Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Arithon lingered, one sensitive hand pressed to a snowy outcrop where the stone of the hillside pressed through. The vibration he half sensed lay far outside hearing, more a breaking touch against intuitive instinct, there and then gone before mental logic could grasp it. Perhaps his own nerves had played tricks on him, with fickle rock casting back the high-frequency echoes of his own uneasy fears.

  Despite the futility, Arithon stilled his mind. He suspended his will, sought the receptive quiet that had once opened the wellspring of his mage talent.

  Nothing met his questing query. As always, the core of his trained mastery eluded him, the inner vision of refined perception swallowed into a bottomless well of blank blindness. Plunged into the familiar, searing pain, as his lifetime dedication to honed faculties rammed headlong against the slick, black wall of the blockage he had carried off the bloody field at Tal Quorin, he stamped back the bleak fury. Wrung through by fresh grief, he rejected entrapment in the clogging, numb bog of self-pity. All but running, he pressed through the dank close that opened on Beckburn Market. More imperative, now, that he find Dakar quickly; the spellbinder’s knowledge could sound for the anomaly, and identify threat or dismiss his fleeting hunch as the phantom of overwrought fancy.

  The stalls with their ramshackle gray boards and used wares were not closed, although foot traffic was scant. Arithon filled his needs with dispatch, his accent a southcoast sailhand’s slack drawl, and his dark hair masked salt-and-pepper gray. The coin he had lifted from the dandy’s purse bought him new boots for Fionn Areth. He chose also four warm shirts, a wool tunic and thick hose, and weatherproof cloaks in dull colors. Since a bow and flint striker would invite the wrong questions, he settled without, his purchases bundled and tied up in scrap twine as he set off for Threadneedle Street.

  In the perfumed sanctum of the dress shop run by the aging Madame Havrita, he obtained the promised yard of yellow ribbon. Payment was made with his own honest silver, then all of his masterbard’s glib tongue required to extricate himself from the gossip inveigled by her bevy of chattering seamstresses.

  Outside, the thin snowfall had restarted. A party of armed horsemen clopped by, their saddlecloths sewn with a private house blazon. The slight, cloaked figure burdened like a servant was given no second glance, though the wood cart at the crossing was stopped and subjected to a thorough search at sword point. While the drover vented his scathing annoyance, Arithon s’Ffalenn ducked into the ice-rimed back alley that led him a crooked course, and let out on the brick paving of Dagrien Lane.

  The tavern he sought, the Tin Flagon and Flask, overshadowed the street, its sagging half-plank balconies hung with flickering, soot-paned lanterns. Noise from inside could be heard through latched windows, and the usual drunks snored in heaps in the gutter, content to lie where they had been ejected for bingeing, obstreperous behavior. The seamier dives were Dakar’s preferred haunts when he fell into scapegrace indulgence.

  The sagging boards of the stair had not changed through the quarter century of Arithon’s absence. He pushed open the refitted door, already scarred by rough usage and the odd gouges left by sailors who believed that carved marks on port taverns would ensure a safe return from sea voyaging.

  The Flagon’s clogged air hit his lungs like a steamed blanket, a miasma of overheated bodies in damp wool, and the gagging, grease-thick scent of meat stew. The trestles were packed, the ragtag of the streets jammed cheek by jowl with the overworked seamstresses from Threadneedle Street, drawn in for the halfpenny beer. Sky signs and portents, and the escape of the dreaded Spinner of Darkness made the drinking more serious than usual. Seated, sprawled, or tipsily standing, both sexes shouted and threw dice and argued. At the Flagon, a wastrel could collapse without harm. The floor was strewn with stale rushes that had likely not been changed in a year, bones and refuse picked out in the carmine light that bled from the smoke-filmed sconces.

  Arithon blinked, eyes stung by the fug of exhaled breath and the rancid brown fumes from the tallow dips. When he failed to find Dakar’s rotund frame propped upright among the garrulous roisterers, he continued his review of the lumpish figures dropped prone upon benches and floor. Marked out by distinctive, bullroaring snores, the Mad Prophet sprawled like a walrus on the settle, his ham pink hands crossed on his breast, and his legs stuffed calf deep in the woodbin.

  He had evidently been a fixture for some time. Someone had parked a plate of stripped bones on his groin. By his head, three revelers sang off-key ditties. Curled in the straw underneath his slack bulk, two toothless derelicts grumbled in dispute over stakes to a game of mumblety-peg. To complicate matters, four of the mayor’s stark-sober guardsmen bulled through the rear entrance with orders to toss the establishment for news of the morning’s escaped fugitives.

