TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The first ray of sunrise spun the mists to raw gold as the party of three pressed into the deep shade of Caithwood.

  * * *

  A day on foot carried the Fellowship Sorcerer and the two clan scouts across seven leagues of wilds to the grooved rut of the Taerlin trade road. Sheltered by brush that rattled in stiff, northern gusts, the small party took covert stock of the Alliance encampment, tents and picket lines and supply wagons packed like a logjam along the verge of the thoroughfare. Here, the patrols of headhunters that swept Caithwood requisitioned their supplies, and caravans en route to Ilswater and Quarn picked up Alliance outriders and the armed escort they needed to ensure their safe passage through the forest.

  'They've dug in tight as ticks, since the summer,' the older clansman said, bitter for the timber that had been cut to raise the rough quarters to shelter townborn officers.

  The land bore the scars of that thoughtless inhabitancy from the trampled, bare quadrangles cleared for field drills to the grass and vegetation milled into pocked dust by the voracious foraging of livestock. The surrounding ravines had been picked clean of firewood. Streamlets ran turbid from the bucket brigades sent to fetch cooking and wash water, and everywhere, the slanting, low sunlight glanced off the war-polished steel of weapon and helm and horse armor.

  'They keep a company of heavy cavalry,' Asandir said, surprised. 'Why? Lancers can't be much use in the deepwood.'

  'Those are assigned to move slave coffles.' The elder spat on the clean, growing earth. 'Double bounties are still paid for male clansmen, when they can be captured alive. You didn't know? There's an established auction at Valenford, now, where galleymen go to buy oarsmen.'

  A chilling, subtle change swept the Sorcerer's bearing. He knelt, all grim purpose, and untied his blanket roll, while an oblivious horn call sounded below and signaled the change in the watch. Several chattering grooms in sunwheel livery led a clutch of saddled remounts to water, unaware that their routine was watched.

  'You don't plan to go down there,' the young scout broke in, his hands gone damp from overtaut nerves as he watched the Sorcerer shake out his formal mantle. The deep blue wool and fine silver ribbon stood out like a shout in the sun-filtered shade at the tree line. 'Archers and crossbowmen guard the perimeter with standing orders to kill. We've lost lives, trying to fire the grain stores in that accursed encampment.'

  'We aren't going down there,' Asandir reassured. 'But I find I have a point to make, and that changes the grounds upon which we borrow three horses.'

  The young scout sucked in a startled breath, while the elder expressed disbelief. 'What use could we possibly be to your cause?'

  'Why should you devalue your worth?' Asandir glanced up, his eyebrows bristled in rebuke. 'Innate power walks in a company of three. Your presence joined to mine cannot but add depth to the impact of my demand.'

  Done tying up knots, the Sorcerer straightened. He cast his long mantle around his broad shoulders, then issued his instructions, the lit gray of his eyes turned baleful as storm, and his purpose no mortal's to gainsay. 'Forget you bear weapons. We go empty-handed. I am going to raise a sphere of resonance that will forestall every aspect of violence. Its force will protect, but cannot discriminate. On your peril, remain at my back. Say nothing. Do nothing, no matter what threat arises. The solidarity of our defense will be underwritten by no other power than peace. Above anything else, I need you to stand fast. You must not give way to your hatred.'

  Impatient, he broke from the dappled verge of the wood and strode down the slope in plain view. The two clansmen followed. Their bold disregard for enemy sentries with crossbows posed an affront that brooked no appeal.

  They were spotted at once, set in sharp relief by the sunlight that poured molten brass over the browned stubble of the hillside. The first surprised shouts were cut through by an urgent challenge. 'Halt, you! Hold fast and declare for the Light!'

  Asandir paid the officer in authority no heed. Straight as Dharkaron's Spear in his blue-and-silver cloak, he continued another three strides, his uncovered head like lit ice against the shadowy backdrop of evergreen, and his hands hanging loose at his sides. He stopped as he pleased. His falcon's stare fixed on the party of horses and grooms, at large on the bank of the streamlet.

