted reek of citrus peel and rose petals, and under these, the miasma of degraded humanity, forced down the worn path from incarceration to impersonal judgment.

Fionn Areth battled his panic-struck weakness and a terror that drained his last wits. His senses reeled as the blood left his head. In his state of near collapse, the massive, black pillars seemed to dance on square pedestals, and the high, groined ceiling became insubstantial and prickled with light. Despite his pride, he fainted, jerked short of a fall by the guard who had charge of the rope.

He bled then, despite Elaira's kind heart. Her shouted imprecations thinned and grew distant, then frayed away altogether as he sank in a rising torrent of darkness.

He woke to the splash of ice water on his face. A keening east wind razed his skin. Ugly, shuddering chills danced after the runneled
wet, which streamed on and soaked down his spine. Pink droplets fell, rinsed through torn bandages, where his hands were lashed to a crossbar. The pain seemed detached. He blinked water from his eyes and saw he was fastened to a post set upright in an open cart. Four guardsmen were stationed at his shoulders, all fully armed. Their helms shone a dingy, pebbled gray against the graphite gloom of low cloud cover.

‘He's awake,' the gruff bass of the warden pronounced.

Fionn Areth surveyed his surroundings through a plastered swath of hair. The enchantress Elaira was no longer beside him. Only the guards in their gold lion surcoats, frowning and jumpy with tension.

‘Move him out, then!' cracked the warden.

A drover's whip snapped. The rough-coated horse in the traces shouldered into its collar, and the cart used in Jaelot to bear the condemned to the gibbet creaked and rocked into motion.

The jerk on the ropes reawakened the burning sting of torn sutures. Buckled at the knees, Fionn Areth received the kaleidoscopic, spinning impression of the prison yard, the gapped board sheds used as barracks for convicts frowned over by three turreted towers. Two warders brushed past, running, to fling wide the heavy, barred gate.

Nothing of herding wild goats on the moors could prepare for the noise as the panels swung open.

A mob rampaged outside, a weaving mass of fists and faces, thrashing and screaming and seething in an explosive, bleak fury of hatred. The cordon of mailed soldiers who held them back seemed inadequate, a loose dike thrown down to dam a rank flood. Mounted lancers in field trappings reinforced the line. Eight more in double file escorted the jolting, slow progress of the cart. Death beckoned on all sides, in the shining crescent edges of honed steel, and in the reviling mouths ofmen, women, and children, contorted with passion beyond even nightmare imagining.

Fionn Areth swallowed. Shivering violently in the rasping, cold wind, he glanced to either side, appeal and desperation on his face.

The guardsman behind him guffawed. ‘No hope for you, laddie. Can't shelter behind any damned witch's skirts now. Yon small, mouthy bitch got ordered off elsewhere by direct demand of her senior.'

Spurred beyond fear, Fionn Areth ripped back a grasslands phrase which meant skat of a loose-boweled goat.

A mailed fist split his mouth in punitive fury. He spat blood and glowered, his fury cast in the same mold as the royal heirs descended of Torbrand s'Ffalenn. The guardsman stepped back toward the safety of his fellows, muttering, ‘Devil's eyes, that one has. The born spawn of a demon. We'll be better off when he's ashes.'

The adrenaline surge brought on by the pain served to clear Fionn Areth's head. He planted his legs against the sway of the cart, while the horse passed the gates, and the vile imprecations of the crowd closed about him, a battering, dense mass of savagery and noise that built to a force that was deafening.

The populace chanted, as the wagon bore him under the spooled galleries of Spicer's Row. ‘Death to the Sorcerer! Death to the Sorcerer!'

Their thousands of voices welded into a barrage of vitriolic spite. The horse sidled, shying. Two guardsmen now walked at its bridle to keep it square in the traces. Every small, accustomed sound became overwhelmed, until all movement near at hand seemed an act done in pantomime, the booming grind of the cart wheels erased, and the oaths of the beleaguered driver. Trapped in that strange, suspended tableau, the mayor's lancers cantered up and down the cordoned verges, the iron-shod clatter of their destriers' hooves drowned utterly in that dinning mill of noise.