Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Winter Solstice Eve 5669

  XIII.

  Passage

  Aboard the brigantine Khetienn, rocking gently at anchor in the cove beneath the grim cliffs of Sanpashir, Dakar watched like a cobra, the creases at his eyes tightened in concert with a grave collection of frown lines. He had to use mage-sight, since the lamps were unlit. Across a thickened, premature gloom cast by the battened-down hatch of the stern cabin, Arithon picked through his chest of bard’s clothing and chose the black velvet jacket trimmed at the shoulders with fur from the elusive northern leopard.

  Like a man under threat of a fight on slick footing, Dakar assayed questions cautiously. ‘Isn’t rare fur a shade overdressed for a visit to share small talk with tribesmen? I never yet saw the desertman who valued a pearl ahead of a spool of spun goat hair.’

  Arithon tipped up his eyebrows. ‘I have a point that needs making.’

  Vague suspicion firmed into dreadful, ripe certainty. ‘Not with the tribesmen.’

  ‘No.’ On that casual syllable, Arithon slipped on the jacket. He threaded the eyelets and adjusted the looped waistline over his belted, plain hose and a baldric already hung with his sword, and a main gauche that carried an unbearable history.

  ‘Not that blade,’ Dakar whispered under his breath. ‘Any other sharpened length of steel under sky, but for Ath’s blessed pity, that one should be thrown in the ocean.’

  His entreaty ignored, he added, ‘Damn you!’ as the Master of Shadow flicked up the latch on the hanging locker and picked out the one cloak inside that was dyed a true emerald green. ‘Step out wearing that, and every loon who sees color will be handed the gift of your bloodline.’

  ‘A prize observation.’ Arithon tossed the garment over the too-elegant jacket, then tucked back the hood until the dove gray silk lining became less blatantly visible. His hose and ankle-high boots for a mercy were plain enough to be any man’s. The cut of the cloak included no ornament, a choice orchestrated to blur the distinctions of class. In maddening character, Arithon prefaced the outrageous with a smile to wear the edged facets off diamond. ‘Some things won’t change. The mayor’s upper-crust cronies in Jaelot still measure a man by the worth of his clothing.’

  The last trace of color blanched from Dakar’s curved cheeks.

  ‘Weak nerves?’ quipped the Shadow Master. ‘I’m surprised.’ Ripe sarcasm warned of his shortening temper, and the futility of further argument. ‘Given such an elaborate invitation, we already know I’m expected. Since the Koriani took this much trouble to draw me, they might as well get what they’ve bargained for.’

  Dakar swallowed, raked by the unpleasant, sweaty awareness that only one method existed by which he and Arithon could reach Jaelot before the execution preordained to occur on the solstice. ‘Well, you’ve grossly underestimated my part in your plan. I can’t harness lane flux. Nor have I even the flimsiest hope of raising the power to enable a transfer across distance. The operant works of a Paravian circle lie far outside the scope of my experience as a Fellowship spellbinder.’

  Arithon paused. The directness that marked his most volatile mood lit sparks like filed iron in his glance. ‘But you do know the runes and ciphers and permissions the Sorcerers use to harness the raw force once it crests.’

  The Mad Prophet let fly, his exasperation masking sharp fear. ‘Don’t think to try meddling on that scale of magnitude. For one thing, the Warden of Althain would take umbrage.’ Touched by the ice-cold remembrance that Asandir had taken elaborate care never to let Arithon witness such mysteries, Dakar stood up too fast. His crown thumped the jut of the overhead deck beam hard enough to jelly his brainpan.

  Swearing only added to the vicious burst of pain. One hand clamped on a goose egg bruise, the Mad Prophet railed on with his list of sensible remonstrances. ‘We’re both past our depth. Last night, the entire lane went unstable. The pulse patterns might appear to have settled, but planetary magnetics deranged by main force have been known to recoil in backlash. Static interference has upset my contact with Althain Tower. That speaks volumes for the packet of trouble that’s afoot. If you think the root cause isn’t Morriel’s doing, nothing else in five kingdoms has even the basic, brute resource!’

  ‘I agree.’ No whit less obstinate, Arithon opened the glass-fronted cabinet and unlashed his lyranthe, then hooked up a dark bundle of cloth already set waiting against the aft boards of his berth. ‘That’s why we’re going to raise power in that circle and ride the solstice surge north into Jaelot.’

