Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Prince Kevor crossed the dais with that startling majesty inherent in Tysan’s crown lineage. He took the grand chair of state reserved for his father, as Lord Regent, and with perfect aplomb, sat down. ‘First of all, that rabble, as you call them, are not faceless invaders. They’re the same master craftsmen and shopkeepers who form the foundation of Avenor. Let one of them die at the hands of the guard, and I promise, they will become your enemy and mine. Would you risk our prosperity for the sake of a warehouse, or one season’s stockpiled profits?’

  Amid shouting detractors, one shrill voice prevailed. ‘What else can we do but show force when there are maddened men howling murder and rattling our gates?’

  Unruffled as though the diadem of high kingship already circled his head, Kevor said, ‘I was going to offer to go out to the cupola in the square and ask the faithful to stand forth and light candles. The more flames they show in support of the Blessed Prince, the better the chance their prayers for deliverance will be answered. If the portents continue, we can encourage the belief that their faith is insufficient to enact a divine intervention.’

  ‘Such tactics might work.’ The garrison captain rubbed his stubbled chin, thoughtful, and overrode the seneschal’s objections. ‘Lighting candles will give the folk focus and calm. The organized presence of any group action would pull in the attention of those on the fringes who otherwise might turn to violence.’

  Yet the fractious, ribboned ministers adhered to their divisive factions and rejected the strategy out of hand. ‘What about safeguarding our guildhalls? If you detail the garrison to look after the young prince––’

  ‘Enough!’ Kevor cut them off. His eyes bored into them, arctic blue, and his inborn drive to seek justice charged him to lordly contempt. While the yammering courtiers bridled at his authority, he said, scathing, ‘If some of your gold had been turned to the greater good, we would have had more trained men defending our walls! Why should Avenor’s populace not fear for their safety? They’re not the fools who brought us to this pass.’ He went on to use names. ‘You, Odrey, that emerald in your thumb ring would have outfitted ten men. Mennis, the gold and ruby buttons on your doublet would have kept our town armorers busy for a year!’ Above pealing shouts, Kevor’s leveling invective prevailed. ‘I dare to suggest that the jewels and bullion adorning your persons could have bridged all our shortfalls long before we found ourselves face-to-face with a crisis!’

  While the subjects of his scorn flushed purple and bristled with self-righteous, humiliated outrage, the young prince pressed home his rebuke. ‘As for protection, I never asked for armed backing from the city garrison! Princess Ellaine has forbidden force of arms in our streets. Show her due respect and give thanks for her foresight. The word of the Light must prevail over Shadow without the bullying threat of bare steel. I say Avenor’s people will honor my lineage. As heir to s’Ilessid, I’ll go to the square and take only the two men on duty as honor guards outside the door of my chamber.’

  Ellaine choked back fear, that Kevor was young yet to be wearing the mantle of royal authority. Despite his inspired instinct for self-command, he was painfully young. Caught up in heady, adolescent heroics, he might not yet grasp the full impact of possible consequences. If events went amiss and touched off mass panic, he would be offering himself up as a target to assuage the mob’s unleashed fury.

  Yet to speak even a well-meant warning in public would undercut the firm hand with which he had taken first charge of the authority due him by birthright.

  As though he understood his mother’s paralyzing worry, Kevor gave her a swift glance and a smile. ‘I am Lysaer’s son.’ His confidence refreshed like new sunshine. ‘Who better to send?’ The sapphire brooch at his throat shot blue sparks as his raised arm encompassed the press of Avenor’s courtiers, still shamed into a seething, flushed stillness. ‘I might not have his Grace’s powers to wield the blessed Light, but given the choice, our people would prefer to believe his gift will defend them.’

  All unwitting, he had lifted the courtiers out of their narrow self-interest. His shining honesty had displaced in one moment the rancors of trade gain and politics. Under the gilt-washed glow of the candles, grown men and elders responded to the rallying cry of Tysan’s untried young prince. ‘I am the promise of my father’s intercession! Let this town see our strength, not our fears of failure. Nor will I be misrepresenting the truth. The Divine Prince’s pledge to fight Shadow has called him away to the east. He would not choose his course without solid evidence. Others must stand in far greater danger than we. Let us rise to his trust, that we are equal to the task he has left us! Defense of Avenor is our charge and our duty. Let us stand strong and uphold the Light, as he would, and protect the weak and the helpless!’