  Down the mild grade, the Alliance crossbowmen knelt and notched quarrels in flurried alarm. They brought weapons to bear, the bitten reflections off lethal, aimed steel chipped glare through the dust-hazed afternoon.

  'Stand firm,' the Sorcerer reminded the sweating clansmen beside him. He did not glance at the archers, but maintained his obstinate survey of the grooms' innocuous activity on the streambank. 'On my word, you will come to no harm when they fire.'

  'Release at will!' cried the officer, in determined adherence to duty.

  The discharge of the trigger latches mangled the drawn stillness, creased by the waspish whine of launched quarrels. Asandir made no move to cast spells. He uttered no word of invocation. Yet the air in his presence acquired a sealed calm, as potent as the tensioned silence that channeled the strike of bolt lightning. The quarrels arched up; descended in deadly convergence. Ten paces before the Sorcerer's stilled form, they crossed the unseen boundary of his influence. The steel tips blurred out of focus, then shocked the charged air into spherical halos of gold sparks. All impetus died. The metal sang out in a queer, wailing dissonance, then dropped like shot stone back to earth.

  At the same moment the horses led to drink at the streambed flung up their heads in excitement. Eyes rolling white, they reacted with one mind and shied sidewards. Hooves bit the muddied earth like balked thunder as they ripped their reins from the stupefied grasp of their grooms and bolted upslope toward the Sorcerer.

  One last quarrel burst into a splash of fine static and crashed, limp, at Asandir's feet. No others followed. In the crease of the valley, the outraged captain who ordered a second volley toppled out of his saddle. His ranked rows of crossbowmen crumpled also, fallen facedown in a faint. The freed horses hurtled past their sprawled bodies. Glossy and fit, the beasts pounded uphill. Their initial madcap dash unraveled into a brisk trot, and equine ears perked forward, inquiring.

  'Choose yourselves a mount,' Asandir instructed the two clansmen. Their appalled uncertainty awoke his swift smile, then a near laugh as a shouting, pointing knot of men convulsed the Alliance camp to fresh turmoil. A wedge of mounted lancers disgorged from their midst, still strapping on their snatched armor and grabbing weapons from squires and page boys. Their rush was spearheaded by an officer in a streaming, loose surcoat. Ahead of his company, he spurred his bay gelding upslope in a howling charge.

  Asandir held his ground. Unconcerned, he addressed the loose horses. The sound of his voice soothed their volatile nerves. Reins trailing, the mare in the lead subsided back to a walk. She ambled the closing, final strides to nuzzle his outstretched hand, her equine disregard all but flouting the mounted Alliance horsemen boring in at an earthshaking canter. Forced to swing wide to avoid trampling downed archers, the irate captain lost nerve, if not outrage. He dragged his gelding to a headshaking halt, half-strangled by the folds of his unbelted garment.

  'We're borrowing these horses,' Asandir informed. 'They'll come back sound and cared for.' Behind him, the two scouts caught trailing bridles and checked girths, then vaulted astride.

  The Alliance officer yanked an arm from snagged silk and gestured an impatient advance. 'Surround them!' The men at his heels reined aside, fanned out, then circled and closed in, lances leveled at the intruders. Reassured as his cordon settled in place, the officer vented his temper. 'What's harm to three hacks, when you've dropped our best squad of archers in their tracks by means of black sorcery?'

  'They're sleeping,' Asandir corrected point-blank. He flipped the reins over the mare's chestnut neck, tightened the girth, then adjusted the stirrups two holes downward to accommodate his lean length of leg. As the captain at arms clapped a fist on his sword hilt, he added, 'I'd advise you
not to try violence.'

  'To Sithaer with your counsel!' The captain closed his mailed fingers and hauled steel in a screeling wail from the scabbard. 'Take them down, on my signal.'

  Time hesitated, blurred, and for one binding moment, a flushed heat like a wind passed through the nerves and flesh of every man in the Sorcerer's presence.

  A white puff of steam plumed from the officer's mail gauntlet. He yelled, instantaneously scalded, and cast down his scarcely drawn weapon. Those mounted companions called to act on his order gasped in dismay as he ripped back burned fingers. The sharp jerk at the rein and the smell of singed flesh caused his horse to snatch the bit and kite sidewards. Loose clothing billowed. A seemingly stray breeze flipped the flapping surcoat over the disgruntled officer's head. The beleaguered man fought to untangle himself without tumbling out of his saddle.

