Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

At Althain Tower, caught in a rare nap, Sethvir springs bolt upright as a numbing, unnatural needle of cold pricks through the fabric of his earth-sense; within the same instant, the broad span of his awareness pinpoints the location of the event to a high tower chamber in Avenor, and the expletive he chooses to vent his annoyance singes nap off his age-worn velvet …

  As the annihilating thread of drake magic slices into Athera’s existence, an adept in the white robes of Ath’s Brotherhood cries out in a hostel in Shaddorn; Morriel Prime snaps awake from a dream of fell darkness; a mage in a cavern stands immersed in conjecture; and a centaur guardian lifts his horned head and trembles, eyes liquid and wide with what could be grave sorrow, or a rage to seed fear in the wild heart of the four elements …

  Unaware of the precedent loosed in Avenor, Lord Maenol, caithdein of the realm, briefs a clan messenger bound on to his counterpart in Rathain: ‘You will say to Earl Jieret that his liege has fulfilled the debt of alliance he swore on my grandmother Maenalle’s death. Our clan bloodlines are safely secured under Havish’s sanctuary. In Caithwood, we are guarded by the wakened awareness of trees, and with ships to offset the s’Ilessid threat of slavery, we expect to endure through the next generation …’

  Spring 5654

  VIII.

  Strands

  The vortex punched a hole through the world’s quickened fabric, a canker of interference inflicted at Avenor by Raiett’s use of the dragon-skull wards. Its influence raised a darkness that seared, an aberrant field of chaos that skewed the grand chord of Ath’s creation. Sethvir reeled from the shock. Bent double as a stab like hot steel lanced the tuned sensitivity of the earth link, he snatched the desperate presence of mind to engage a spontaneous defense. Still shaken, wrung to wax pallor from the reserves just expended to shut out those deranging vibrations, he gasped a clipped epithet maligning the invention of wraith-cursed s’Ilessid royalty. Then he raked down his snarls of disarranged hair. His next thought sent Luhaine an immediate summons to appear at Althain Tower.

  Though darkness had fallen, no candles burned in Sethvir’s private quarters. The Sorcerer required none. Each object sang from the velvety gloom, a ribboned chorus of light and sound that underpinned all form and matter. Barefoot since the demise of his buskins, he padded, unerring, through his obstacle course of antiquities; the unending array of worn bridles and waxed twine threaded onto curved needles; the chess table with its carved ivory pieces left set in an ongoing match against Traithe; the candle molds andwicking string, jumbled alongside a Second Age dagger that had once been Cianor Sunlord’s. Despite his rank haste, Sethvir took no wrong step. He reached the door running and scaled three flights of stairs to the tower’s top-floor library.

  His discorporate colleague awaited by then, a pool of dense cold in the corner by an aumbry overburdened with a clutch of smoothed river stones.

  ‘We need a grand scrying,’ Sethvir opened without pause. ‘Fresh trouble at Avenor. Lysaer’s just set a dragon-skull ward to mask a meeting with his high priest and inner cabal.’

  Shocked by the dangerous ramifications, Luhaine whirled into motion. ‘Where’s Arithon?’ he demanded point-blank. His unsettled passage riffled the opened books stacked in tipsy piles on the tabletop.

  ‘Far out in the Cildein Ocean, and so far as I know, safe for the foreseeable future.’ Sethvir’s brow furrowed before the daunting task of clearing a space for his work.

  A disturbed sheet of rice paper fluttered to the floor. Luhaine froze, his irritation a palpable tingle as his colleague recovered the scattered leaf, then scooped up an armload of pens and parchments and wedged them beneath the clawed stand of an armillary. ‘Really, someone should summon a djinn to attend your housekeeping for you.’

  Sethvir glanced up, miffed. ‘That’s sheerest folly. I’d never be able to find anything.’

  Since a discorporate spirit made inefficient help with the physical task of tidying, Luhaine grumbled, ‘Save us all, you’re a creature born without logic.’

  ‘I need no one’s plodding, unnecessary logic! Certainly not to recall what’s kept where.’ Sethvir sneezed at the dust that puffed from the leather-bound tomes he thumped to rest on a stool seat. ‘Bless me.’ A touch of one finger and a sigil of stasis anchored the pile as it teetered. ‘As if the glorious invention of the natural world could be sorted in record lists anyway.’

