Grand Conspiracy (79 page)

‘Come on.' Through a ripe reek of blood, the guiding hand on Fionn Areth's arm pressed leftward. As if no one screamed, or
no guardsmen crashed in blundering, blind pain at his heels, the Shadow Master recaptured his dropped conversation. ‘There's an elegance, don't you think? The fires meant for you are being rained down on the mayor's guard and most of your front row bystanders.' He pursued his unlikely, talkative bent of humor. ‘Fair is fair, after all. The explosion which arranged such a neat twist of justice was our mad spellbinder's champion touch.
Now,
come on!
You can praise Dakar's genius as much as you like, but after we've survived to rejoin him.'

Then in breathless afterthought, while Fionn Areth was hauled into a staggering semblance of flight, the running lines of monologue resumed. ‘Be careful. That lump to your right is an unconscious guard. You may step on his hands, just watch out for the sword. Also, don't spit in the eye of sweet fortune. The darkness you curse just happens to be all that's spared your skin and mine from the burning. Now, here, mind the staircase.'

Fionn Areth's fumbling efforts incited a spectacular oath, hard followed by a snatch of rhymed proverb to the effect that bad actions begat yet worse consequences.

As though drunk on daft wit and exhilaration, the Master of Shadow added, ‘My apologies in advance. We've got enemies waking up. There won't be any time to claim the day's prize for grace.' With small care for torn flesh and battered limbs, those taut, busy fingers shifted grip on Fionn Areth's wrist.

His bruised arm wasbraced acrossa wirymuscled shoulder, and the bunched hood of another mantle, likely worn underneath the voluminous black cloak just shed from necessity to clothe him. In a downward, swift rush, the condemned goatherd was dragged free of the block, past the tangled, prone bodies of men-at-arms from the cordon, and plunged headlong into the seething crush of the crowd.

The dark was black felt. Blinded and mazed, every person packed into the grand square of Jaelot took to their heels in mass terror. The buffeting press of them bashed the wind from Fionn Areth's chest. His feet slipped and caught on the cobbles. A battering, unseen force in the darkness, the mob elbowed and surged like a beast. Voices shouted and screamed. Hands snatched and clawed. Terror choked reason, while the palpable nightmare of Arithon's shadow ignited a trampling panic.

‘You should be aware,' resumed that remarkable, silken voice in his ear. ‘Far more than bluebloods from Jaelot are in full cry after our hides.' Through an unrelenting dark as absolute as
poured pitch, the sorcerer steered a definite course through the struggling, obstructive bodies. ‘The Koriathain are much worse than unfriendly. There's a sizable pack of them shuffling spells to see our free movement cut short. Are you willing to fight? We'll need more than luck to escape them.'

The closely bunched bodies made swordplay impossible. If the spelled blade was still drawn, Fionn Areth could not see. Forced to stumbling flight, he noticed the Shadow Master's mellifluous voice now addressed the maddened hysteria, words and tone pitched to settle and calm. A man with a cudgel was cajoled into helping a crying woman seek her lost child. The shoving torrent of humanity eased a fraction, as bystanders were urged to assist. But if Arithon managed to blunt the irrational edge from the hysteria nearest to hand, throughout the square, crazed upset still reigned.

Shouts commingled with the clangor of weapons as men-at-arms regrouped under orders to seek the Shadow Master, then resorted to steel to suppress the rampaging ferocity of the crowd. Torches flared. Their light shone queerly battened in murk, as if fog stained with ink roiled and clung against the façades of the buildings. An officer's bugle blared a shrill call to rally, and the hammering clatter of shod hooves warned where mounted lancers shouldered their destriers through the press, hunting the renegade criminal.

More torches bloomed, one startlingly near at hand. Propelled headlong by the torrent and by the relentless grip on his arm, Fionn Areth snatched the chance to look closely. He saw, not black hair, but blond, and snub-nosed features that were fair-skinned and rosy.

His cry of confusion turned nearby heads. One heartbeat, he caught the swift flash of a grin; then blanketing shadow clamped down to forestall any further scrutiny.

‘Don't mind the change,' said Arithon s'Ffalenn from inside that knot of smothered flamelight. ‘The face you saw first is my real one.'

