Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  ‘Save your sympathies for the horse,’ said the Shadow Master, well aware Fionn Areth choked back nausea. ‘In an hour you might wish I was the wicked brigand you imagine. If we find ourselves taken, remember, I didn’t commit the sensible cruelty and fire the destrier’s tail for distraction – oh, Dharkaron’s bloody vengeance!’

  That oath ripped out through a snatched pause, as another Koriani crossed their path and deflected them again from their preferred downhill course toward the harborside.

  ‘This way. Fast!’ Arithon ducked left, then slipped through the trailing, dead canes of a rose trellis. Fionn Areth clawed after him, tearing his bloodstained bandages on the briar and sliding on icy rocks. The pair tacked a desperate, erratic passage through a garden of cast-plaster statues, winged swans and naked nymphs bearing birdbaths stuffed with rotted caches of oak leaves. A side stair at last let them up through a pigeon loft, where Dakar once held assignations.

  Relentless, the scrying spells in the vat continued to track their least movement. Arithon’s snatched reminiscence of a humorous escapade frayed into static as the thin flurrying of snow interfered with the sigils that sealed the connection.

  ‘Does that building have an exit other than the front entrance?’ Lirenda demanded in glacial objectivity.

  The seeress’s reply emerged through the whiffle of startled pigeons, set flying across image in the vat. ‘The downstairs passage leads into the brewer’s. The doorway’s kept barred with an iron hasp and lock.’ But she sounded unsure such ordinary measures could pin down their volatile quarry.

  The next instant, the waterborne scrying went blank. ‘We’re cut off by earth element,’ Cadgia informed.

  A subtle change in the quality of Elaira’s leashed quiet prompted Lirenda to straighten and take notice. Eyes the flat gold of the hunting tigress surveyed the adversary perched with insouciant obedience on the wine tun. ‘What do you know?’

  Elaira’s pale features remained a closed book, unwritten with sign of dismay. Through the chill, dusty gloom, her regard in return held the same steely gleam as the finished gloss on a sword blade. ‘About rearing squabs? Very little. The ones I stole from the dovecotes in Morvain, we ate to get rid of the evidence.’

  Lirenda returned a cameo smile, her voice like poison gloved in honey. ‘Don’t waste my time. Believe this, for the effort, I’m going to see you pay dearly.’

  Elaira shrugged, world-weary and indifferent. ‘What coin do I have that’s not spent already?’ But nonetheless, her hands stayed locked tight throughout her unflinching reply. ‘The brewer has unsavory habits in bed, and a wife who keeps ironclad books. To pay for his pleasures outside of the till, he takes silver from husbands and dallying wives and lets them keep trysts in his cousin’s dovecote. Beyond Dakar’s hearsay, Arithon once said folk went in for a jar and came out looking much too exhilarated to account for the watered-down beer the mayor’s bailiffs were paid bribes to ignore.’

  ‘A good thing the order has the benefit of your council. No other initiate has the low cast of mind for such sordid snippets of gossip.’ The slide of layered silk skirts a poured swish of sound, Lirenda turned her back and resumed her vulture’s survey of the scrying vat. While Cadgia and her handpicked circle of talent cast a fresh augury riddled with barbed sigils of seeking, the former first senior maintained her clipped interrogation. ‘Do you know how the brewer arranged for covert exits?’

  ‘I don’t.’ The bare bones of Elaira’s honesty rang just as chill off the musty board walls of the shed. ‘Arithon was discreet for good reason. Dakar could have been flensed by any number of cuckolded husbands if the love nest became common knowledge.’

  ‘Cast a search ward over the brewer’s,’ Lirenda commanded. ‘We’ll tag them as they come out.’

  ‘Who do we have posted in the neighborhood?’ Cadgia asked, her rounded cheeks flushed with affront that her quarry had slipped her spelled shackles yet again.

  A pause followed, filled by the sigh of tense breathing. Crystal chimed softly to crystal as the seeress dangled her personal stone within the etheric field of the main quartz focus. She then murmured a list of names set amid the arrhythmic verses of advanced incantation. Under Cadgia’s painstaking, efficient instruction, a new net of sigils was woven. Through a sending unfurled through the core matrix of the amethyst, other directions were dispatched to the enchantresses stationed outside.

  Elaira’s short nails mined small crescents in her palms as the drawing spells sealed and, on Cadgia’s release, deployed outward.

