TWOLAS - 05 - Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The sow and her farrow had long since graced the pot. Under the damp thatch that had been their last shelter, Etarra's Lord Harradene snapped off his gloves and stamped the caked mud from his boots. The day officer delivered the most urgent news through the noise of his jangling impatience, while a gesture saw the wrapped packets of dispatches accepted by his breathless equerry. Harradene stilled as he heard the reports. His cliff-edged frown stayed quarried in place as he learned that the camp north of Caithwood had withdrawn in disorder back to Valenford.

  'No, don't repeat that,' he snapped. 'I heard damn all the first time. Puling ninnies, every milk-nosed captain who let his company turn tail. Fact's known well enough. Fellowship conjury never kills.' He slapped the royal writ on the trestle with the maps and glowered at his ring of cringing officers. 'I don't care horse apples if some fools have fled from a display of arcane posturing! Your prince wants a fire. Therefore, this stand of wood's going to burn! We're driving clan dogs out of hiding with singed tails, and the crown's bounties won't wait for the hindmost.'

  Through a spattering of cheers, someone's raspy question prevailed. 'Is this wise?'

  The boldest of the sergeants appended a protest. 'The Sorcerer claimed he would waken the trees.'

  Lord Commander Harradene spun back, his spiked brows still furrowed, and the shoulders under his sunwheel surcoat bristled as a bear's before a charge. 'Oh, did he indeed?' His rankling, Etarran sarcasm thundered, sifting fine dust from the thatch. 'And what will that mean, do you think? That hundred-year-old oaks are likely to rise up and walk? That greenwood is going to bear steel?' He turned in a tight circle, leaving no officer unwithered by his scathing contempt. 'Is there anyone else present with the brains of a chicken?'

  No one spoke or moved. Pent silence expanded like poison, sawn through at a distance by barking dogs and the wailing of some mother's toddler.

  'Good!' Lord Harradene slapped the wet ends of his gloves against the dulled mail of his byrnie. 'Now show me you've kept the two bollocks Ath gave a newborn. In one hour, I want ten relays of messengers assembled. They'll bear my orders the length and breadth of Taerlin. By dawn on the day of the new moon, every man marching in the service of the Light will be in position to torch trees. We'll have archers in line to take down the flushed clansmen. Hereafter, these roads will be safe enough for a naked virgin to travel unscathed!'

  Ahead of all argument, Lord Harradene snarled his ultimatum. 'Any man who fears trees may turn in his insignia right here, right now, and go home stripped of all honors. Ones who run later, or ones who drag feet will be burned and run through by the sword as no less than Fellowship Sorcerers' collaborators!'

  The pig shack emptied to a stampede of boots, and the last couriers streamed away well ahead of the hour allocated for their departure. Some galloped north and east, mounted upon fast horses and given escort by tried veterans in sun wheel surcoats. Others ducked spray from the oars of swift boats, commandeered from trade service by crown authority. These careened downriver into the wilds, their course sped by the winding ribbon of the Ilswater's lower branch in its rush to meet the sea estuary.

  The trees dripped and brooded in the mist-heavy air. They exhibited no change as their sovereign territory became invaded by the Alliance couriers, who dispersed the written orders for Lord Commander Harradene's campaign of fire and sword. Their stillness magnified the trepidation of the men, who rode with ears tuned to the wind in the leaves and heard nothing, only autumn's chorus of dying vegetation as the unmoored foliage chattered and danced in the gusts. In the boats, beneath breaking cloud, sweat-drenched oarsmen watched the shadowed deeps on the bank, prodding at waterbound roots with unease as they moored to make camp for the night.

  Yet no living tree displayed any sign of an uncanny movement. The fiery pageant of changed maples unveiled at each bend in the river, their outlines punch-cut and serene. The hollows wore carpets of scarlet and gold, turned by the furtive brush of night's frosts presaging the advent of winter.

  Whatever the Sorcerer Asandir threatened, no Alliance scout's sharpened vigilance detected anything untoward or amiss. Mice continued to nest in blankets and stores, seeking shelter against the chill; the hunting owls sailed the starry dark, silent and sleek as lapped silk. Days, the hawks circled and called from a blue enameled sky. Geese clamored south in straggling chevrons as they had for time beyond memory. No one saw oak groves tear up roots or talk. If every place a man trod to seek firewood, his steps felt stalked by hidden watchers, that unease more likely stemmed from the clan scouts who shadowed their movements, unseen.

