Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The small upsets struck first: birds and fish and great turtles in the seas lost their homing instinct and the inborn knowledge of their spawning grounds. Climate recoiled into aberrated cyclones of weather. Worse things cascaded into ruin as the vortex fanned through Athera’s aura. The sharp, static burst disrupted harmonic balance. The frequency shift smashed every delicate tie in those wards held in stasis by Fellowship guardians.

  In the seeress’s lap, the quartz sphere she had forgotten recorded the first toll of damages. In Tysan, black Khadrim took flight in a gusty storm of wing leather and flew free of the Sorcerers’ Preserve. Other fell creatures in Mirthlvain’s dark mire stirred and blinked, awake for the first time in centuries.

  The last image the crystal imprinted showed Sethvir before the cluttered table in Althain Tower’s library, his bare feet inundated by a cascade of books, tossed pens, and torn papers. Across the space just swept clean with indiscriminate haste, the Sorcerer chalked row after row of swift ciphers. If his hand was not steady, his art was infallible. The spells he commanded bloomed and burned in straight lines, their withering light raised to hold eighteen grimwards secure through Morriel’s firestorm of deranged lane force.

  Then the scrying sphere shattered. Shards of quartz flew like daggers. Flung fragments ripped with lethal force, and killed the seeress where she sat at her post.

  Winter 5669

  Backlash

  Shaken awake by a drastic shift in the tuned awareness of his mage-sight, Asandir leaves the safe shelter of Kieling Tower and sprints through the spirit-haunted ruin of Ithamon to engage the power focus; by the ranging imbalance sensed through his feet, he knows he has scarcely minutes to bind the fifth lane energies back to harmony before their magnetic alignment becomes snarled beyond hope of recovery …

  On guarded watch in the airless deeps of interstellar space, Kharadmon answers the flaring damage which blooms over the continent of Paravia; he leaves at once, his destination Methisle, where the spellbinder Verrain sends his beleaguered distress cry, warning of hordes of roused drake spawn; while Luhaine descends into the deep rift beneath South Sea to prevent a destabilized fault line from collapsing …

  Within a hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood, under trees whose soaring heights extend across the veil of the mysteries, the adept who keeps watch cries out in blind pain as the water in the sacred pool darkens to tarnish, and while the animals and birds who inhabit the glade flee and vanish to a rustle of foliage, she sees images: of fissures that blast gaping holes through the innate balance of the world …

  Winter 5669

  XII.

  Dire Portents

  Static discharge set off by the imbalanced lane flux hurled white chains of lightning across the night sky the length and breadth of the continent. In the absence of overcast, the forks spat and flared against the jewel-strung brilliance of Athera’s winter constellations. Sleepers awakened by the actinic bursts responded with fear and dismay. Where storms masked the view, or sifting snowfall sheeted the hollows in trackless mantles of white, the jagged flares threw an eerie, diffused light over the snow-clad landscape.

  Nor did those ranging, skewed crests of vibration escape notice, even beneath Athera’s surface. Under the knife peaks at the heart of the Mathorn Mountains, far removed from the smoking, white veils of the blizzards that mantled the swept granite cornices, Kewar Tunnel spiraled downward into the bewildering maze of deep caverns cut by the refined forces of spellcraft and a genius command of grand conjury. There, the unquiet spirit of Davien the Betrayer had withdrawn in adamant solitude. Nor had he emerged throughout the ongoing span of his self-imposed exile from the Fellowship.

  No living spirit had broken his isolation for over five hundred years. Sethvir’s intermittent, polite messages went unanswered. Davien himself made no overtures. He refused all outside company. His presence walked lightly on the face of creation, a trace resonance so slight, Athera herself scarcely carried the imprinted signature of his presence. Whether the Sorcerer had built etheric walls out of seals and wards of his making, or whether he had turned his awareness inward, or let himself fade through attrition, none knew. His nature had never been quiet or retiring, nor his work, which had fomented the rebellion that overthrew the old order and dethroned the five chosen high kings. For that act of violence, made against the will of the other six Fellowship Sorcerers, he had received his due hour of censure. In recognition of the damages caused by his hand, he had been rendered discorporate through a ceremonial destruction of the flesh. Since then, his colleagues had granted their strict respect to his right to private withdrawal.