  Asandir looked on, guileless. "That attack was unwise. Your men would do well to avoid your mistake. I further suggest you disband this Alliance encampment. Pack up your gear and your tents, and let all the captives in your compound go free.'

  Flushed with torment as his blistered fingers bore the weight of the rein to control his plunging horse, the captain threw back a murderous glower. 'You hold no authority to revoke the direct command of Avenor's Prince of the Light!'

  'Perhaps not.' Asandir flicked the heavy, rich weight of his mantle back over nonchalant shoulders. The silk lining shone numinous silver against the forest's turned foliage. 'But your s'Ilessid idol has overstepped prudent limits and threatened the green life of Caithwood.' Unwilling to grant any pause for rebuttal, the Sorcerer set foot in the mare's stirrup and mounted. 'Such desecration will not be permitted. By terms of the compact I will act.'

  'How? By sending more archers to sleep?' the officer sneered in vain effort to bolster his men, who were fast losing the courage to stand firm. 'Or will you just singe a few fingers?'

  'More than that. I am going to awaken the somnolent awareness of the trees.' Asandir closed his heels and stepped the horse forward, trusting the two clansmen would have the good sense to stay close and follow his lead. To the captain at arms, helpless to prevent him as he and his party spurred past, he delivered his mild ultimatum. 'On that hour, woe betide any two-legged creature in this forest who unsheathes cold steel or kindles a fire for harm's sake. Remember my warning. The mind of quickened wood has no heart and no conscience, and no kinship at all with the needs of hot-blooded animals.'

  * * *

  Five days later, tinder pearl mists of drizzle, Asandir walked alone. His scout escort had departed, sent on as his emissaries to inform the scattered clan encampments of Prince Lysaer's intent to fire the timber in Caithwood. They would spread word of the Sorcerer's course of action to avert that looming catastrophe, and also deliver the list of necessary precautions to be observed by every man, woman, and child.

  Asandir moved afoot on his long panther's stride, the reins of a different horse hooked in slack loops through his fingers. This mount was a scrub-bred bay with surly teeth and an unkempt autumn coat. By inclination it did not balk at thick brush; nor did it fear to tread through the mossy, rank mud of black mires and the tumbled, round rocks of swift streamlets. In its cantankerous company, the Sorcerer ventured the deepest heartwood of the forest. His sifting search sought out the most ancient tree, the one he must win as his ally to configure and catalyze the awakening.

  Such a patriarch tree embodied far more than the accumulated wisdom of advanced years. Its ancient being would span the four elements, the deep taproots twined with earth and water; its upthrust limbs of vigor and majesty would be anchored in the transformative fire of the sun and the windy, wild force of the air. A king tree was not given to reveal its true nature. By the elusive manner of its kind, it could only be found through the riddle of subtle communion with its fellows.

  Asandir paused, as he had many times in the dull, gray chill of the morning. He touched the horse still, though it snapped at his wrist. 'For shame,' he murmured into its laid-back ears; then he listened. Amid the splashed tapestry of sound caused by water drops kissing moist leaves, he measured the tap of their fall on the earth. The palm of the hand he held flattened against the trunk of a middle-sized oak became like an eavesdropping ear at a keyhole.

  For there was language embedded in the dreaming awareness braided through these acres of live foliage. Word and syntax were tapped in the endless percussion of interlaced twigs. In the sticky, slow river of the sap flowing beneath his touch, the trained mind could read the imprinted secrets that passed from one tree to the next, their world of overlaid messages given amplified breath by the unending conduit of weather: of the wind and the free-falling water.

  Nor was the questing touch of this Fellowship Sorcerer any stranger to Caithwood's vast silence. Asandir himself had once bespoken the world's trees to anchor a spell of homing. The signal had been sent to recall Kharadmon from the far-distant world of Marak, from which Desh-thiere had launched its first invasion. The ghost signature of that conjury still lingered, imprinted yet in the live congress of the greenwood. Welcomed by a surge of recognition, Asandir returned tacit greeting. Guardian that he was, and for all that the drake's binding had made him, his listening presence was admitted with forbearing tolerance.