  Stunned to sudden tears for her pride in Kevor’s courage, Princess Ellaine recovered the nerve to wrest back bold initiative. ‘Send a man for Gace Steward,’ she commanded the seneschal. ‘The palace will be providing the candles to encourage the vigil in the square …’

  Within the sealed chamber deep under the Mathorn Mountains, the spark sustaining the keyhole view of Avenor’s council hall flickered out. The water drops spilled in continuous cascade from the blank face of the pool, tinged to softened, hazy light by the ephemeral play of forces that ranged through the interlocked rune patterns. For a handful of seconds, the sheer granite walls mirrored their burnished reflections. Then the quiescent draft flicked to life out of nowhere. More sparks lit and blazed, whirled into flurried, frenetic existence like a madcap swarm of summer fireflies. They fell, a rain of slow-motion fire that excited the pool through a rapid-fire sequence of glimpses: of Cerebeld in his tower, opening a locked chest; of mounted crown messengers dispatched from Erdane to points south; of beacon fires lit to signal unrest at Isaer and Castle Point; of a galley flying a sunwheel banner cleaving a course at war speed through the frigid waves off the coast north of Camris. A return pass showed Prince Lysaer, emerged from his tent slightly pale, but restored to brisk confidence after a private consultation with the priest, Jeriayish. Then the view that did not fit in sequence: of a pack of Khadrim in wheeling flight against a backdrop of stars and forked lightning.

  A pause ensued, dense silence filled by the unending ripple of water and the rinsed imprint of light across seamless walls.

  The next spark, descending, wore a diamantine scintillance, born out of relentless, hard focus. Its word of command woke an aerial view, high over the volcanic ledges surrounding the mud pots at Teal’s Gap. Fir stands and bare rock scabbed the snowy flanks of the foothills, the scarred gulches engraved by solidified lava softened under weak starlight. Against that vast tract of proscribed territory, configured in geometrics like folded lines starched in translucent ribbon, the ring wards demarking the Sorcerers’ Preserve glimmered over the landscape. Yet where Asandir’s recent work had lately framed a flawless, bright barrier, the erratic lane flux that ranged over Athera wore and stressed the locked seals of his handiwork. As a fresh static discharge ripped across the night sky, the spell boundary threw off a resonant flare of dull red. Wide, snagging gaps were already torn where the damaging range of low-frequency bursts had disrupted the integrity of the spellcraft.

  The image was not permitted to fade, but became blasted aside by an arcing explosion of light, this one a hard, electrical blue, and dazzlingly stellar in brilliance. Its call seeded a view of the crumbling Paravian ruin crowning the hill beside Mainmere. Yet even through the imbalance unleashed by a radical deflection of lane force, the stones of the ancient foundation sung to ward by the centaur, Imaury Riddler, remained silent under a velvet tarnish of frost. The rime of thin ice flicked to lit spangles as another discharge of white static raked the darkened sky overhead.

  The vision in the pool slowly faded, rubbed to attrition by the flow of cold water until it became thinned to a gossamer cobweb that erased back into the void. The ponderous stillness settled deeper, the unmarked refuge of earth-enclosed darkness braided throug
h by the tremulous trickle of droplets. The dustless space held the tang of wet rock and dissolved limestone; mirror-polished walls abided in the vast patience that endowed ancient granite its strength. Amid the drawn pause, the power of an unseen presence thrashed through a turmoil of conflicted debate.

  Then another spark fell, this one a whispered imprint less seen than felt as a tracing of air onto a blank template of existence. Its directive unfolded the vantage of two bubbles of void space, written and defined by the secretive, bound power enchained by Koriani ciphers; one, very small, was sited over the quartz veins in the Skyshiels near the mountain settlement of Eastwall. Larger, more sinister in meddling implication, the other encompassed the entire walled city of Jaelot.