  The spate of outrageous speculation peaked and subsided, restored to a general complacency as Lord Harradene's orders reached the far-flung Alliance encampments, and the days waxed and waned without incident. The rank-and-file troops who occupied the deep wilds were experienced and staunch. They curbed all explosions of foolish hysteria lest they draw in the prankish attention of iyats, the invisible fiends that played living havoc with a man's kit and gear. Evenings were spent wrapping fire arrows with cotton, or binding oiled rag to pine billets. The casks of pitch and resin that would fuel their brands were drawn from supply, and tallied in readiness for action.

  Across Caithwood, the ordered companies marched into position, unmolested beyond the nipped flush of cold fingers and the paned skins of ice on the bogs. No signs appeared of arcane workings. The only change any troop captain could pinpoint was the scarcity of traps set by the lurking bands of clansmen.

  'Well enough, they know when to tuck tail and run,' dismissed Lord Harradene when the duty officer drew the oddity to his attention. 'We already know they were warned by that Sorcerer. Should they stay, do you think, just to burn?'

  The eve of new moon arrived in due course. Over the jittering light of night campfires, tucked under cloaks against the wind, the archers waxed longbows and cracked bawdy jokes lest the silence be claimed by the rush of tossed leaves, or the bared scrape of oak twigs find voice. Dawn would see all of Caithwood aflame, by the grace of Prince Lysaer's dispensation. If some men who had families lay awake out of pity for clan children and wives destined to fall in the carnage, Tysan's headhunters celebrated. Other scarred, grizzled veterans recalled the bloody knives that had dispatched their wounded with no mercy given at Tal Quorin.

  ' 'Tweren't natural,' those whispered. 'Our wounded all died, throat-cut and choking, done in by the hands of mere boys.'

  * * *

  Two hours before the new moon's pale dawn, at chosen locations across Caithwood, every man not on watch as a sentry sharpened and readied his weapons. The archers checked arrows and quarrels, and positioned the casks of oil and pitch. No one sensed any flare of worked sorcery. Trees loomed dumb as they always had, amid their shed mantles of leaves. Against black, forest stillness and a nagging, keen chill, troops bolstered their courage with whatever cruel memories could fan their passion for vengeance.

  The graying east sky brought a scouring north breeze that promised an auspicious campaign. In the posted positions set forth by Lord Harradene, the most hardened veterans wolfed down cold bread. They teased laggards with jokes as they girded on mail and weapons in the steadily strengthening half-light. By horn call and barked order, they formed ranks and fanned out, the forefront to wield torches and fire arrows, and the rest set at strategic points to intercept whatever might flee from the heart of the lethal conflagration.

  'On time, and no quarter,' read Harradene's last orders. The fires would be kindled at sunrise, with no reprieve given for clan prisoners, grown man or woman, child or newborn. The Etarran field troops blew on chilled fingers. They eyed the dense trees, their ink-blown branches entangled against the brightening skyline. The gusts smelled of dead leaves, and cookfires, and oiled metal; ordinary, even surreal before the butchering bloodshed to come. Today, fair retribution for the long string of massacres at Tal Quorin, at Minderl Bay, and at Dier Kenton Vale, each one the design of murdering clan war bands in collusion with the Master of Shadow.


  Now came the fierce reckoning for so many dead, and a long-overdue salve for the interests of trade. Caithwood was to be cleansed of barbarians by decree of the Prince of the Light.

  The Alliance ranks stilled in the mist-laden gloom, prepared with tinder and steel. They fingered the honed edges on their knives and drew swords; tested the grip on halberd and lance and soothed their restive horses, sweating in anticipation. A long-sought, elusive quarry would be theirs to bring down. The sunwheel banners fluttered in the stiffening north breeze, and the leaves spoke, scratching, against the eaves of the forest.

  One moment rushed into the next. Under light turned pearlescent, the eastern sky brightened into a sheer, cloudless citrine. The black borders of Caithwood limned in silhouette, the wind-tossed verge of an ocean of linked trees, their collective awareness and their language dumb noise to more limited human ears. On that poised instant, a Fellowship Sorcerer spoke a word: the Paravian rune that meant one and which tied all things in Ath's creation into the prime chord of unity.