He found unseen egress between what smelled like a mule drover and someone unwashed and sweaty who worked in a bakehouse. Fionn Areth sneezed out a breath of inhaled flour. Someone else broke an impasse by stepping on some woman's toes. Theshrieks of the offendedmatronfell behind, with Arithon's low comment slipped undaunted through bedlam. ‘The odd guard or townsman will be fooled in dim light. Koriathain are another matter.'

Long overdue, Fionn Areth found his voice. ‘What makes you think I'll stay with you? I nearly burned for your list of dire crimes. If I win free, I won't take your murdering cause out of gratitude. Just the opposite. I support the Alliance. For justice, why not give your name to the first guardsman I find wearing Jaelot's gold lion?'

‘Well, that could be difficult, wearing my likeness,' said Arithon s'Ffalenn in quick irony. ‘Pull on your hood.'

When Fionn Areth made no effort, he yanked the cloth up himself. Then he released his cloaking of shadows.

Daylight resumed, gray and matter-of-fact, over a scene stirred to roiling motion. The bolting, terrified press of humanity seemed the worse for that stripping exposure. Arithon had swathed his face in his mantle, a green wool broadcloth without embroidery. His head turned away, as if he took bearings, while his supporting hold on Fionn Areth's arm stayed fixed and firm as a shackle. ‘You're my drunken brother, if anyone asks.'

The noise and confusion effectively deferred any argument. Blinking at the sudden transition from darkness, Fionn Areth glanced behind.

Smoke spired upward from the raised block, where faggots still flamed and streamed cinders. The rucked carpet burned also, and one upset state chair. The space in between teemed black with clumped guardsmen, fallen over themselves to extricate Jaelot's hysterical mayor. The city magistrate crouched down as though faint, while below, where the cordon of lancers had stood, the belated wedge of heavy cavalry shouted and waved lances, exhorting the pikemen to rally from witless confusion. War destriers plunged and battled their bits as a heedless populace continued to stream past their haunches.

Ahead, more guardsmen breasted the choking press to set a blockade on the side streets. An upset carriage spun random wheels, while its team plunged and kicked, entangled in traces. The rich had fled from the open galleries. Their departed wake left tables of spilled food, upset goblets, and cut-glass decanters. Upper stories showed a wall of barred shutters, while rioters stormed the doors of the street-level craftshops in search of tools that might serve them as weapons. Not every owner was set back by the looting.

Fionn Areth saw a red-cheeked butcher and his family handing out knives and cleavers to all comers with blustering encouragement to hunt down and kill the escaped Sorcerer.

Next step, he tripped over something ragged and wet. Arithon's hold kept him from sprawling headlong into a body left pulped by the mindless stampede of humanity.

Sickened again, and reeling with horror, Fionn Areth lagged back in distress. His nemesis ruthlessly braced him back upright. Someone slammed into him. A matron pointed and screamed. ‘Look! There's the Spinner of Darkness himself!'

While Fionn Areth's gut upended in pure terror, he saw a dirk flash off to his right. A black-haired man fell screaming to his knees, with a pale girl bent over him, wailing;
not Arithon s'Ffalenn
, but a stranger.

Yet the blood which gushed through the victim's clamped fingers was no less mortal for the tragedy of mistaken identity. The girl wept and clung, while the bystanders cheered, and the killer flourished his dripping blade in whooping, ignorant triumph.

‘Seen enough?' said the trueborn scion of Rathain, now whetted to rage. His shadow clapped down, unmercifully blank, and lidded the carnage in darkness. ‘If you're dead set against the small talent that shields you, go
far
out of Jaelot before you try steps that might bring down drastic consequences.'

Fionn Areth said nothing, but forced knotted muscles to carry a more even share of his weight. Movement had loosened the worst of his stiffness. His bruises pulled less. He found he could limp without stumbling, then bear up to the shoves when hapless folk blundered into him. Arithon's hand lent more guidance than support, which was well, for ahead, where Cobbler's Lane met the square, the first Koriathain stood in ambush.

‘You see her, too?' said Arithon s'Ffalenn.

In chill fact, even the casual eye could not miss her. She waited before the stone archway that fronted a fashionable dress shop, her violet mantle furled against the raw chill, and her alertness keen as a ferret's. The quartz crystal raised in her hand blazed white light, a beacon whetted in unpleasant, sharp spells that burned a bright star through the uncanny blanket of shadow. Nor did the crowd set to flight in crazed fear wish to pass through that flared burst of spellcraft. The mindless egress slowed and swirled like a river current jammed by a rock. Trapped in the eddy, unable to turn, Arithon sought to stop dead.

