Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  The vision forecast a multipronged Alliance campaign, yet yielded no key to unveil its directive.

  Tormented by a stabbing, sharp wave of premonition, Earl Jieret cried aloud for the boon of Fellowship guidance. Someone, somewhere, would soon be riding a suicidal course toward disaster. Clanblood, or close kindred, he had to know whom. No townborn war host would venture the barrens in winter. Not without threat of dire proportion, or an extreme source of provocation.

  Then a sheet of light bloomed; a radiance like a honed blade cut through the dull steel of the overcast. Bearing due eastward another small force of headhunters rode out of Narms, led by Lysaer s’Ilessid himself and a train of specialized officers.

  Dreadful certainty jabbed Jieret’s vitals. He tasted futility bitter as wormwood. As Rathain’s sworn caithdein, he understood that innocent blood would stain the snow red unless he gave orders and dispatched steadfast clansmen to stand in the breach.

  Against townborn numbers, such defense would cost lives.

  His torment tore an animal scream from his throat. ‘How do I know the grief of such losses will match the cost of the sacrifice?’

  The cry of his heart ripped the dream’s continuity. The image of Daon Ramon ran like spilled dye, churned to a whirling blur that burst into a flare of white light. Dazzled blind, struck deaf, Jieret lost all ties to the earth. Shoved through the eye of chaos itself, he sensed the pull of the sorcerer’s blood bond he held with Prince Arithon of Rathain. Paradox ripped him, cruel as a jerked wire, and he knew: the liege lord who had won his trust like a brother walked into lethal danger …

  The roaring noise in his ears became the splash of salt spume, sheeted off the bow of a hard-driven brigantine. Wind shrieked in gusts through tarred stays and taut rigging. Yardarms overburdened with close-sheeted canvas transferred the element’s raw burden of violence into timbers that bucked and groaned in complaint. The craft’s lean hull heeled, shining like foil with runoff. Defiantly flying the royal banner stitched with her leopard namesake, the Khetienn sliced northward at reckless speed, the clean lines of her strakes masked in smoking spray at each battering joust with the wavecrests.

  The sodden, wrapped figure who manned the rank helm was no less than Arithon, Prince of Rathain. Where two men might have lent him assistance at the wheel, he muscled the pull of the wet spokes alone, drenched to the skin through his oilskins. The tormented flicker of the lamp in the compass seemed a match for his mood as the wind whipped the streaming, rag ends of black hair from the drenched planes of his face.

  He turned his head. Something he saw changed his harried expression to a mask of reviling mockery. ‘Don’t say you came out to get soaked for sheer fun, or are you earnestly expecting to stop me?’

  The larger of the two men who approached responded in challenge, his clanborn accent infused with the mild vowels of country East Halla origins. Whether his ancestral background was farming, the hand lightly grasped to his scabbarded sword bespoke a chilling competence.

  Arithon hauled the wheel two points to starboard against a pounding gust. ‘How touching. Why not use bare fists? As you see, I’m not armed.’ He laughed in the teeth of the man’s blond companion, who had dared threaten force if he failed to reverse the brigantine’s troublesome heading. ‘Why trifle with talk? The hour won’t wait. If you’re going to try bloodshed, you’ll need to draw swords. Best finish this well before we make landfall at Sanpashir.’ A showering backfall of spray razed the deck. Arithon held his braced stance through the dousing, then resumed his razor-sharp sarcasm. ‘On my first step ashore, a half dozen desertmen are sure to be shadowing my back. They’d make my close friends into dart-riddled pincushions, if they ever once thought I was threatened.’

  ‘Your life’s not at issue,’ said the tall, slender blond man. ‘And Vhandon backs up his promises. You should know, since he once broke your leg.’

  Arithon’s reply came fast as a slap. ‘Do the same this time, and an innocent dies screaming.’

  ‘That could be an excuse,’ said the gruff, older clansman. ‘How can you be certain Desh-thiere’s curse hasn’t inveigled you onto a path to suicidal destruction?’

  ‘On that point, there’s no outside surety,’ the Shadow Master agreed. ‘I would plead, if you stop me – and there’s no doubt you can – that what you would shatter is the backbone of my integrity. Break that, and who am I? Deny my free choice, tear down the last foundation of my character, and what will I have left to withstand the pull of Desh-thiere’s curse?’ A pause, while his steep eyebrows angled up in derisive amazement. ‘You think I don’t battle the ugly directive of that geas with every breath and throughout each waking moment?’