  Arithon’s tactic to extricate Dakar was simple, direct, and expedient. He pinched the pooled dip from the nearest sconce and fired the unsavory rushes. Stepped back, masked in shadow, as the flames fanned and spread, he watched the shouted dismay of the Flagon’s owner entangle with the bellowing squeals from singed patrons. He could have laughed for bright irony. To judge by the horde of rats that emerged to flee the disaster, he had no doubt accomplished a public service by purging a nest of breeding pestilence.

  Retired to the street amid yelling pandemonium, Arithon caught the sleeve of a tavern maid with a rawboned build and the pursed lips of no-nonsense character. He offered a gold piece in smooth negotiation, while inside the roiled taproom, the garrison soldiers howled for buckets. They drew weapons at length, and by force pressed every lout into service to douse straw before the blaze spread and ignited the planked timbers of the building.

  The woman bit the gold, grinned with surprise, and rammed back into the smoke and confusion.

  Arithon backtracked to Threadneedle Street. There, he mounted a loft stair with red-painted newels and knocked on a door fitted with a brass latch cast in the busty curves of a sea nymph.

  Through the brief interval as the bar scraped inside, he altered the appearance of his face and dark hair with a deft, wrought illusion of shadow. Another man greeted the large, scented woman, painted and powdered, and clad in a gown roped in freshwater pearls. She planted her bulk in the entry, arms folded, and inquired after his business.

  When he gave no answer, she surveyed him in turn, from his wide, hazel eyes and middle-aged crow’s-feet, to hair of a lank, lackluster brown dusted iron gray at the temples.

  His voice held an almost forgotten light music as he prompted her flagging memory. ‘Meliane, you’re magnificent. As always, we have a mutual old friend who’s fallen facefirst into trouble.’ He kissed her perfumed cheek, his mouth tweaked to a smile that caused the woman to squeal and snatch him headlong into her bosomy embrace.

  ‘Medlir? Is it Medlir?’ Twice his slim girth, and two fingers taller, Meliane thrust him at arm’s length. Her ringleted hair chimed with amethyst dangles, and gold necklaces sparkled to her heaved breath as she beheld his wry, laughing features. ‘Merciful fate! All these years, and I’d thought you a figment, crafted out of a sorcerer’s mischief to serve our fat mayor his comeuppance.’

  ‘Do I feel like a figment?’ asked the Master of Shadow, who, in the calm and reasonable persona of Medlir, had served the late Masterbard as apprentice twenty-five years in the past. ‘I’ve paid one of the wenches from the Flagon to bring Dakar here. He’s falling-down drunk and disorderly, as usual. Can we plead for your famed hospitality?’

  ‘Oh, for him, I’ve a girl with a willing enough heart, provided you share all the gossip.’ The comfortable, large woman flung her door wide, her smile all oyster shell teeth. ‘You do still pay silver for the extra service in advance?’

  Arithon, as Medlir, gave her laughter. ‘Enough to slake the thirst of every soldier who comes searching.’ He stepped into the incense-soaked air of a brothel that had changed not at all through the years. A stalking, sleek shadow against banks of lit candles, white and pale gold in brass stands, he
stayed genial. ‘Does the weasel I remember still keep your account books? If so, I could owe you a fortune.’

  ‘Dearie, yes. Wulfcars still tends the ledgers. Will you sit?’ She waved a plump hand toward a violet hassock, flanked by two muscled, bronze statues whose yoked shoulders supported carafes of spiced wine hung on chains. ‘Serve yourself as you wish.’ Her welcoming gesture encompassed the laden table of sweetmeats, all of them spiced, and infused with enspelled aphrodisiacs.

  ‘You’ve that poor an opinion of my aging manhood?’ teased the man she knew as Medlir.

  Surprisingly graceful for her generous frame, Meliane snapped back a scarlet curtain. She shouted down a hallway spangled in light thrown by candles in pierced copper shades. ‘Casley? Freshen the room in the annex. We’ve a customer.’

  Her swept mass of hair like combed brass as she turned, Meliane studied her questionable guest, tucked in cat elegance on the hassock. She sighed, divided between longing and dramatized, mock disappointment. ‘Your manhood was never in question, my sweet. Every girl I ever had who laid eyes on you has tried to breach your bastion of unshakable good taste. Or were my instincts in error? Has it been pretty boys all along?’