  ‘I still smell earth,’ the scryer announced. ‘They’ve gone underground? A tunnel stair might be angled below the boards of the cellar.’ Little else would account for the darkened, featureless surface reflected in the vat; only a specialized few sigils could carry binding influence through earth, and even those were uncertain, unless their powers were channeled through a quartz focus tapped to a flux line.

  ‘Patience,’ urged Cadgia. ‘Hold strong. The snowfall’s still thin, yet. We’ll have our quarry nailed down the instant they cross back under the biddable influence of air.’

  ‘Wait,’ whispered the seeress. ‘Wait. There’s something. I sense the boy. Yes, that is him. He’s broadcasting fear.’ Eyes closed, her consciousness sealed into trance, she rocked to a rhythm of perceptions tuned far beyond range of ordinary hearing. ‘Look for a dray filled with fuller’s earth, I think. The mare in the traces won’t settle. She’s unnerved by the tension she picks up through the hands of an anxious carter.’

  ‘Fuller’s earth? The devil!’ Lirenda stalked to the vat, her immaculate grooming cobwebbed in sickly light as Cadgia’s swift adjustments to the spell seals charged the water, and resurged to a glow of pallid phosphor to keep pace with the seeress’s shifted perception.

  A new image unfurled, steady and clear, the moving chaos of street traffic marred by a scrim of flurrying snow. An unpainted wagon centered the scene, heaped with a tarp-covered load of dry clay. The gray horse in the shafts moved head high and snorting, her flanks crowded by a troupe of rollicking gallants wearing gaudy cloaks sewn with ribbons. Their party was trailed by two trollops, equally blithe under billowing mantles of peach silk and daffodil yellow.

  The unwieldy cart made balked progress in the press. Ahead, a merchant’s lacquered coach tacked a lumbering course down a thoroughfare clogged with confused throngs of foot traffic. In due course, a farm wagon bearing crated pigs jostled alongside in a hub-to-hub jockey for position.

  ‘What street? Give me bearings!’ Lirenda brooded over the image in the vat, nails rapping an impatient tattoo on the aged wood of the rim.

  ‘That’s the back wall of the exciseman’s yard. No place else has iron spikes and gold finials set into capstones of mortar.’ In unruffled precision, Cadgia deciphered other details half-masked by the turmoil and the murky, gray weather. ‘Our party is northbound.’

  The seeress sent precise word of that bearing to her counterparts stationed on watch in the streets. ‘The fugitives will soon be picked up by a search point. The garrison guard has posted lancers and pikemen screening traffic at each major crossroad.’

  ‘Very good.’ Cadgia raised a glance lit to triumph. ‘Unless your two renegades want that clay for their grave shrouds, we’ll have them exposed and back on the run.’

  ‘Let the guard flush them,’ Lirenda decreed, confident the carter who transported live contraband would turn aside rather than submit to a thorough inspection by nerve-jumpy garrison forces.

  The wagon inched forward. On the wine tun, fists jammed to shut lips, Elaira all but stopped breathing. Her insane, almost suicidal plea to let the worst happen, and make an end to her harrowing dread won no pity from Ath Creator. The scene in the vat spun itself out with an agonized, detailed caprice that might have spurred humor had the prize stakes not been flesh and blood.

  Nor was reprieve likely. If the dray bearing fuller’s earth sought to turn down a side street, the farm vehicle and its bawling cargo of pigs cut
off that small chance of escape. Ahead, the broad, satin bulk of the carriage blocked sight of the approaching checkpoint, where a rising altercation unraveled to shrill shouts as the reveling young men in their ribbons and exuberance picked an argument with the mayor’s guardsmen. The footmen who attended the coach proved more biddable. When challenged, they stepped off the running board in long-faced resignation and opened the gleaming door on command of the burly sergeant. A broad-shouldered guard with a scar on his chin jammed his torso into the compartment and began a belabored search under cushions and lap robes, to the bilious contempt of the occupants.

  The two whores amused themselves as they could. One flirted with the grizzled drover of the pig cart. The other, in her frothy cascade of peach skirts, grew bored poking straw at the snout of the sow in the crates. With her mantle bundled up to her ears in disdain, she sailed on ahead, determined to insinuate herself among the uproarious pack of drunk dandies.