  The younger, blond swordsman looked away, shamed. The older one held to his obdurate stance. ‘Dakar said as much. He begged us both not to trust you.’

  ‘Then don’t!’ Arithon corrected the brigantine’s strayed course with a vicious pitched effort that demanded the last fiber of his strength. The anger that shielded his vulnerable desperation acquired fresh edge as the wind screamed and rampaged through the thundering, stressed gear aloft. Twice, he had refused the mate’s advice to reduce sail. Single-mindedly determined, he wrung the last ounce of speed from a vessel that quivered and slammed over the rough havoc of the night ocean. ‘Take me down. I’ve said I’m unarmed. You could use rope, or forged chain and shackles. Whatever you decide, however you choose to hobble me for the sake of Dakar’s shrinking cowardice, you already have my given word I won’t raise hand or steel against you.’

  ‘However you plead, we were charged not to listen.’ The more stolid, older clansman set his footing, prepared to follow through in pitiless devotion.

  Warned of his peril by that small move, Arithon braced the ship’s wheel and faced forward, all the terrible, bright anger gone out of him.

  He said in clear and unflinching surrender, ‘I won’t resist. That’s the measure and sum of my trust in your judgment.’ Through another veiling shower of spray, pinned in the sputtering flare of the deck lantern, he met the well-meant opposition of his protectors with an honesty that laid open his defenses. ‘Faith in my character should argue my case. Surely, if the Mistwraith’s geas held sway, I’d fight to kill anyone who sought to gainsay me.’ Horror and old pain snapped his tone of surgical logic as he added the unthinkable, last weapon he had to forestall his loss of autonomy. ‘Think, Vhandon, I ask you! Don’t cross my will, Talvish! Give Caolle’s memory due grace to stand as my inadequate testimony …’

  The vision of the brigantine’s deck vanished back into darkness, leaving Earl Jieret cast adrift. The helpless, aching conviction stayed with him, that s’Ffalenn compassion would vanquish sound sense and keep Arithon on course for the mainland. Whatever the problem his Grace vowed to set right, whatever the implied threat hanging over an innocent life, his adamant choice to effect intervention would trigger a chain of untold consequences. Unless Vhandon and Talvish stayed firm and rejected his cause by main force, at daybreak, far southward, the Khetienn would set her anchor into the shallows of the harbor at Sanpashir.

  Still lost in the void where Sight crossed the veil, Jieret tried to cry warning that the last living prince of Rathain should turn back to sea and protect the irreplaceable legacy of his lineage. The survival of Rathain’s clans dangled on the slender thread of his life. Whether or not Arithon escaped Desh-thiere’s curse, he jeopardized the unfulfilled promise of blood descendants who could uphold charter law and restore crown rule at Ithamon.

  Yet trapped in the vise grip of prescient dream, Rathain’s caithdein had no voice. His burdened awareness of future disaster unfolded a fresh wave of precognition.

  The blank dark burned away to a stripping, fierce clarity that seared into branding vision: of a portal carved into the face of a mountain, the blank gloom of the entry guarded by gryphons and gargoyles, and framed with intricate knot patterns. Power moved through the stone, a ranging vibration beyond eyesight or hearing that answered a warding presen
ce. The place seemed to radiate uncanny peril, with even the sere, winter runners of briar broken out here and there in curling green leaves and exotic cascades of summer blossom.

  Nor was the stairwell that led to that archway deserted, despite ice and snow and the ripping, thin winds of high altitude. In dream, Jieret heard a pounding flurry of rushed footsteps, ascending.

  Arithon s’Ffalenn breasted the high landing, turned at bay with his clothing ripped ragged. He bore the Paravian-wrought longsword, Alithiel, unsheathed and at guard point, left-handed. The reversed grip was not whim, but unequivocal necessity: his quilloned dagger was held in the opposite fist, hampered by a bandage wrapped over a seeping, raw wound. Arrested in midflight, the Prince of Rathain poised and shot a swift glance behind.

