Grand Conspiracy (77 page)

Over the spiked helms of his escort, Fionn Areth glimpsed the purple cloaks of Koriani enchantresses embedded here and there amid the tossing motley of the crowd. Their eyes, ever bright, surveyed their surroundings, as if they cataloged each individual nuance of the bystanders on either side of them. None of them glanced in the condemned man's direction, and none of them proved to be Elaira.

Fionn Areth endured, wretched as any of the struggling goats he had led to his father's knife in the slaughter shed. The crowd showedless mercy than hehadfordumb beasts. Here, a ham-fisted butcher shook a bloodied cleaver; there, four ragged children who darted on the fringes threw missiles of manure and mud. He managed to duck, at the cost of torn skin where the ropes at his wrists gouged his bandages.

Though the wind snapped his hair, the chill ceased to matter. Sweat rolled down the knotted muscles of his back. The cart turned again, rattling into the narrower lanes of the trade quarter. The jut of the shop fronts, with balconies above, were crammed to capacity with screaming people. Garbage and kitchen peelings rained onhis
head. Once, the warm slop of a jakes splashed and missed him, splattering the near ranks of guardsmen.

Two broke away, shouting. They pounded in vengeance up the wooden stair from the street, and found themselves beset at the landing by the shrieked imprecations from a trio of toothless grandames. Someone else capped their outrage with another hurled offering, this time the offal steaming and fresh from gutting a slaughtered pig.

The cart lurched ahead, its progress inexorable. The curses of the soldiers and the jeers from the beldames fell into the growl of the crowd. Fionn Areth never knew how the altercation ended. The thinned ranks of his short-tempered escort rounded the smithy and the harness maker's and waded into the choked throng of the eastside markets. There, the cavalcade ground to a halt, blocked by packed knots of onlookers and the ramshackle maze of tinker's stalls and used-wares booths that ringed the public cisterns of Dagrien Court.

Froth flew from the bit as the officer in charge reined his mount down from a half rear. ‘Fiends plague! Will you look? The whole townseems possessed!' He jabbed in both spurs, sent his bucketing mount ahead to flag down a lancer. ‘Close in the cordon! Then get a dozen men up here with bows. They're needed to cover the prisoner.' He loosed a hand from the rein and shook his fist at the crowd who plunged and howled against the men-at-arms striving to stay them. ‘We'll have to back into a side street just to hold our position. Find me two lancers with reliable mounts and send them back to the garrison. We'll need reinforcements to win clear of this impasse without tripping off a damned riot.'

The troop sergeant sounded his brass horn to deliver the urgent command for retreat. Wheeled back to rejoin the mounted escort with the wagon, the captain swore in between his spate of rapid-fire orders. Through bedlam, screamed epithets, and a dauntless assault of bone-hurting noise, he fought to regroup his inadequate band of foot to the task of forming a shield wall to hold off the murderous press. ‘Never seen anything like this, not in my born days of soldiering! We'll be lucky to reach the town gibbet before dark, bearing a live prisoner between us.'

Winter Solstice Morning 5669

The old vintner's shed off Wheelwright's Lane in Jaelot had ceased being inhabited by tradesmen since deeded ownership had been claimed in recompense for a Koriani oath of debt. The mullioned window overlooking the street remained black, but the interior was not empty. On the hour that Fionn Areth was delivered to his fate, an initiate's cloak blocked the incoming light filtered through the latched boards of the casement. One lit candle burned on the sill, the hazed edge of the flame upright in the dust-laden air. Its halo fell like dipped brass on the heads of the three women stationed over the rim of the vat once used to pulp grapes.

Each enchantress held her spell crystal in hand. As one, their gazes stayed trained on the water filling the wooden vessel to the brim. The surface was ironed to rippleless stillness under the influence of their spellcraft. Across that sheened mirror, in animated miniature, the choked confrontation in Dagrien Court played itself out in reflection. The crowd clamoring to witness the blood and fire of execution rolled and surged like stirred cloth scraps, while the cart which bore the condemned to his doom wedged the mouth of the spindler's alley, circled by beleaguered guardsmen.

One of the lancers lost hold on his horse. The creature reared and struck out with its forehooves. Hecklers caught too close scrambled back. An opening gaped through the thronging mob behind, ragged as a snag in torn knit.

‘Spell seal has weakened,' the seniormost seeress murmured in a tranced monotone.