  He brushed off his hands and plowed into a heap of scrolls. His ink-stained cuffs flapped around wrists chiseled by strain to a framework of bone and laced sinew.

  ‘You’re thin,’ Luhaine snapped in concerned exasperation. ‘Have you run out of butter again?’

  ‘It went rancid because I ran out of time, a problem not likely to roost elsewhere.’ Once the table’s obsidian surface was swept clean, Sethvir delved into the depths of a store chest and recovered a square of black velvet. This, he spread over the mirror-polished stone to damp out misleading reflections.

  ‘Strands?’ Luhaine cried. ‘You want to cast strands? Shouldn’t the others be called to stand witness?’

  The Warden of Althain hooked a chair with his ankle and sat. ‘They should.’ His acerbity frayed into worry. ‘Except for the problem that Tysan’s crown examiners have grown unpleasantly vigilant.’

  ‘You’re worried for Traithe?’ Luhaine’s horrified presence shrank to a fixed point that scribed frost crystals on the fogged casement.

  ‘Traithe,’ Sethvir concurred. Sorrow oppressed his cragged features. ‘Our hopes since the Mistwraith’s defeat have borne bitter fruit, have they not? The affray over Caithwood last autumn has seeded redoubled unease. Lysaer’s sunwheel patrols have grown vengefully diligent. Given fresh license by the prevailing fears, they’re scouring the villages to rout out the practice of small magecraft.’

  Silence, filled by a stark truth as ominous as a circling vulture. Traithe’s crippled powers could not shake an armed troop without using the lesser practice of ceremonial magic. That exposure, in crossing Tysan alone, could send him to trial and arraignment; no idle threat with the Fellowship itself too overburdened to effect a reliable rescue.

  ‘A telling victory for Lysaer, if one of our number was found to be mortally vulnerable.’ Luhaine’s distress snapped static from each bitten consonant. ‘How did you break those ugly tidings to Traithe?’

  Sethvir sighed. ‘I told him point-blank: stay well clear of Tysan. Since Shand and Rathain are becoming as dangerous, I urged that he should avoid them. If he was called to the wilds of Melhalla, he should travel with extreme caution.’

  Another lapse, while the two Fellowship colleagues strove not to dwell on the grief of Traithe’s impaired freedom. Nor could they find aught but outright discomfort in the projected array of possibility. Lysaer s’Ilessid had begun the unthinkable next step in his Alliance campaign to quell magecraft. The facts were not kindly. If he revived the lapsed practice of drake magic, the warping fields set off by such spells posed a dire threat to those Sorcerers who were stripped of their flesh.

  ‘The quandary sets barbs in every direction,’ Sethvir agreed at due length.

  Outside the latched casement, the spring constellations rode a sky like carpeted indigo. The library, by contrast, was a well of deep shadow, musked with dry ink and cured leather. That illusory coziness became sliced across by the point of sharp cold that was Luhaine, immersed in agitation far removed from his usual rambling remonstrance.

  ‘If you have a suggestion to make, please speak,’ Sethvir prodded. The roving chill discomposed his bare ankles, and the poisonous depth of his colleague’s silence rankled him to unease. ‘Lysaer’s plots unsettle the earth link, and tracking your thought patterns out of clear air can be as bothersome as a Koriani sigil of confusion.’

  ‘Very well.’ Luhaine roved to the casement. ‘Traithe’s still at Waterfork?’ Given Sethvir’s clipped affirmation, the discorporate spirit rushed his point. ‘I suggest we unkey the ruin at Earle and call a convocation of the Fellowship. Since Lysaer’s intended m
uster in the east has been balked outright by the s’Brydion, we can expect he’ll engage s’Ahelas farsight. I much doubt the plot hatched under dragon-skull wards will develop with short-term interests.’

  ‘Summer solstice?’ Sethvir asked, brows raised as his thoughts leaped ahead. ‘Asandir’s in East Halla, traveling south.’ The timing meshed nicely. The itinerant Sorcerer had enough time to spare to review the methspawn at Mirthlvain. ‘He could transfer directly from Methisle without difficulty. But Earle? That’s extreme.’

  ‘From Earle we can test the fault line through the Skyshiels,’ Luhaine argued. ‘That would eliminate the need to survey the state of the wards on the Mistwraith.’ The discorporate Sorcerer revolved in place, as though he ticked each listed item off on the fingers he had lacked for centuries. ‘As well, we can sound the far future. Better to see what Morriel Prime plans for that herder’s son, Fionn Areth.’