  The sergeant, meantime, disengaged from the coach and seized the bridle of the gray draft mare. ‘Gotta be searched, no exceptions. Mayor’s orders.’ He beckoned on his compatriots to attend to the drover, who nodded rather than risk his quaking liver to somebody’s excitable pike.

  The rabble-rousing dandies flowed aside in a whirl of wild color, divided by the departing coach and a liveried driver who held no compunction against laying the whip on his team in close quarters. Through the grind of iron wheels, and a plowed swirl of snow, two surcoated lancers broke past. They swarmed over the dray, their drawn knives slashing the cords securing the sun-faded tarpaulins. They then grasped their pole arms and used the bladed ends to stab and stir through the load of dry clay underneath.

  Cadgia’s black curse entangled with Elaira’s choked-back snort of wild laughter. ‘Ath, they’re not in there, of course. For Arithon, the ploy would be much too obvious.’

  ‘Where then?’ snapped Lirenda, lips tight with fury. ‘How were we misled?’

  The young seeress shook her head, the odd, bloodied light thrown off the fired sigils sparking her circlet of amethysts deep red. ‘They are there. I sense the boy’s presence quite strongly.’

  In confounded frustration, Cadgia’s circle watched the enspelled waters in the vat. Its reflected turmoil quickly brewed into the overblown style of farce only Jaelot’s entrenched snobbery could produce as one of the dandies refused to be searched. He waved eloquent hands and howled until all within earshot understood that men-at-arms were known to filch jewelry.

  ‘You can never be certain,’ he warned his companions. ‘These men might seize our coin on the extortionist pretense of keeping the mayor’s law and order.’

  Moneyed and reckless, and surrounded by friends, the young rake well knew he could heckle without suffering dangerous consequences. His spate of histrionics should have stayed harmless, except that the trollop in her ruffled peach silk pointed out that one of the young men seemed the lighter of his purse already.

  The gentleman she collared slapped a hand to his belt, found cut thongs where his scrip had been moments before, and raised a cry fit to damage the hearing of everyone in the district. Heads turned on all quarters. The circle of Koriani scryers at the vat enjoyed an untrammeled view as the yellow-clad prostitute simpered, then passed off a squealing piglet to the lancer who had just finished searching the wagon. He accepted her offering, too flustered to shed his tongue-tied male leer over curves draped in feminine clothes. Then the farmer screamed also, for the glaring discovery someone had unlatched his sow’s crate.

  Her four-legged instincts unimpaired by armed might, or confounding human fracas, she spun toward the distressed cries of her young and lowered her snout in a charge.

  The lancer holding the piglet went down, his legs scythed from under his mail-clad weight by three hundredweight of enraged porcine motherhood. At first no one heeded his bloodied shoulder, where the yellow-clad prostitute’s lightning sword had crippled the arm that wielded the pole weapon.

  ‘That tart’s wearing a black petticoat,’ Cadgia observed, her surprise distinct over the babble of noise from the vat. Through a blur of commotion, the dandies set to and began battering guardsmen, fist and dirk. Their sergeant gave no curt order to restore peace, hung up as he was like a cod in a net by billows of peach silk fringed with tassels.

  That strumpet also wielded cold steel like a veteran. Her victim fell, stabbed through and twitching, while blood blossomed in arterial gouts through the lace-and-silk shroud that muffled his screams.

  ‘That’s no petticoat, imbecile!’ Lirenda elbowed herself into the closed circle by the vat, steaming with fury and blame. ‘That’s the boy, Fionn Areth, under that silk! He’s still wearing the executioner’s cloak, with a thread in the lining interwoven with the elemental signature of the earth.’

  ‘Dakar’s work, surely,’ Cadgia extrapolated, too professionally engrossed to take umbrage. ‘What a fiendish turn of genius, to drag along a cart full of clay to mislay our searching attention.’

  A growl underneath their flurried conversation, the street scene exploded into full-blown pandemonium. While bystanders scattered from the wrath of the loose sow, and the farmer barged in fist-waving pursuit, two lancers confronted the Master of Shadow. He poised on light feet, a knife gripped in each hand, the cart of fuller’s earth parked between like a hillock of disputed territory.

  ‘Blink,’ said Arithon s’Ffalenn in crisp courtesy. Due warning given, he hooked the ripped tarp on one blade and gave the slack folds a swift snap. Clay burst and flew, fanned on by a gust. The guards jerked back, blinded. Then they sat down, folded on the cobbles like dropped marionettes, each with a thrown knife impaled in the neck exposed above his steel gorget.