  ‘It’s been pretty trying,’ Arithon confessed. ‘Keeping Dakar’s randy appetite supplied tends to limit the available partners.’

  Meliane clapped plump hands in delight. ‘Still kept the sauce on your tongue for evasions, I see. If you were the Master of Shadow, the Alliance at Etarra posts a price of five thousand gold royals on your head.’

  ‘So little?’ said Arithon, eyebrows raised, unconcerned. ‘The army housed in Lysaer’s barracks eats thrice that, over the course of one winter. Were I in fact the Spinner of Darkness wanted for acts of foul sorcery, believe this. You would never hold such a man long enough to collect.’

  Her probing suffered a rude interruption as a commotion thumped up the outside stair. Meliane arose in a cinctured gleam of stitched pearls and peered through a spyhole in the window bay. ‘Your prophet’s delivered, but not by a wench. He’s being lugged, hand and foot, by two of the heavies who toss drunkards out of the Flagon.’

  ‘Well, give them an afternoon’s frolic, at my expense,’ said Arithon from his perch on the hassock. ‘Keep them happy enough, they won’t rush off to inform the mayor’s overzealous pack of troops.’

  Meliane measured him. Comfortable as he looked, his relaxation was illusion. The hand held beneath his plain cloak surely gripped a readied weapon, and the eyes were alert and too steady for a man who played for anything less than blood stakes. Experience had taught her when customers were most dangerous; this one lit her instincts to screaming.

  At least resignation came tempered in coin. The whole day had been bad for business. ‘Just warn the lugs they can’t traipse their hobnailed boots over my spotless carpets.’ Feeling all of her years, Meliane moved to the door and opened the latch by worn precedent. She had hosted the Mad Prophet through scurrilous excesses far more than once in the past.

  The annex room where Casley installed them had a sloping low ceiling, two dormer windows curtained in garnet chintz, and a bed wide enough for a tournament. The two muscled men who plonked the Mad Prophet on the quilts were cozened away down the hall. Arithon, thoughtful, chose sweet tact with the nubile Casley: he bequeathed her a large denomination in silver, with his involved request for hot food and a rare vintage wine that required an effort to collect.

  Left behind a closed door, in privacy that he knew could not last an hour without a betrayal, Arithon surveyed the Mad Prophet, limp as a beached whale in the ruby cast of the tinted lanterns. For a marvel, the spellbinder’s comatose state did not include rattling snores. The fringed pillows instead made Dakar look wasted, eyes sunken into the blued orbits of his skull, and the white-streaked hair at his temples grown prominent. Set at odds by his bedraggled presence, the sweet scent of patchouli clashed with the seamier tang of pipe smoke and rotgut gin.

  ‘Spirits are scarcely your usual style,’ Arithon said in too quiet, opening observation. ‘What went wrong at the jam seller’s?’

  ‘We’re alone?’ Dakar mumbled. He shed his playacted illusion of oblivious, drunken collapse, opened his eyes, pained, and rubbed pudgy fists to gummed sockets. The groan he dredged up shook the flab at his midriff, soul deep and resonant as a martyr’s. ‘Save us all, if you’re wearing Medlir’s identity, we must still be in Jaelot. Say I’m having nightmares, if you’ve got any shred of pity in your miserable heart.’

  ‘We’re still in Jaelot,’ Arithon affirmed, in no mood to lighten the circumstance. ‘I’m wearing Medlir’s identity because even Meliane’s grasping nature wouldn’t accommodate for a stranger.’ Not when armed searchers might toss her back rooms in hot search of the Spinner of Darkness.

  ‘Meliane, bless her. She always did come to everyone’s rescue in time.’ Then, sharpened to edged accusation, ‘She wasn’t the one who fired the straw.’

  ‘I’d hoped to entice you to walk.’ Arithon’s ghost step passed from washstand to window. His oddly blurred profile seemed to shimmer between forms as he peered through a gap in the curtains.

  ‘I had a disaster,’ Dakar confessed, then dropped the shattering gist, ‘a collapse from a fit of tranced prescience.’

  Deceptively cold nerved, Arithon raised his unbandaged hand and eased closed the small crack of daylight. ‘Then you don’t remember the vision you saw?’ He faced into the room, the shuttered planes of his face washed in gaudy light from the lanterns.