  ‘Morriel again?’ Sethvir’s cheeks dimpled into an expression more grimace than smile. ‘If I didn’t sense your total sincerity, I’d think you were growing obsessed.’

  As Luhaine coalesced with offended fire, the Warden spoke swiftly and quelled him. ‘Very well, we shall convene at Earle.’ He arose, fingers locked through his beard as his thoughts reached out to his colleagues, then vaulted ahead to particulars. He needed to adjust the guarding wards on Althain Tower, and, of course, he would have to pack tea.

  By default, Luhaine must fare on to West Shand. His work would unkey the protections left in force on the ruin that commanded the southern tip of the peninsula.

  ‘Hindsight, of course,’ the portly shade grumbled. ‘I should’ve thought first, and suggested that onerous burden should fall to Kharadmon.’

  ‘He wouldn’t be weaned from the construct warding the star tracks, not under any circumstance.’ Already on course for the stairwell, Sethvir shook off sharp chills. The remnant wraiths still at large on the splinter world of Marak yet posed an incalculable peril. Kharadmon’s extreme anxiety would be justified. He alone had observed that decimated civilization firsthand. Nothing else in Athera’s unsettled history had hardened his piquant character to such rabid dedication.

  Nor had his Fellowship peers dismissed the grave danger he stood vigil to avert. On Kharadmon’s warning, Asandir had bound Arithon s’Ffalenn under blood oath to survive. The star construct now standing guard for Athera had taken over a year’s labor to dedicate. Even for the purpose of a Fellowship convocation, the wards must not stand unattended; if the wraiths left rootless and moiling on Marak ever crossed over to launch an attack, the odds they might spring the penultimate disaster became unthinkably final.

  All living things on a green, breathing world would wither and perish.

  ‘Avert all ill,’ Luhaine breathed as he drifted through the casement.

  Sethvir had no platitude to ease his departure. He passed from the library and descended the spiral stairwell, arms folded to his chest in vain hope the gesture might wring the cold dread from his heart.

  Summer solstice shimmered heat waves on the thin spit of land that extended south of the Salt Fens. Sky lidded the savage, untenanted landscape like sheet-fired enamel, and baked the beleaguered shingle under relentless, diamond-bright sunlight. There, the earth’s granite bones broke the dunes like dull knives. Seabirds stitched through the moan of the winds that scoured in off the ocean. Word held that the haunts from Second Age history walked over that damascened ribbon of shingle.

  In stark fact, the unrest stamped into the site held origins far older. Sere stone and stripped dunes had endured their uneasy siege with the sea since the Age of Dragons, when past duels between drakes had raged in fell fire that remade the coast’s western shoreline. The bay at the mouth of River Shonian in Falwood had been formed when the earth’s crust collapsed, riven into a molten caldera by two packs locked in mortal conflict. There also lay the bones of Eckracken Challenger, king among drakes, who had fallen to earth, downed by cinder-burned wings. The tortured landscape itself had been carved as his mighty, scaled hulk writhed in the fatal throes of his agony. Legend held that the Salt Fens were formed on the breath of his death wish, as a balm for his terrible burns.

  Although Althain Tower kept no record of myths, the first centaur guardians sent by Ath Creator to walk the land and bring healing had never gainsaid the tales of the peninsula’s origins. Certainly Eckracken’s bones rested still, wreathed in bog mists, the raging, angry dreams of his haunt surrounded and sealed by the spells of a Paravian grimward.

  Nor had time erased the trace remnants of drake magic that resounded and whined through the wracked strata of the headland. The resonance of a wanton destruction lay imprinted in the broken stone. The left residue thrummed a subliminal ache through warm flesh where the silted sands mantled the roadside. Echoes still rang through the bedrock spine of feldspar and quartz-veined granite.

  As spirit, less constrained to linear space, Luhaine sensed the burn of past forces as well. The sensation ranged like flaying steel through his etheric awareness. By preference he would have shunned this desolate tract; yet unpleasantly as the site could wear on pure spirit, how much worse for the colleague who had trodden these shores to deny Desh-thiere’s access through South Gate. Traithe had survived the affray with his life, but at crippling cost to his mage powers.