  His retirement was made by the dictates of free choice, which the Law of the Major Balance held sacrosanct.

  None knew if the Betrayer retained any interest at all in the passage of events on the continent. His presence had been neither seen nor felt. The four seasons turned one into the next, and became years; passing years piled up into decades, which became centuries, without sign of remission or change. Davien made no effort to mend long-standing differences. He asked for no reconciliation. On the hour Morriel’s meddling cast Athera’s lane forces into imbalance, the Black Rose Prophecy, which offered the sole promise of hope, lay entangled in the knot of the Teir’s’Ffalenn’s life thread. The fated resolution of the Fellowship’s schism still hinged upon Arithon’s free acceptance of a royal birthright he rejected with every fiber of conscious awareness.

  Whether or not Davien knew such an augury existed, or whether he cared to reconnect with outside events, the bursting chaos wrought by Morriel’s banespell rocked the black depths of his refuge. Kewar’s chains of caverns lay in alignment with the natural flux of the fourth lane. Earth and stone resounded to the snarl of torn energies, until the glassy, still stands of underground water shivered into rebounding ripples of stress. Stalagmites cracked and fell, exploding to fragments of limestone and calcite. Stones rolled into fissures; in the geothermal vents, the mud in the hot springs boiled and spat brine and sulfurous fumes.

  Far beneath the bedrock strata of the mountains, under the layers of petrified sediment where Davien had fashioned Kewar Tunnel and its range of reactive mazes, not every secretive, subterranean hollow had been formed by natural forces.

  In a sealed, round chamber seven furlongs underground, a branching spring welled up and fed into the roaring spate of the watercourse that emerged into daylight at the mouth of the River Aiyenne. Here, where the structural language of minerals had reigned supreme since the dawn of Athera’s existence, that trickling flow had been reforged by grand conjury into a pool rimmed with engraved stone knotwork and minuscule chains of linked ciphers. No artistry with hammer and chisel had fashioned such intricate patterns. Complex, interwoven lines of geometry ran like song and light through the carving. The dynamic resonance instilled through their presence was direct, and material, and yet, like the untamed flow of primal energy, the currents had no definitive beginning and no end. The self-sustained emanation of radiance crossed the veil into mystery: a chord that climbed the scale of vibration and ranged beyond the upper limits of hearing, then reemerged in the octaves of visible light, only to vanish into the refined frequencies past all reach of mortal senses.

  The chamber had been created in the painful years after Davien was first rendered discorporate. Existence as pure spirit galled him to bitter frustration. The intricate artistry set into grained stone, the puzzles of interlocked ciphers that had once been the delight of his handiwork were no longer so facile to produce. Balked by the loss of his physical form, Davien had not been thwarted by inconvenience. His penchant for cleverness was in fact the product of wild-card genius; he owned determination, but not patience, and though to the eye of an outside observer such a fine point might seem insignificant, the masterful innovation that had rechanneled the spring into a construct of grand conjury represented decades of brute labor and a monumental pinnacle of achievement.

  No torch burned within that cylindrical structure. The walls were m
irror-polished granite, and the ceiling, a mathematically perfect parabola that refigured sound into a needle’s point focus. Built without entry or exit, the space was not lightless. Soft illumination rippled over the walls, bearing the imprint and signature of water. The chill, clear flow welled up and spilled in soft, sheeting melodies over the wrought framework of ciphers which, in turn, flared and burned with electromagnetic discharge. Nor was the trapped pocket of air stale or stagnant. A tight, contained draft spindled and swirled an invisible course of agitation. Now and again, a white spark would arc from an unseen origin and snap out above the tireless cascade of clear water.

  Then the soft light that rinsed the stone walls would shift into mazed colors, rainbow hues split into irregular patterns like jostled shards of stained glass. An image would bloom on the surface of the pool, recaptured in simultaneity from an event that occurred on the surface world outside …

  Night winds moaned over the wilds of Camris, battering man and beast, and lashing through bundled mantles and gloves to sear naked skin without mercy. The men chosen to accompany Lysaer s’Ilessid had spared no time to gather field tents and equipment when the travel-stained horseman first clattered into Erdane, bringing breathless word that a man bearing the Shadow Master’s description had been seen abroad in Daenfal.