  Whether or not enemies were closing on his back trail, in the distance, spread across the throat of the vale, a war host advanced in phalanx array. Sheer numbers cut off his chance of retreat into the sheltered dells of the low country. He had no cloak, no saving store of supplies, and the sky above threatened snowfall. From the valley below, the flare of a light bolt bit through the low-hanging gray overcast. Earl Jieret required no other proof that Lysaer s’Ilessid spearheaded a curse-driven pursuit.

  The bared sword flickered warning. Arithon agonized over his predicament. By his taut expression, he was already pressed near his limit by the forces of Desh-thiere’s geas. If he refused to give way to insane, vengeful hatred, his last option left was to hazard the arched entry imbued with a Sorcerer’s wardspells.

  The place was not dead. Movement flickered and stirred in the shadows across that forbidding stone threshold. Perils would lurk in the darkness within. Yet Arithon would be faced with the untenable choice of crossing inside or allowing Desh-thiere’s curse its free rein to drive him to madness.

  ‘Save us all!’ cried Earl Jieret, from the throes of his dreaming unable to divert the course of that unwritten future. ‘Where are my feal clansmen, that my s’Ffalenn liege should be faced by straits such as this?’

  Yet no answer came to him. His view into prescience faded and bled into nothing. Again he was falling, a slow, prolonged spiral that ended with a slamming, harsh impact. Unyielding earth drove the last gasp of breath from his lungs as he measured his length, facedown in the chill of a snowdrift. Shocked back to a semblance of waking awareness, he rolled onto his back, spitting ice chips. Overhead, tangled ink against the night sky, the tall oaks of Halwythwood whirled in a stately spin, in step with his lingering dizziness. Poised on the cusp between the world’s time, and the hidden veil of deep mystery, he struggled and tried to reorient his upended senses. His effort brought only limited success. The young scout who knelt and steadied his shoulder mouthed words that imprinted no sound.

  Earl Jieret felt his gaze drawn upward as though tugged by intuitive compulsion. He made out the hulking silhouette of an eagle, perched in the tree over his head. For an uncanny instant, the bird’s flat, golden eyes met and locked with his own.

  Then all the world seemed to shatter into a sleeting rain of bright sparks. At due length, the conflagration rearranged back into firm form and substance. This time, the aching cold in his joints left no doubt the power of Sighted dream had ebbed and left him unstrung.

  In harsh fact, he lay full length in crusted snow, his fall no stray figment of nightmare. The young scout still knelt at his shoulder, voicing his distraught concern.

  Jieret found no answer for words that sliced sound into meaningless increments. If his hearing seemed blurred, the air in his lungs held a surreal, sharpened clarity, and his vision, too remorseless a focus. He inhaled a mouthful of snowflakes, coughed, and turned his whirling head. Sundered from prescience, not yet firmly anchored to the confines of his flesh, he forced a careful survey of the ice-scabbed branches overhead.

  No more flaring portents ripped the night sky. The limb looming over him was bare as stripped bone against the night glitter of stars. If an eagle had perched there, or any large owl mistakenly identified by his swimming, untrustworthy eyesight, no sign remained of its presence.

  Nor could Jieret recall the details of the last augury that had shown Rathain’s prince in flight through the split-second span of an instant. Only the elusive impression remained, and the bedrock conviction that his liege would enact his free choice to court danger and return from sea voyaging.

  Why Arithon elected to tempt fate made no difference. Jieret had heard through Fiark at Innish that Cerebeld’s new circle of acolytes dabbled in unsavory practices. Seers and diviners would be tracking the Shadow Master from the instant he set foot back on land. If the earlier sequence of augury held truth, that opening would set his armed enemies marching amid the fierce storms of deep winter.

  Earl Jieret pushed away the scout’s grasp and sat up. The overriding urge harrowed him, that he must rally the clans in response.

  The phrases he blurted as he came back to himself shocked his younger companion to outspoken dismay. ‘You would call up the war band? Has a bash on the head left you daft? If our clans ride to arms, who will be left here to defend the clan families who shelter from headhunters in Halwythwood?’