  A snap of brisk breeze fanned over the pool, marring the water’s limpid surface into a puckered lens of distortion. The lightless maw of the spell-circled town shattered like black glass, then relit to display the spider’s web pattern of impact on the course of outside event. Fragmented imagery captured details. A thousand incandescent threads of connection unreeled over the night landscape. The will of the presence that dwelled beneath Kewar selected but three to trace back to their living sources.

  The first captured impression showed a bonfire lit in the dockside shanties at Southshire. While white lightning portents snapped across the night sky, a chanting crowd of zealots led by guardsmen wearing sunwheel badges surrounded a ceremonial pyre. The victim for execution was no herb witch, this time, but the demonic straw effigy of a black-haired sorcerer, run through the heart by a rusty billhook and pelted by the screaming onlookers with salvoes of offal and garbage.

  The next sequence to be mirrored in the rock pool revealed a desertman elder, crouched muttering on the black sands of Sanpashir. His thrown bones of augury blazed white as another blinding burst sheared through the heavens above him. Yet his voice as he cited his reading was steady. ‘Behold the truth! The son of Mother Dark will make landfall at the ruin and go on to try to avert an ill deed and a wrongful shedding of blood on the solstice.’

  Last, a lone brigantine flying the leopard blazon of s’Ffalenn heeled on a close-hauled course, bearing due north across the ink waters of South Sea.

  Then the pool stilled, singing its trickling melody of droplets within the underground deeps. The rune patterns ceased their manic flare of light. Within that womb of utter blackness, the draft whirled and whispered, restless. Through a taut span of minutes, nothing changed. The presence sealed in the isolate cavern whisked to and fro in unquiet cogitation. Nor could the surrounding earth offer help, or the nurture of grounding comfort. The needling burn of lane imbalance transferred through layered bedrock and caused the water to shiver and rebound through the fissure. The splash of runoff surged and dwindled, erratic, still distressed, but no longer abandoned to the forces of freewheeling chaos.

  In the far-distant south, above a rimwall of Vastmark shale, a Sorcerer’s raven soared through an intricate pavane of circles. A brilliance of energy trailed from its feathers, and its croaking call resounded through all four of the elements and begged help to renew Athera’s upset stability.

  The presence in Kewar heard, but did not bestir in response. One last time, the rock pool flared into a shimmer of rainbow light. Yet the final image showed nothing more than the momentary view of a large golden eagle unfurling broad wings and launching into steep, upward flight.

  Autumn 5669

  Resolve

  Under the massive, bare oaks of Halwythwood, Earl Jieret, caithdein of Rathain, broke out of his sprint and snatched a moment to recover his breath. The deep, hidden glen he chose for the pause was stitched through by a shallow streamlet, laced in glass panes of ice. The young scout who had partnered the extended patrol flashed him a glance of limp gratitude and folded, head down and panting, on the glazed-over bark of a deadfall.

  ‘How much farther?’ he gasped to his chieftain.

  Jieret glanced sidewards, no less exhausted. Each heaving breath he drew into his lungs knifed through his chest like cold fire. ‘Three leagues, maybe.’ He leaned on the gnarled trunk standing nearest, his forearm compressed against his left side to ease the nagging, first knot of a cramp. Each second of delay chafed at his overtaut nerves. He adjusted the hang of his deer bow and quiver to free his right arm for his dagger.

  Another queer burst of lightning snapped across the dark bowl of the zenith. The discharge affected more than the high atmosphere. With each flaring bolt, Earl Jieret sensed a recoil jolt through the staid earth beneath the hide soles of his boots. The same disturbed current traced an answering prickle up the full length of his spine.

  ‘You don’t think that’s the sign of a Fellowship working,’ stated the scout, perhaps touched to concern by the marked wariness he observed on his chieftain’s weathered face, or else moved by the deep-seated instincts inherent in most of the old clan bloodlines.