  Eyes squeezed shut against tears of frustration, Dakar sifted through his last statement for the ill-fated word which had opened the loophole to allow contradiction.

  ‘Dakar, it’s because of Morriel’s extraordinary effort.’ Arithon freed a kink from the strap that hung his fine instrument at his shoulder. As he scooped up the sealed pages of orders he had penned for the Khetienn’s mate in his absence, he volunteered, ‘Why else would she frame her opening move as an outright attack on Athera? Her feud’s not with me. She’s more likely just presented her demand that the restraint on the Waystone be lifted and reversed by the Fellowship.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ the Mad Prophet shot back before thought.

  The pause afterward shredded a handful of seconds.

  Poised against the light-filtered square of the companionway, his cloth bundle at rest against the wrapped neck of his lyranthe, the s’Ffalenn prince no longer smiled. ‘Then what else do you know? In what way could my doings leave the Fellowship Sorcerers vulnerable?’

  ‘The idea is nonsense,’ Dakar agreed, a transparent lie that would surely come back to haunt him. His own vision of prophecy had cast Arithon s’Ffalenn as the indispensable linchpin; on his life and sanity turned the Sorcerers’ hopes for their restoration back to seven.

  Arithon knew only that he had jabbed and blindly encountered a weakness. ‘Then for nonsense you’ll help me achieve a lane transfer to Jaelot. At the Fellowship’s insistence, I vowed to stay alive. But my blood oath to them gave no sanction for my name to be used to lead innocents to slaughter as the pawns of political byplay. While the Koriani Prime stoops to setting such traps, I shall disarm them, with or without your assistance.’

  Inexpressibly angry, Dakar flared back. ‘Well, whatever you do, I won’t parade into Jaelot prinked and jeweled like an effete townsman! Not for the sake of your arrogant pride, which could spring an unbridled disaster.’

  Arithon already strode toward the main deck. A blurred outline against the molten gold of a midwinter southland sunset, he said in brass calm, ‘Lysaer’s in Tysan, smugly counting his assets. If you won’t join the party in feathers and brocade, you’ll just have to pass as my servant.’

  Dakar bit back retort, canny enough to cut losses before he became mauled beyond recourse. Lysaer in Tysan was sheer supposition; and Arithon’s comeuppance would be served soon enough by the hand of a Fellowship Sorcerer.

  ‘Just waken that circle, and see what you get,’ the Mad Prophet warned as he trailed his charge out of the stern cabin. His own memories of chastisement under Asandir’s authority still made him cringe and sweat. A puffing bear to the prince’s cat grace, he heaved his bulk down the ship’s side battens and into the Khetienn’s poised longboat. ‘I swear on my dead mother’s virtue, you’ll be sorry as the fool who pissed on a flagstaff in a thunderstorm.’

  No man who dared trifle with the flux of the earth escaped censure from Sethvir himself.

  The wind blew cutting and thin from the north, sifting through the ruin on the cliff top. Hunched like a turtle under three layers of cloaks, Dakar blew a sigh of resignation. The chalk in his hand seemed a sliver of ice. Where drifts of blown sand had not buried the old rune lines, dry stalks of weeds taken root in cracked stone clawed at his shins through each stride. Nor did his gut-deep uneasiness abate with the choice to let Arithon’s willful nature run the course of inevitable consequence.

  Fellowship reproach at its mildest form was an experience no sane man rep
eated.

  Nor did Parrien’s two liegemen fare better in their effort to divert Rathain’s prince from disaster. The blistering argument which kept them aboard the Khetienn could have hazed solid bedrock to give way. The reasons Arithon used to ram home his point made sound enough sense, until one recalled he intended to spring a Koriani trap with only an apprentice spellbinder’s backing.

  The sole avenue left was complaint, and the bloodletting sting of rife insult.

  ‘I can configure old ciphers until we both freeze,’ Dakar snapped as he jammed his toe on yet another fragment of loose rock. ‘That still won’t raise enough lane force to shift the arse end of a gnat.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ rebutted Arithon, bent over his lyranthe with his ear laid against the ebony and pearl inlaid soundboard. He tweaked the peg of a bass string, then tested its pitch by striking a glass-clean harmonic. ‘I won’t ask for miracles. Just have the last figure in place before midnight.’