  ‘Our women use bows just as well as our men.’ Jieret grimaced as a finger of snowmelt ran under the snugged collar of his hood. Disgruntled as a bear kicked untimely from sleep, he checked only to assure that his sword was still with him, then clawed himself upright. Back on his feet, still weak at the knees, he shook clods of ice from his leathers. ‘I don’t care if it’s winter! Or that Daon Ramon Barrens is no sane place to set watch for an Alliance invasion! My Sight has cried warning. Arithon s’Ffalenn has set the Khetienn on a return course for the continent. Whatever ill twist of fate’s brought him back, unless we stand ready to effect intervention, Desh-thiere’s curse will draw Lysaer s’Ilessid into the crown territory of Rathain.’

  Winter 5669

  Vigil

  Still flushed from hot argument over the dispensation of the palace store of wax candles, Gace Steward bristled like a belligerent rooster before the outer gate that accessed the main square. A watch captain with a set, bulldog jaw crowded the postern behind him, in command of the row of sunwheel guards posted outside the entry. Beyond their armed ranks, the unruly crowd milled and shouted. Catcalls and the intermittent crack of thrown gravel signaled the temper abroad in the streets. Neither steward nor captain seemed inclined to open the iron grille for the determined, small party just emerged from the secure hall of state.

  Prince Kevor led, clad in the deep blue mantle sewn with the gold star blazon of Tysan. At his heels marched the pair of honor guards royal protocol assigned to his presence. Princess Ellaine came after their staid, martial tread, firm courtesy leashing her motherly instincts. An exasperating interval spent coercing stout servants to carry the requisitioned crates to the square had worn her self-command. Just barely bound to civilized manners, she paused in stiff silence as Kevor confronted the impasse that blocked the outer gate. Love and pride for her son all but burst her last semblance of dignity. Yet her role as a parent demanded restraint. She understood she must defer the oncoming confrontation to her son, who had startlingly seized his sovereign power of command. Let the boy achieve his success without adult help in his proud bid to lay claim to a ruler’s autonomy.

  The bitter, hard fact that Ellaine herself had failed to win the same due respect through all the years of her marriage must not be permitted to hobble Kevor’s fledgling effort. Her protective unease seemed shared by the honor guards, who marched in matched step the requisite two strides behind. If the young prince had claimed their heart’s loyalty, the watch officer beside Gace outranked them. His direct order to stand down and return to the palace would force them to break Kevor’s trust, or else bring a charge of insubordination.

  Chin up, head encircled by the fillet of his princely rank, Kevor retained the born statesman’s instinct to offer his challenge first. ‘You will stand aside.’ The resonant baritone of his matured voice rang thro
ugh the bleak, icy air. He did not slow his pace until he confronted Gace Steward face-to-face. Taller than the weasel-quick steward, he waited.

  The presence of the man he would grow to become shone from him in that moment, a burst of transcendence that stopped Ellaine’s breath and caused the honor guard to stand straight with squared shoulders.

  Gace Steward was caught short, evidently expecting a boyish outburst of justification for outrageous behavior. Kevor said nothing, but gave a clipped nod to the captain, demanding deferent obedience.

  ‘There are rioters, young master,’ Gace interjected, his rushed words glibly patronizing. ‘Your safety must not be compromised.’

  Kevor turned his head. In the light of the torch that burned in the gate sconce, his hair wore glints of carnelian. His eyes, freezing blue, swept the steward up and down in magisterial dismissal. ‘The realm’s security is at issue. I will not have innocent lives set at risk. My place is to act, or I was not born royal, and the circlet I wear is a mockery.’ His regard framed the watch captain, his focus a chiseled imperative. ‘You will open the gate.’

  A gruff man, but honest, the officer folded mailed arms in planted obstinacy. ‘Two honor guards are insufficient protection from––’

  Kevor interrupted, his impatience no child’s balked pique, but a rage founded by his righteous concern for Avenor’s threatened people. ‘How many guards were assigned to my father on the days he gave alms in the square?’

  ‘Ten.’ The watch captain shook his head, his admiration no match for his stolid good sense. ‘But we already had a half company outside, formed into a protective cordon around the cupola before the Divine Prince made his public appearance.’

  ‘There’s no time for that.’ Above Kevor’s head, more lightning flared; distant shouts broke over the booming din of the populace converged in the palace square. ‘Get me ten, or answer for every drop of shed blood if a riot breaks out in my absence.’