The sister initiate to her right closed her eyes, and intoned a rhythmic binding to sharpen her flagging will. The resonance of intent carried through her quartz matrix, amplified and heightened into focus. The fingertip she raised to renew the sigils of confusion glowed faintly scarlet in the dimness. Her scribing moved over the scene of obstruction, trailing faint, sifting streamers of energy over the spelled vat of water.

In Beckburn Market, the lancer cajoled his charger back down on four legs. The crowd flooded behind like a breaker against a dam, and his shouted oath reechoed, whisper faint, through the dust-filtered stillness of the shed. ‘Fiends alive, it's as though the whole town's been possessed to go mad and run riot!'

The conjuring enchantress sealed her dire work, face sheened with a fine dew of sweat. ‘I can't keep your victim exposed for much longer without risking a serious mishap.'

As the senior in charge, Lirenda looked on, her skin like old pearl inlaid into gloom, and her oval face loftily dispassionate. ‘Hold firm for as long as possible.'

The wispy, thin elder who stitched sigil after sigil of seek-and-find over and through the gaudy surge of onlookers remained unimpressed by such staunchness. ‘If our quarry hasn't taken the bait by now, chances are he's not going to.'

‘Keep searching.'

Under Lirenda's iron command, the three enchantresses bent back to their scrying. They wove spells of stay and of manipulation, courting the thinnest edge of raw danger. No one of them harbored undue expectations. The fine, wrought line of spells they maintained skirted the brittle edge of peril. If an accident happened and caused the least bloodshed, the balance would irrevocably tip. An incensed, frustrated, volatile mob would outrun all their careful constraints. Fear and anger would spark an explosion of violence. The lancers trapped in that spelled pocket of entropy might not understand why the populace hazed their position. Yet professional instinct grasped pending danger. They gathered in a roiling, nerve-jumpy mass, their pennoned weapons leveled to stand down a crowd who pressed in like riptide, screaming insult and imprecations.

Lirenda uttered a breathless epithet, resisting her need to pace out her frustration. Backed by the honeycomb rows of wine shelving that now harbored cobwebs in place of corked
bottles, she fumed, ‘Damn the man for irrational stubbornness! He's lurking inside the city walls, somewhere, or why mock us by tweaking our ward spells!'

‘He's Torbrand's descendant,' said the stout, gray-haired seeress. ‘His inborn nature as Teir's'Ffalenn won't hold to the straightforward course.'

‘Don't harp on the obvious!' Lirenda turned her profile, backed by the cloth pinned over the shutters. Faint light leaked through, curling like silver smoke amid the raised dust stirred by her agitation. ‘Tell me how long we have before the reinforcements come through from the garrison.'

‘They've already crossed into the north side of the square,' the seeress advised, softly neutral before her senior's simmering temper.

‘They've sent in armored horse. Heavy cavalry from the field division.' The one initiate with the nerve to interrupt stated fact, fearlessly cold as etched carbon. ‘If you maze these poor people to hamper their war destriers, innocents are going to be trampled.'

Perched on an overturned barrel in the corner, all but overlooked in the tension, Elaira awarded the exchange her own stamp of acidic practicality. ‘If Arithon tries his attempt at a rescue against a quarter company of lancers, he's far more likely to get himself skewered than we are to pull him out whole.'

‘Spare us your impertinent opinion, if you please.' Lirenda spun in pettish irritation and stepped to the side of the vat. ‘Let the seals go,' she commanded. ‘Release the confusion and allow the garrison escort to get the prisoner's cart moving again.'

Elaira tucked her hands under her elbows, held them clamped to her side to stop shaking. This one tiny victory signified little. At some point, she knew Prince Arithon must launch his attempt to wrest Fionn Areth from the armed cavalcade. Force or weapons would not deter him, nor numbers, nor the riled crowd in the streets. If those factors did not offer obstacle enough, in each small alley and lane along the cart's labored course, Koriani initiates lay waiting in ambush. If Arithon escaped a lance thrust through the heart, he must find himself pulled down from behind by spring traps and spells of constriction.