  With minimal provisions and a skilled headhunter’s scout to guide them cross-country, they made hasty arrangement to meet an oared boat at a remote cove on the north coast. Now en route to that rendezvous, the Blessed Prince and his handpicked cadre of officers camped as they could in the open. The glacier-scarred plain of Camris fell under interdict by the compact, preserved without habitation or footpaths. Shallow dales and scrub-clothed downslands offered browsing for wild deer, but no feature of natural cover. Except for the field tent pitched to shelter the Divine Prince, men lay wrapped in their cloaks, snatching sleep in the hollow carved through an old moraine by the flow of a frozen watercourse. When the sharp, bursting discharge of stressed lane forces spat branch lightning across the starry arc of the sky, the Alliance Lord Commander, who was the blood son of Hanshire’s mayor, stood his assigned turn keeping watch. No man to panic in the face of dire spellcraft, Sulfin Evend clenched his jaw. He cursed in his precise, patrician accent, his sculptured fist clamped on his sword. Townborn though he was, eight summers spent with Etarra’s league of headhunters had changed him. His brisk stride back toward the banked coals of the fire fell almost without sound in the brush. When his cautious word at the flap of Prince Lysaer’s tent raised no answer, he snapped back the canvas and ducked inside. The bedding that should have sheltered the Divine Prince lay unused, the thick blankets still rolled and lashed to the rings on the saddle pack.

  Sulfin Evend slapped his thigh, irritated, and abandoned the empty tent. Overhead, another actinic flare traced the heavens, sharp as snagged wire, but unpartnered by the expected percussion of thunder. The sky was black crystal, unmarred by mist or cloud. The stars burned unsullied, though the bitter, north gusts hissed and snagged in queer eddies, thrashing the bared twigs in drumming bursts that unmoored the last paper-dry leaves. The unsettled horses stamped on their picket lines and blew in high, nervous snorts. Braced against the buffeting elements, the Alliance Lord Commander reached the fireside, found the officer appointed as his second-in-command, and jabbed his toe into the man’s mounded blankets. The officer shot awake, barraged with his superior’s fast-paced instructions to rouse the camp and stand steadfast. ‘Once Lysaer’s found, we’ll have orders.’

  ‘Do you think––’ began the captain, broken off through an uneasy glance skyward at the etched flare of turquoise that sheeted the stars overhead. The display was too hard-edged to be mistaken for a seasonal display of aurora borealis.

  ‘Don’t think,’ Sulfin Evend corrected him, brisk. ‘Just act. Roust everyone else and get them busy. I want the horses saddled and ready.’ He straightened, each movement spiked to volatile impatience. ‘If the portents we see are signals of threat or some other work of dark sorcery, the Blessed Prince will be saying where he expects us to march.’

  Too disciplined to argue, the captain groped in the dark for his weapons and strapped on his studded sword belt. ‘The guide out of Erdane might bolt when he sees this.’

  ‘Well, tie him down here and now if you’re worried! I don’t want mistakes or unnecessary fuss.’ Sulfin Evend spun away from the warmth of the coals. Despite the rough ground, he moved with oiled speed. The light set to his carriage reflected the instinctive, neat balance of a man who wore steel with killing experience. He paused only once to assess his surroundings. Spinning wind devils kicked through the brush. Deep in the night, a wolf howled. Shown no obvious visual sign to provide his search with direction, he bent and read the frost-silvered grass for traces of Lysaer’s footsteps.

  A tentative touch on his forearm made him start. He whirled, sword half-drawn, every muscle tensed to fight.

  ‘Peace,’ lisped a whisper-thin voice from the dark.

  Caught back just in time from striking on reflex, Sulfin Evend confronted the shadowy form of the sunwheel priest attached with the officers of the company. Faint starlight drizzled thin glints of reflection over the six chains of rank yoking his high, cowled collar. ‘I know where to look for his Blessed Grace.’