The enchantress was not the only threat present. Under the covered roof built to shelter the rich as they stepped from their carriages, four uniformed guardsmen with nervous, drawn swords kept an uneasy vigil.

‘More guards in town clothes wait by that pastry shopjust across the street,' Fionn Areth observed, apprehensive. ‘Two of them were with the dog pack that dragged me into the dungeons.'

‘They know your appearance? Then we have trouble.' Arithon need not elaborate.

Jostled and buffeted as the crowd broke and ripped past them, both fugitives saw how the witch surveyed each face that crossed through her net of silvery light. The distinctive s'Ffalenn features would not escape notice on the instant the Koriani seals razed through the shadowed illusion masking his natural appearance.

The time to plan strategy for evasion was lost as a ham-handed blacksmith barged into the fugitives from the rear. ‘Mind yerself! Move! Make way for the mayor's guard.'

A squad of mounted lancers pressed for the same side street, with no way to turn or deflect them. Their impetus from behind pressed the logjammed masses inexorably forward into that ring of spelled light.

‘I hope you prefer hot tarts over witches,' said Arithon in rife desperation.

He turned his cloaked face aside as the fired glare of the ward fell upon him. Masking cloth availed nothing. The set spell had been tuned to comb auras, infallibly more reliable than the shortfalls of visual identity. Preset rings of ciphers and keys triggered off the instant the flare touched Arithon's person. A sound like a rip tore across the charged air. The baleful burst brightened, rinsing the street into sudden, actinic brilliance.

‘There!' cried the enchantress. Unerringly, she pointed. ‘Both the Master of Shadow and his look-alike henchman! Take them in hand.'

Still hooded, and brazen enough to react, Arithon raised his masterbard's voice in persuasion. ‘Indeed!
There they are!
' He gestured farther down the street. ‘Hurry! Clap them in irons! Move quickly, before they escape!'

Blind instinct turned heads and swerved the first steps of the guards' headlong rush. The following cohort of lancers reined back, reflexively searching the press to locate the flight of the fugitives. For a fateful split second, the crowd swirled to an indecisive standstill.

Arithon plunged ahead, an eel through turbid flotsam, towing Fionn Areth behind him.

The first guard by the bakeshop died on his sword. The next, he rammed into a signpost. The last pair entangled in the recoil
of bodies as hapless bystanders flinched back from the outbreak of bloodshed.

‘Down!' Arithon shouted. He jerked Fionn Areth with him, just as a bolt of uncanny energy sheared like swarming wasps overhead. ‘Stayspell,' he gasped, then whistled an odd triplet that rang out in harsh, cringing dissonance.

Across the street, the Koriani enchantress screamed. She dropped her quartz focus, clapped her hands to her ears, then screamed again as the crystal changed resonance and nearly shattered.

The spell the stone matrix had amplified came unraveled. Its skewed impact smashed the shutter. Frame and glass, the bakeshop window imploded to a cloud of hot ash and ripped slivers.

‘Go through,' cried Arithon, unwarrantedly jubilant as he yanked off his mantle. He unfurled the cloth like a blanket over the one intrepid guardsman who burst through cowed citizens to seize him. ‘Lights out for you as a damned witch's bloodhound.' He skewered the guard mired in the wrack. While Fionn Areth hurtled on and slithered over the smoking, curdled varnish on the sill, he bent, cleared his sword, and snatched back his holed cloak. When he straightened, the guardsman's purloined weapon claimed as salvage, he ducked through the window on the heels of his double.

Innocuously fair haired once again, he looked harmless, except for the bared blades he brandished in right and left hands. In baleful, wild humor, he breathed in the thick, yeasty smells of fresh bread. His green eyes missed nothing as he sized up the trades-folk who stared openmouthed over their dropped utensils. He measured the journeymen, bedecked in floured aprons and bare arms, rolling out pastries and packing them with fragrant gobs of jam; then the women, muscled like fishwives, who kneaded and braided the dough. Lastly, the red-faced apprentices, caught aback tending the ovens, and behind them, the master baker, a wizened elder with muttonchop whiskers, ensconced like an owl on a stool. The old man brandished a bone-handled cane, his toothless lips puckered with outrage. ‘Come here for looting, have you?'