At the vat, the bent, wizened elder shifted her incantation to effect the cantrip of dispersal. Old fingers that had once worn delicate jade rings began the arcs of the six primal runes of unbinding. She completed the one to strike down by intent, then
the second, for stasis. The third, with its spikes, for clearing tied energies, and the fourth, for stability and balance; the flash and flare of configured power streamed down like dropped tinsel, scattering ripples over the image clinging like film to the water. Next to last came the fifth, for containment of chaos, and the sixth, for grounding out backlash. A heat of freed energy cleared from the water as a burst of ephemeral steam.

The spelled impasse set over the market square gradually came unsnarled. In trembling, distorted reflection, the wagon unwedged from the alley where it had been sidetracked for shelter. Bearing its toy figure prisoner, and flanked by the pennoned lances in the hands of its mounted escort, the cavalcade re-formed itself into a wedge and sheared on toward its appointed destination. That labored passage tacked an erratic course through the ragtag jumble of shanty stalls that sold used clothing to poor folk.

Lirenda scrutinized each step and detail with a vulture's fixated intensity. She waited, hands clenched, as the strayed vortices of spent spellcraft were wound in by the deft old enchantress. Those withered fingers knew their work well. Cadgia, Third Senior, had strung arcane power like knitting throughout her four centuries of life. Meticulous and neat, she grounded and tied off each loose end into harmless, entropic knots. Their residual force would gradually spin off and fade without raising accidental disharmony.

The scene in the vat returned to stability, the cart horse settled, and the lancers moving in front and behind to clear the way for its passage.

Lirenda straightened in tight-reined irritation. ‘Inform me at once of any changes.' She transferred her survey from the vat to Elaira, her hair the immaculate sheen of black wing feathers, and her eyes the intent, unblinking pale brown of a polished tiger's eye cabochon. ‘You will go nowhere without my permission.'

‘Your will,' Elaira replied in street sarcasm, her own gaze wide gray and unflinching.

Her senior would read past her pretense of indifference; yet the sword cut both ways. Neither was Lirenda herself immune to the slight slips that tension laid bare to the trained lens of peer observation. Her carriage was perhaps too fashionably flawless, her chin just a fraction high-set. She might have been a glass statue dressed out in silk, except for the fingers wound over both wrists.

‘Don't bend your bracelets,' Elaira said sweetly, heels drumming an insolent tattoo on the barrel. ‘Am I not safely muzzled by my initiate's oath? Or Ath forbid, do you fear I might snap? What are the odds I might tip off the end play of your double-sided game of butchery in the square?'

‘Try.' Lirenda smiled daggers. ‘Nothing would please me more than to see our Prime Senior strip your mind. I should find entertainment, watching you live out your days as a slavering idiot.'

‘If you want your boots licked, why not get a puppy?' Elaira shot back, attacking words all she had to vent the unbearable pain strangled inside her. ‘Dogs never cavil at nosing through muck, but whimper and grovel for the privilege.'

‘You've a mind crude as cat dirt,' Lirenda said. ‘A grave pity you didn't lose your tongue as just punishment for begging before the Koriani Order took you in.' She glanced toward the vat, snapped her curt order to carry on, then glided in aristocratic superiority through the doorway, where a second circle of seeresses labored to coordinate the movements of the enchantresses keeping vigil outside in the streets.

Confined to her barrel, Elaira endured. Feelings warred in her, ferocious and hot. Too real, the prospect that temptation would lead to disloyalty and see her consigned to the order's supreme penalty. Eyes closed, she took a deep breath and wound fired nerves back to patience. No question now, how her heart would respond. If the opening came to abet Arithon's intervention to save Fionn Areth, she would act in sacrifice with no second thought.

To ensure their escape from Morriel Prime's trap would be worth any cost under sky.

The minutes crawled by in spring-wound suspense, with the reflection in the vat standing witness. The prisoner's cart crept and rocked through the press. Elaira could snatch only glimpses of the scried image that measured its progress. More often, someone else's hand or face obscured the critical viewpoint. Those moments, she was left to interpret events from the nuances garnered from the expressions of firsthand watchers. The vital details that destroyed peace of mind remained elusively past her reach: such as how Fionn Areth fared under the strain. Was he still weak and dizzy, or had the sigil to lend him strength as she left allowed him to regain his balance? Had his guardsmen vented their tempers and been cruel through the nerve-wracking delays imposed by Lirenda's meddling? From her limited vantage on
the barrel, Elaira caught only the occasional glimpse of bowed shoulders and a face resting in what appeared sheer despair upon the support of tied wrists.