  Few places in Athera held the bitter brew of history ascribed to the strands of West Shand.

  The ruin at Earle proved no exception in the annals of legend and lore. Once the fortress had held the first line of resistance against the Mistwraith’s assault. The defenders who had shed blood and lost lives were a sorrow too lengthy to list; nor were their memories forgotten. At solstice dawn in Third Age 5654, the sky lay mantled and weeping.

  Arrived to a fine drizzle smudged against louring cloud, Luhaine paused. Ahead stretched a sere landscape, with the ancient causeway a tumbled rut, and the puddles poured glass in the hollows. He surveyed the dark, notched profile of the fortress, its sea-broken walls strung with wild briar, and its landward rampart of shark-toothed crenels still whole between the closed fists of the watch keeps.

  Though no Fellowship Sorcerer had witnessed the First Age, when Paravian heroes marched and perished to subdue the ravages of Eckracken’s haunt, to mage-sight, those events stayed immediate. The infinite sadness scribed into stone transcended all barriers of time. Within recent memory, these sands had staged the hard-fought conflict begun with the Mistwraith’s invasion. Here, five ruling high kings, endowed with the activated powers of their crown jewels, had stood their ground for the weal of the land. Shoulder to shoulder with Paravians, they died, to be replaced by grown heirs, who did likewise.

  Luhaine gave homage to the past he had witnessed, his chosen expression a masterbard’s requiem, and his voice as one with the wind, that hurled spume in raked sheets shoreward …

  While four seasons turn under moon and sun,

  and the unicorns’ springtide migration runs;

  while dancers leap to the solstice paeans,

  remember the names of the fallen sons.

  This life, the paid gift of their sacrifice –

  our brilliance of days their eternal night,

  forevermore. Oh, forever mourn them!

  Nor were all the mighty powers from those times faded, or dead, or silenced. One keep in the ruin remained pristine, unmarred by old wars and wild elements. Its fastness yet guarded a brooding awareness still primed for Athera’s defense. Through the power focus at Earle, the centaur guardian, Seannory, had thrice laid his claim, and bound the four elements into service for need of the world’s protection. The ritual release had not been enacted since the hour of the Mistwraith’s confinement. Desh-thiere’s ills were imprisoned, not undone. The threat to sunlight lay subdued, but not conquered; and there rested the reason for a Fellowship presence since Lysaer s’Ilessid’s inner cabal had convened under the shadow of a dragon-skull ward.

  To Luhaine fell the task of unkeying the locks which held
the old fortress inviolate. His, the burden of subtlety and care, that the work he enacted disturb none of the primal seals of stasis that checked and balanced the forces within. Burdened by the gravity of the trials ahead, he descended to Earle Keep.

  Where Seannory’s guarding wards still reigned, the pale granite blocks wore a glassine finish. No mortar fastened their setting. Each face had been raised by centaur masons, mortise and tenon cut to a precision past the skills of human artisans. True mark of Ilitharis Paravian craftsmen, stone sang to stone in linked balance, each fitted block matched and meshed with its neighbors in harmonic resonance. The rampart arose, each buttress anchored through its aggregate minerals, a bonding fashioned in sound and light beyond range of mortal awareness.

  Mage-sight unveiled that ephemeral splendor as a strength tuned to outlast the ages. Amid the grand spectrum that framed Ath’s creation, this structure resounded and sang, a signature chord of achievement that perhaps might never be equaled. Luhaine beheld the fortress of Earle and mourned the loss of an artistry vanished with the Paravians.

  The entry was a sweeping, half-circular arch, chisel-punched from a slab of gneiss granite. A massive boulder plugged the opening, moss-grown and weathered, and possessed of no visible mechanism. The spirit who sought access must win through by means beyond force. The decorative border carved into the archway itself held the key, endowed by Davien the Betrayer. His piquant ingenuity had patterned the geometry beyond the grasp of reason. Those interlocked spirals could tumble a man’s mind into madness, as each loop and line unraveled eyesight into dizzy, ecstatic confusion.

  No perception bound by substance could decipher that tangle of paradox.

  As pure spirit, Luhaine was spared the first challenge; he need not engage the esoteric discipline to lift his consciousness free of dense flesh. From his vantage of subtle awareness, the opening point shone as a blue spike of light from the high curve of the arch. To cross the ward, the aspirant must send his naked spirit within to thread the riddle of the maze.