  ‘No.’ Jieret’s certainty rang unequivocal. ‘Something’s amiss. If the Sorcerers are involved, they’ll be working to clear the source of imbalance.’ He surveyed the frozen wood, locked in a bitter, windless silence, the blown ink tracery of limbs overhead crusted in a thin rime of snow fall. No natural feature appeared out of place. Aside from the marks of their own running footsteps crushed through the crusted ground, yesterday’s game trails showed as dimpled imprints where the noon sun had melted the edges. Yet the deep, biting cold that had followed the storm front now and again showed disturbance. A sharp, fitful breeze stirred the high branches. Sudden and oddly contrary in nature, the spinning gyre of air was there and gone before his forest-honed senses could tag its direction. ‘We’d best move along.’

  The scout arose from his perch on the log. He was duty bound to withhold his complaint, though the snatched interval of rest had scarcely relieved his wrung-out state of fatigue.

  ‘You’ll be all right?’ Jieret asked, as tired himself, but hagridden by pressing instinct. He could not shake off the overriding sense of some nameless, looming disaster. Though the chain-lightning portents that cracked the night sky had not gained in force or frequency, and the Companion he had chosen to take charge in his absence had well proved his cool head through a crisis, Jieret’s mood stayed unsettled. The persistent, gut-deep conviction hung over him, that he stood at the crux of a cataclysm, as though the firmament around him had gone subtly unstable and subject to change without notice. Urgency drove him to near-reckless haste. He burned to rejoin the central encampment that sheltered the clan’s elders and young children.

  ‘My wife and daughter are back in camp, too.’ The scout slapped clumps of granular snow off his leathers and tightened the looped thong that secured the loose arrows in his quiver. ‘I’m ready.’

  Yet as Jieret led into his first running step, he cried out, overset and bewildered. The foot that should have struck solid ground seemed to plunge into an abyss of nothing. Hurled into sudden, violent vertigo, he heard the scout call his name. Firm hands caught his arm, and still, he was falling. Earth and sky upended and cast him headlong into drowning disorientation. The scout’s dismayed cries thickened like felt in his ears, until words became lost into noise that choked out cognitive meaning. Then all his five senses let go into darkness; he was not in Halwythwood, but hurled through the heart of a maelstrom and into his gift of Sighted dreaming …

  As though he looked down from a dizzying height, Jieret beheld the weathered barrens of Daon Ramon, the rocky leagues of deserted scrubland lit dismal gray under a scud of storm clouds. Bitter winds raked over the desolate dales. Driven snow mantled the ice-glazed heads of dead grasses and deepened the mounded drifts already snagged on the twigs of thorn brakes and thickets. Despite the cruel weather, the vista was not empty.

  Touched by a prickling surge of foreboding, Earl Jieret beheld ragged companies of armed men braving the unkindly terrain and the freezing barrage of the elements. He could make out no banners. A harsh edge of fear scraped down his nerves, warning of pending danger. The cruel cold of deep wint
er bit into his lungs, as though his watching presence carried back to the detached awareness of his body. From the eagle’s eye vantage lent by the dream, he searched the harsh land, but encountered no sign of opposing forces. Whatever quarry the troops harried in pursuit remained elusively invisible. Lacerated by concern for his people’s safety, Jieret swept the thorn brakes and gullies. He combed every secretive cranny where a helpless band of fugitives might seek cover to escape the swords of an enemy war host.

  Yet he found nothing hunted. Only more bands of headhunters armed with town steel, relentlessly tracking something or someone. The fir-clad mountains on the horizon could have been the rugged, high spur of Skyshiels, or perhaps the white teeth of the Mathorns, which rimmed Daon Ramon to the north. No feature of landscape affirmed the location. The flat murk of the overcast foretold of a blizzard and obscured the subtle, directional clues that might have been gleaned from a sunny day’s cast shadows. Every other detail bespoke a massive Alliance invasion. Here, a swarm of support troops dragged laden supply sledges over a snow-covered watercourse. The flat, windswept channel could have been the dry bed of the Severnir, or else the ice-sheeted span of the shallower River Aiyenne, which snaked southward in meandering loops from the verge of the Mathorn Road. Whichever site the augury disclosed, a sunwheel troop captain ordered a lame horse killed to ease the privation of depleted provisions.