  The next second, the reddened edge of the sun sliced above the horizon.

  Illumination speared the heavens. At each of two hundred and eighty locations, Alliance horn calls rang out; the cried order clove through the burn of chill wind, to execute Prince Lysaer's sealed order. Men steadied drawn steel. Excited fingers grasped flints, began the decisive move to strike sparks and set pitch-soaked arrows and cressets alight.

  There came no connection. On one Sorcerer's word, a wave of awareness crossed time and space, sped fleeting as light on the cognizant tide that passed from one tree to the next. The moment lagged into an unnatural sense of hesitation. The stir of the wind gained a surreal impetus, and the susurrant scratch of dead leaves acquired a magnified roar of wild sound. That nexus of vibration caught the conscious mind and sucked human thought into a whirlpool that overwhelmed all reasoned continuity. No live thing was exempt. The deer ceased their browsing with wide, glassy eyes. Hawks on the branches mantled and blinked, for the moment too muddled for flight. Among the two-legged, whether clansman or soldier, that pause gripped the heart like old roots. Busy purpose made no sense. Logic lost meaning. A peace deep and vast as the slow turn of seasons, the ordered dance of a planet's annual journey round its star grasped and drowned every shred of animal identity.

  For that one given instant, the speech of the trees reigned in smothering supremacy. The staunch patience of fixed roots and the wine taste of sun rinsed warp and weft through the weave of all breathing, warm-blooded awareness. Iron prejudice shattered. Those Alliance-sworn men who were townbred and ignorant now learned what the hawk, and the deer, and the insect had always known, and what Caithwood's clans kept alive by tradition. Their unbroken, old ways reaffirmed the immutable truth through words that gave thanks, and through timeworn, small rituals which renewed by expression of gratitude. That trees were alive. Their gifts and their bounty might be taken at will. They could be raped and robbed, or they could be acknowledged, a trust of consent sealed in the language of humility, granting each bough and trunk its due recognition for generous sacrifice.

  Yet the wisdom of Paravian law had dimmed with the passage of centuries. Men now walked Athera who gave back no such grace. Whether the lapse stemmed from blind carelessness or the vice of acquisitive greed did not matter. The chain-linked communion that was forest discerned no gray shade of distinction. Trees grasped no code but the one that acknowledged the grand chord of Ath's primal order. They owned no concept to forsake whole awareness for individual separation.

  No second was given; no freed train of thought broke the noose for shock or humanborn fear. The vise grip of the dream on men's minds was unyielding, a crescendo wrought of numbers too massive to deny, each note tuned to urgent communion.

  The blow fell, bloodless, in that trampling breadth of vision. Lost in the vast ocean of forbearance that defined the existence of greenwood, the trees' vision reclaimed hate and violence for peace. Townborn minds stilled and sank into an abiding continuity that frayed sensibility, and awoke a remorse without mercy: of wood cut, unblessed; of saplings uprooted. Each thoughtless twig broken in callous disregard framed a cry of acid-etched clarity. The impact stunned beating hearts like a wound. A day's pitiless industry, which sought to turn fire and steel to rend life, ripped a chasm of shame through shocked conscience.

  Men screamed without voice as the dream of the wood flooded through them and clamped like the embrace of black earth.

  There came no reprieve, no concept for pity. Each hand that had moved with intent to strike spark; each arm, to grasp weapons for slaughter; all dropped, limp. Names and identity and meaningful purpose submerged without trace in the flux. What remained was the everlasting communion that passed between root and leaf and spread branch. The peace of the forest seized the mind like fast ice and held with the endurance of centuries.

  Determined experience served none in that hour. The strongest and best of drilled veterans gave way, sapped of will and inclination. Any who ventured near Caithwood unprepared, all those who embraced human purpose beyond the encompassing calm of live trees was undone. To the last rank and file, to the most steadfast captain, the Alliance veterans buckled at the knees. They dropped swords and tinder, crumpled like rags, or slipped reins through slack hands and toppled off startled horses. When the messengers came riding from Watercross to inquire, they found Lord Commander Harradene's troops felled to a man, sprawled comatose on the cold ground.