  Their killer retreated, slick as sleight-of-hand flimflam, under the muddied wheels of the farm cart. Two lancers dived after. They emerged, craning confused heads, then barreled headlong through the scried image cast in the vintner’s vat. The quarry they mowed down all comers to pursue was a jonquil yellow hem, fast vanishing under a door stoop. They pounced, skinned elbows, and reeled in the kicking contents. The hood strings proved attached to the hind legs of another pig, which squealed in soprano chorus with those crated brethren still penned in the bed of the farm cart.

  Elaira collapsed on crossed arms by the wine tun, choking on laughter and tears.

  ‘We’ve lost them again,’ said Cadgia, too humorless to care as she stated the painfully obvious.

  Lirenda whirled about and discovered that her thoughtless, tense hands had mangled three heirloom bracelets. She exploded with an oath to redden the ears of Jaelot’s most execrable fishwife, then detailed the punishment everyone would suffer if Arithon’s location could not be recovered immediately.

  A first combing sweep, a second, then a third, exhaustive examination of the neighborhood failed to turn up the two fugitives. When Cadgia tasked the seer to scan the whole quarter for unusual signs of disturbance, all she found was a half troop of the mayor’s men-at-arms splashed with horse glue, casting circles of sticky footprints in and out of the furniture maker’s. Their noisy persistence touched off a second-floor journeyman, who vented his temper by cascading the contents of three sacks of down stuffing over the heads of his persecutors.

  The captain of the guard arrived on the scene and arrested the heckler in an explosive show of armed force.

  ‘Daelion preserve!’ Elaira exclaimed, from her recovered vantage on the barrel top. ‘Pray they just fine that poor citizen for nuisance. He’s much too young to know Arithon s’Ffalenn, far less to have acted in collaboration.’

  ‘Why ever should you care what becomes of that nobody?’ Lirenda gasped, vexed. She stabbed a finger at the vat with imperious orders to keep dogging the soldiers’ activities.

  The mayor’s men swarmed in a house-to-house search, leaking purposeful dust storms of feathers and leaving handprints in glue upon door handles, chest keys, and closets. Their disgruntled efforts yielded no fugitives. Only threats from irate servants, and torn
boot cuffs from the teeth of a matron’s snarling lapdog.

  ‘Stymied,’ Cadgia admitted at length. Her announcement held wry admiration as she raked bony fingers through her fallen-down wisps of cream hair. ‘Whatever bolt-hole our quarry has found, someone’s offered him powerful protection. The sigils we cast all spiral downward. Until something changes, we’re hopelessly grounded into a vortex of darkness.’

  Lirenda jerked her chin in negation, her exhale hissed through locked teeth. ‘No. This isn’t the end. Whatever obscuring darkness you find, keep on trying to track through it. If our quarry has help, he’s still hemmed in Jaelot. The mayor won’t allow his arch nemesis to win free. Nor will I do less. Be very sure no one here will find rest until we’ve untied the knot that is binding our spell weave to find the Master of Shadow.’

  Winter Solstice Afternoon 5670

  Bolt-holes

  The oak-paneled door shut to a well-oiled click of the latchkey. Arithon surveyed the candlelit foyer, with its carved agate cats, waist high, and an ebony side table inlaid with patterned birds of paradise cut from mother-of-pearl. The carpets were Narms dyed, and worn dim with age. The floor beneath, just as old, was maple parquet, merled with the raised grain that bespoke generations of beeswax and silk-slippered footsteps.

  Still breathless from a sharp uphill run, one hand gripped to a gashed wrist to keep bloodstains from marring his unknown patron’s moneyed elegance, Prince Arithon fought steadiness into the requisite words of courtesy. ‘Thank you. We would have been gored on some halberdier’s weapon if you had not stepped in and sheltered us. Have I the pleasure of knowing the name of the benefactor who sent you?’

  The servant who slid the iron key from the lock was well dressed, but not in house livery. His quality mantle of gray loomed wool more befitted a patronized scholar. Aged, but not frail, he had long-jointed hands and clear, oakbark eyes; the trimmed white hair at his temples curled like the fringe on an egg. His smile was formal, and his hand on Fionn Areth’s shoulder too firm to be mistaken for tact. ‘You will meet my mistress directly. Please follow?’