  ‘Damn you, man!’ Sulfin Evend shook off the priest’s womanish clasp, his aggression clipped back to disgust. ‘Creep up from behind, quiet as all that, and you’re lucky not to get skewered.’ As another flare of blue streaked the sky overhead, he tightened his mailed fist at his sword hilt. ‘I hate riddles, as well. You say you know where to look, then get moving.’

  The initiate priest laced bony hands over the woven gold cincture at his waist. He bowed without word. On uncanny, soft footsteps, he then led the way, his expression recessed in the voluminous cloth of the hood that obscured his gaunt features. Sulfin Evend disliked that habit of dress. Always, he distrusted a man who would not look him squarely in the eye.

  Thin and gangling as a stick puppet beneath his lush robe, the priest picked a fussy path through clawing thorns and wind-stunted furze toward the rise of the neighboring hillock. A birch copse crowned the crest. Spindly trunks slashed the gloom like blotched bones snagged in a grave shroud of shadow. Beneath the black spokes of winter-stripped branches, Lysaer s’Ilessid stood alone.

  Clad all in white, he seemed an ephemeral form stamped on the stark face of darkness. Whatever odd whim had made him withdraw from the circle of human company, he was not averse to interruption. As the sound of oncoming footsteps broke his solitude, he turned his head, and Light bloomed around him in welcome.

  He greeted both arrivals by name. ‘Sulfin Evend, Jeriayish.’ Above his golden, haloed presence, another sheeting flare of static branched and faded into an eerie, cobalt violet. The discharge subsided back to starry night, cloaked in disarming tranquillity. A stray gust rattled the bare tree limbs and shivered through the frost-spangled underbrush, there and gone as Lysaer’s gesture encompassed the settled arch of clear sky. ‘The hour brings us fell portents.’

  Sulfin Evend raised his eyebrows, taken aback by the explosive anger he sensed dammed behind the Divine Prince’s disarming civility. ‘You’re surprised? How often you’ve said the works of true evil never carry the stamp of convenience. I have men back in camp awaiting your orders.’

  ‘Would that I had definite orders to give them.’ Lysaer’s masked rage burned the more fiercely for the fact he was caught at odds in an untenanted wilderness. With no target at hand, and no other distraction of state crisis, he could not ease his hard-driving urge to eradicate sorcery and destroy the Master of Shadow. The current balked state became as raw salt on an open sore of frustration. ‘The rotten truth,’ Lysaer said, bitter. ‘Fell powers are afoot without any doubt, and at the one moment I’ve gone beyond reach of town messengers. The minion of Darkness himself could not choose a better moment to disadvantage me. One cursed stroke of timing has just undone the painstak
ing work of two decades!’

  ‘We’re still bound for Daenfal?’ Sulfin Evend pressed, his stalker’s instinct aroused by the implied upset to long-range, secretive plans. Left uninformed, denied the sure insight to lend strategic backing and guidance, he waited in coiled stillness, his question dangling unanswered.

  ‘Suppose Arithon s’Ffalenn chose this hour to unleash his sorceries on the continent?’ This once oblivious to his Lord Commander’s razor scrutiny, the Divine Prince almost lost to the tormented urge to pace the ground in obsessive agitation. ‘Such a man would scarcely allow himself to be seen, except by intended design. At first, I expected the reported sighting at Daenfal would resolve as a case of mistaken identity. Now, I’m not sure. The event may have been set up as a blind to draw me away from Avenor.’ A tight gesture of defiance encompassed the heavens, lit now by the adamantine glitter of winter constellations. ‘The fact major sorcery has reared up in portents drastically rearranges priorities. If Arithon s’Ffalenn has returned, he’d bid to make use of our weaknesses.’ In the rapt intensity of the instant’s blind passion, Lysaer’s veneer of majesty cracked through. Voice and bearing this once revealed his vibrant base feeling: not fear, not concern born of righteous distress, but the focused rage born out of pride and a stinging, personal defeat. ‘Avenor will panic without my protection, and I’m not there to capture the plum as the tree shakes.’

  Struck to deep insight that prickled his nape, Sulfin Evend stared at the prince before him. His keen glance read a frustrated anguish few men alive ever witnessed. He said, cool and neutral through a shocked leap of epiphany, ‘You meant all along to use the s’Brydion clan as your game piece to trigger the selfsame reaction?’