  Flurried searches confirmed: not one Alliance supporter inside Caithwood was left standing. Nor did the camp servants who lurked on the fringes remain in command of their wits. Dazed, even weeping, they forgot their own names, while livestock and woods creatures raided their supplies, and their oxen browsed loose through the brush.

  How the clans fared, no city man knew, since no one saw hide nor hair of them.

  * * *

  In the depths of a glen, ankle deep in red oak leaves, Asandir lifted long, lean fingers from the bark of the ancient patriarch that ruled Caithwood. He murmured a run of liquid, sweet syllables, a blessing framed in the tongue of the vanished Paravians.

  Clear of eye, his mind and his purpose vised to ruthless alignment, he stepped back from the tree whose compliance had keyed a whole forest's salvation. Subtle as shadow in his featureless leathers, he traversed drifted leaves with a step like a wraith's and retrieved the tied reins of his horse. He tightened the animal's slack girth and remounted. Two hours' ride through the breezy afternoon brought him to a clearing in a glen, where he met the eldest in the circle of clan chieftains who maintained their caithdeins guard over Caithwood.

  Cenwaith was a great-grandmother, wizened, but not frail. Tiny hands with the weathered grain of burled walnut clutched a bronze-studded quarterstaff. By the scars crisscrossing her knuckles, she had wielded weapons throughout a hard lifetime. Her jacket of fox fur blended her diminutive form amid the changed leaves of the maples.

  'How long?' she asked him, her voice the aged quaver of water-smoothed stone, rinsed by a tumbling brook.

  Asandir paused, his gaze turned to flint beneath a fringe of dark lashes. 'Days. Maybe five, before the first caravan from the south can use the road without leaving prone bodies. No man bearing steel will escape, even then.' He brushed a caught leaf from his hair and firmed the reins to stall his inquisitive horse from nipping the sleeve of his shirt. 'No victim will suffer, rest assured of that much. The awareness of trees regards time very differently. Lysaer's troops who fell senseless will lie in stasis until they find release from the dream. Your people must take flight as soon as they may. Abide by my warnings. They'll stay safe as long as none breaks the covenant laid down to appease the roused might of the greenwood.'

  'No steel and no fire?' The grandame wheezed out a fluttery laugh. 'Our folk know their place. We've laid in stores to hold us through the next fortnight.' Before then, the last clanfolk would have slipped past Lord Harradene's unstrung cordon. Their fighting strength would regrou
p in the rugged mountains in Camris. The young who had families would cross Mainmere estuary by boat to claim sanctuary in Havish. The Alliance's campaign of persecution was this day deferred, with Tysan's threatened bloodlines granted reprieve for continuance.

  That such survival came at a price, the old woman and the Sorcerer never doubted. Tysan's trade route to the east was now irremediably severed from the moment northern snows closed the passes; and with slave-bearing galleys disbarred from King Eldir's coastline, the crisis would find no relief.

  Blame for those woes would only lend impetus to Lysaer s'Ilessid's pitched campaign of intolerance. Asandir foresaw the cost of this day's reprieve written in bleak terms on the future: more armed troops raised for the purpose of war against mage talent and, ultimately, to hunt down and kill by the Mistwraith's fell geas, the Shadow Master, who was Rathain's last living prince. Too aggrieved for speech, he moved to return his borrowed horse.

  Cenwaith's firm touch caught his wrist in restraint. 'You'll not be staying, Kingmaker?'

  The Sorcerer shook his head, the weariness bearing upon his broad shoulders a yoke he dared not defer for his own needs or comfort. 'I cannot.' He gathered himself, while her kind eyes sought and failed to plumb the extent of his urgency. "The troubles I forsook in Midhalla to come here have strengthened and grown in my absence.'

  Courtesy kept her from pressing with questions. Since he need not seed pointless worry at his back, he answered with direct speech. 'The trees will lapse back into somnolence on their own, once they're left undisturbed, and if the crown rescinds its sealed edict to enact their destruction by fire.'

  Caravan masters would eventually learn not to hack down live wood. Nor would Tysan's leagues of armed headhunters fare reiving for scalps with their former impunity. An eerie unrest would settle and linger. In the odd, haunted glen, the oldest stands of forest would cling to isolate pockets of self-awareness.