  ‘Ask or not, you expect the impossible all the same.’ Dakar set down his foot, fed up with wrenched tendons. ‘When you come to suffer the sorry results, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  He shifted the offending stone out of his path and scuffed at the detritus of lichens. The fragment of inlaid white agate he laid bare framed a curve that raised the small hairs on his nape. Excitement coursed through him, despite his misgivings. He had found the grand axis of the pattern.

  Dakar faced the east, his next steps taken softly as he sensed the fine current which married the live lane force into the pattern’s tuned spiral. ‘I doubt these old runes have spun power for centuries. You’re fully aware that just one broken line could hurl us both to perdition?’

  Arithon stifled a sharp crow of laughter. ‘Asandir’s right. Your memory’s as holed as a sieve.’

  Dakar flushed, embarrassed. The reminder of the late Masterbard’s death hurt far too much. The roots of that tragedy led back to Jaelot, a sorrow he would have paid blood to erase. Nor was Arithon’s jabbing, cruel humor aught else but an effort to mask the same lingering grief.

  ‘You’re forgiven, for that,’ the Mad Prophet said. ‘I just don’t want to die with another grand blunder on my already overworked conscience.’ Under stems of dry sage, his questing fingers had found the east interstice. He knelt, swept a clean space over black agate, and wielded the chalk to scribe the rune for the element of air. ‘Damn you, Teir’s’Ffalenn, are you sure you have to go through with this?’

  No reply from the bard, perched on a broken drum tower’s foundation; westward, the day-old sliver of new moon dusted the black landscape of dunes in weak silver. Six hours remained until midnight. Dakar would need every minute to complete an array that Asandir could invoke with precision inside a half dozen heartbeats. Mounded sand on the pattern would have posed no impediment; for a Fellowship presence, the bedrock underneath would volunteer its deep secrets in homage.

  Ripped on the hand by a runner of thorn, Dakar swore aloud. He glared at the prince, whose trained background included all the constraints of wise conjury about to be broken. ‘You know that boy has small odds of being saved. You’ll risk everything anyway, and not one damned thing I can say will shake you out of this folly.’

  ‘There are limits.’ Arithon struck a fierce minor triplet into the teeth of the wind. ‘Find another way to bring my double out of Jaelot before he gets torched on false charges.’

  None existed. Dakar licked the seeped blood from his knuckle and grimly set to with the chalk.

  Night deepened. Winter stars replaced the low moon. The wind keened over the clifftop ruin, sweetened by the lyric, plucked strains of Arithon’s lyranthe. Dakar sat huddled in the lee of the foundation, his work with the ciphers completed. Amid the sparkling runs and snatched crotchets of grace notes, he picked out isolate fragments of the melody Arithon had once captured by intuition to waken the old circle in Jaelot. Knees hugged to his chest, the Mad Prophet cherished the mean consolation that perhaps Sethvir’s intervention would not fall on their heads after all.

  Carefully, quietly, he masked smug relief, that the music sung by Paravian dancers to channel the life chord across latitude had not been accomplished by means of a single composition. To raise lane force to peak magnitude, the orchestrated balance of vibration and tone must be tailored to match each disparate location. The keys sung for Jaelot would not waken Sanpashir. No matter how perfectly Arithon played, his rescue was foredoomed to failure.

  Complaisant that sunrise would find them still on the cliff top, Dakar settled into his cranny of stone. He tucked his bearded chin on his forearm and snored himself into sound sleep.

  His rest proved short-lived.

  Mild dreams of warm women and hot taprooms with beer tore away to the unmistakable raw thrum of potentized lane force.

  Dakar shoved erect, skinning both elbows on the rock supporting his back. ‘Merciful Ath, I don’t believe this!’

  Just past his feet, the Sanpashir focus gleamed active, lines of old inlay rewritten in phosphor and smoke. The north to south axis lay darkened in places where banked sand still obscured the design. Three major interstices were choked in crabbed briar, but those buried fragments would scarcely impede the coiling flow of raised lane force. Dakar had seen Asandir come and go from Paravian circles sunk beneath tons of smashed masonry.

  The Sanpashir pattern was proved intact, its ring wards and runes unimpaired. It would draw the earth’s magnetic forces into focus in answer to the will that commanded the burgeoning scale of its resonance. Since Arithon’s powers of mastery were blocked, he had to have accessed the gateway to deep mystery through his trained sensitivity to sound.