  ‘Why else would I drink?’ Dakar said, peeved. ‘The gift had to be stifled. All of us want out of this city, alive.’ He let slackened wrists flop back on the quilts, anger dissipated into a puff of lavender and rose-scented air. ‘Never mind I’d be worse than useless, dropped comatose in the streets spouting prophetic futures. That sort of behavior could send me to the faggots condemned as a lunatic seer.’

  Arithon unearthed the chamber’s close stool. He shut the fringed velvet cover, and sat, his expression wide-open and thoughtful. His linked hands and posture suggested a long wait, and a patience as forced as cranked wire.

  From his purgatory of discomfort on the pillows, Dakar said, ‘You know Meliane will sell us out to the first man who offers more coin than you have in your purse.’

  ‘Tell me a fact I don’t already know.’ Arithon maintained his listening posture.

  Dakar ejected a rude phrase, too sick for verbal evasions. ‘All right, we’re compromised. There’s a problem, a big one. Something’s upset the clear flow of the lane force. I can’t say why. The prescience I had is utterly blanked from my memory.’ Which meant whatever he had dreamed would inevitably come to pass. Nor were recriminations in hindsight much use, that an imbalance of such magnitude was surely the reason for Sethvir’s failure to intervene with their meddling with the Sanpashir focus in the first place.

  Arithon did not pass judgment, but said gently, ‘We daren’t attempt our planned escape by lane transfer from Jaelot. Is that the bad news you’re evading?’

  Dakar twisted his neck in the mire of pillows, sick for more than physical reasons. ‘The difficulty can’t be helped. To get you and Fionn Areth clear of danger, we have no choice left. We’ll have to cross through the city walls.’

  Never slow to grasp setbacks, Arithon stood with the whiplash athleticism that too many opponents forgot could accompany small stature. ‘You can’t help, either. That’s why you were drinking. If you try to tap your inner resource for an act of grand conjury, your talent for visions will take precedence and overwhelm all of your faculties.’

  ‘Quite,’ Dakar said, slack with an exhaustion that, this time, held nothing feigned. ‘A stunning predicament, with a pack of Koriani and all the mayor’s guards like howling demons at our heels.’

  ‘My heels,’ snapped the Master of Shadow in weary and acid correction. ‘It’s my life and liberty that make you and Fionn Areth desirable as enemy bargaining chips.’ Poised by the doorway, rimmed in carmine light, h
e pulled the nondescript hood of Jasque’s borrowed mantle over his head. ‘I trust you’re not too undone to arrange livery mounts? Good. Then we’ll separate, for safety’s sake. Bring horses, provisions, and gear for winter travel. I’ll steer Fionn Areth out of this snake pit. Just manage to meet us before midnight at the abandoned sawmill three leagues north of the walls.’

  His quick fingers tripped the latch, then paused. The Master of Shadow turned back and delivered his wry parting. ‘Don’t worry for your stomach.’ Then, in jarring and genuine sympathy, when another in his position might have shown rage for the dangerous increase in stakes, he grinned. ‘You can eat the feast Casley brings while you’re waiting. Drink to luck with the rare vintage Cheivalt red you’ll find to wash it down. On my way out, I’ll make sure Meliane sees I won’t play sitting pawn in her parlor.’

  Winter Solstice Afternoon 5670

  Cogs

  In the westlands of Camris, Lysaer s’Ilessid sits in a drafty campaign tent, poring over tactical maps by the guttering light of one candle and saying to the coiled whip presence of Sulfin Evend, ‘Don’t ask how I know. It’s not instinct, but certainty. We’ll cross into Rathain and discover that the Master of Shadow is once more abroad on the continent …’

  At Althain Tower, under Luhaine’s uneasy vigil, Sethvir shivers and mumbles in the grip of ill dreams, while across the breadth of the continent, in searing, patched flashes, his earth-sense shows him the pending pressure of the solstice tide that will crest in last passage at midnight, the song of the pulse still running dissident where the power lanes are left roiled from the malice of Morriel’s masterstroke …

  In Jaelot, Dakar the Mad Prophet arises after a replete hour of Casley’s fine favors; he engages a simple cantrip of illusion and forges a writ of requisition, complete with the mayor’s lion seal; the language grants him permission to draw supplies from the garrison stores, four horses from the stables and an unrestricted pass through the city’s outer gate for the purpose of bearing dispatches on to Highscarp …