  North, he sensed. The whispered flow of information meandered that way, from saplings to stands of mature growth trees in full prime, to the twisted, skeletal ruins of the eldest, with their scraping crowns of stripped branches.

  The Sorcerer shifted his grip on the reins. He urged the horse onward, then strode like a wraith in his soaked, dark leathers and ducked under a leaning stand of conifers. The loamy forest floor cushioned the sound from his footfalls. Green needles hoarded the insipid wet, each laden branch strung with clutched hoards of diamonds. Asandir bent, picked up the tattered, black shells of last season's cast-off fir cones. North, was repeated in the winding energy of spiraled petals from which fragile, winged seeds had departed.

  He moved on. The horse at his heels snatched an opportunistic nip at his sleeve, but collided with the elbow he moved to intercept the tender flesh of its muzzle. It subsided, sullen, ears flopping. The squelch of each hoof into saturated moss stamped a pockmark of noise in the liquid symphony of runoff. The rain fell, dimming the light to dull mercury. Asandir's hair held the wet like dewed cobweb, and the shadowy density of the trees wore the gloom like a scene viewed through a smoked mirror.

  Set into the layered weave of the wood, a cameo cut from milk porcelain, an ancient beech flagged Asandir's attention. The roots grasped the earth in an embrace that felt boundless and mighty as time, and the limbs framed a vaulted arch for the pearlescent sky. Asandir paused. He gave the old tree his intent, sweeping survey, as if the unveiling powers of his mage-sight would decode the manifest of its destiny in Ath's primal language of sound and light.

  This beech he knew from all other beeches, and it was not the one tree that he probed for: the giant that guarded the heart strength of Caithwood, whose prodigious endowment would be masked and cherished, kept hidden like a cached treasure. Ties of loyalty would reside in this tree as well, and for the ingrained pride of its kind, it would not lightly unveil the trust of its sovereign's identity.

  Asandir untied the tether rope knotted to his mount's neck and secured the animal to a deadfall. The horse had long since grown accustomed. Too shrewd to expend restless energy, it tipped one shaggy hoof, slanted a hip, and shut its eyes, relaxed to the point where its lower lip dangled. The Sorcerer was not fooled. He was careful to stay well clear of its heels as he settled himself in damp moss. There, he reclined, with his head cradled amid the branching divide where the trunk of the beech engaged its splayed grip on the earth. He, too, shut his eyes, but not to subside into sleep.

  Instead, he embraced the dream of the tree, stately, slow, a step in four attenuated beats that marched to the change in the seasons. He drifted there, an immersion into a peace so beguiling, danger lurked for the unwary. The th
ick crawl of sap lay far removed from the pulse of a red-blooded heartbeat; recast to the dance of a rooted perception, the endurance of a winter's freezing winds became as poisonously gentle as a soundless, caressing fall of snow. All threads of human personality could unravel, lulled into forgetful slumber, and then drawn into deep coma that would spiral beyond the threshold that marked life from death. A mind trained to power embraced at its peril the engulfing, staid majesty of the greenwood.

  The Fellowship Sorcerer took precautions and wove a small spell as an anchoring link to the sun. Should he lose his purpose and drift into languor, too much at one with the sugared tides of sap that subsided below ground for winter, the advent of nightfall would recall him. Earth's shadow would snap that frail linkage. A jarring cry of dissonance would run through his nerves as that binding gave way into chaos.

  Should he fail to harken, his bones might be found, clutched at length in the ingrown embrace of the beech. His mind would be absorbed, welded into the current of dreaming that made up the leafed weaving of Caithwood.

  Asandir let go of awareness without hesitation, without fear, with no marring note of unease. He immersed his whole being into the slipstream of life that was the joined multitude, root, trunk, and bough, that comprised the forest of south Tysan. In fullest command of all that he was, unencumbered by barriers that would cloud true perception, he became at one with the gnarled old beech.