  Dakar stumbled forward, bent on reaching the bard, who still played within the rim of the focus. The soft, seeking notes he recalled between catnaps were now wholly changed, re-formed and melded into a breathtaking fire of unity. This was no longer the known composition Arithon had used to waken the circle at Jaelot.

  A fresh theme had been added, the original phrasing reduced to a fragile, high counterpoint, exquisitely rearranged to partner a countermelody refigured in a new signature. This one rang grander, darker, with notes that spoke of burning black sands and bladed rays of fierce sunlight. Set in starkly ranged measures and acid-bright chords that shifted in majesty through the major keys and grand sevenths, Arithon had reforged the original dance the Paravians had celebrated at Sanpashir.

  No time left to wonder how that daunting feat was accomplished. If bardic sensitivity could cross the barrier of time, Dakar beheld its dangerous consequence as the pattern flared up into sheeting, hard light and rocked the still night with leashed power. By his flustered measure, the stars turned a minute away from the inaugural solstice flux at midnight.

  Sethvir, with his earth-sense, should have responded. No exceptions were granted, no stays of tolerance. The compact’s law was unequivocally stern when Athera’s mysteries were channeled for use without sanction.

  Yet no Sorcerer arrived to put down the lane’s rising. Dakar watched in horrified consternation as the casually chalked ciphers implicating him as Arithon’s consenting accomplice flared also, branding the darkness into an actinic brilliance.

  ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Arithon, desist!’

  His protest availed nothing. Mere words passed unheard. Around him, the circle responded in wild light, well beyond mortal power to subdue. Arithon’s playing had successfully tapped the high mysteries. The upshifting vibration that portended a transfer already resounded through the energetic linkages of matter. The solidity of lines and forms lost their stasis, until the surrounding drifts of sand and the tumbled stone foundations appeared distorted by roiling heat waves.

  The guiding tones from the lyranthe were no longer necessary. Athera herself now impelled the stepped measures of the song to a peal of meshed resonance and vibration. The confluence of roused energies interlocked with the ciphers that lent them guidance and intent.

  Arithon sensed the instant his work stood complete
. Alone at the cross of the central axis, he arose. Through the fountaining brilliance as the lane’s flux thundered toward its inevitable crescendo, the Mad Prophet heard his hailing shout. Then he bent and laid down the heirloom lyranthe inherited from his past master. At least, Dakar saw, Rathain’s prince retained enough presence of mind to place her beyond the radius of the grand arc. Since every grudge-holding citizen in Jaelot would surely recall the exquisite workmanship adorning Halliron’s instrument, she would be left safely outside the coruscating threshold where raw power would lift into transfer.

  Then, whipped by the uncanny forces he had raised, Arithon beckoned to Dakar. ‘Are you coming or staying?’

  The Mad Prophet, worried fool that he was, stepped forward rather than back.

  Asandir returned to Althain Tower past the hour of midnight that led into the morn of winter solstice. Ragged, exhausted, drawn hollow with worry, he materialized at the grand junction inside the focus circle. While the powers of the lane flickered and flared back to uneasy quiescence, he winced for chilled feet still numbed from exposure on Daon Ramon Barrens. When he glanced up at last, he found candles lit in the gargoyle sconces and Luhaine there to receive him.

  ‘You look pale as a marsh wisp,’ Asandir greeted in caustic sympathy, well aware of whose dogged, meticulous touch had restrung the continuity of the third lane energies. That boon alone had allowed his prompt transfer from the ruins of Ithamon. As workworn himself, he stumbled a step, recaptured his balance, then brushed the lapse off with a question, ‘How is he?’

  The reference was to Sethvir, who, amid breaking crisis, had shielded with spells of raw power to bridge space and time and protect the stability of the grimwards.

  ‘He’s resting.’ Luhaine’s presence drifted at the edge of the focus pattern, too distressed to try even the pretense of his usual fatuous dignity. ‘You should be warned. When the lanes went unstable, his earth-sense was marred. He said he could see and feel nothing across the entire breadth of the continent. That set him back to plain augury and scrying. He had no choice but to use his personal resources to buffer every one of those wards from the backlash of magnetic turbulence.’