Grand Conspiracy (17 page)

Then even that fragmented awareness upended. His senses whirled away in kaleidoscopic chaos as the restored torrent of the earth link hurled his mind through a cataract of impressions.

For a brief, helpless interval he swayed in the saddle, hands locked in black mane to stay upright. Visions rinsed his mind like actinic static, a deluge of disordered, random events spiked by the odd, recognizable fragment …

He saw a royal birth in Havish laced through the mating of whales in
the china blue reaches of South Sea. In a cedar-paneled room with red
curtains, Duke Bransian of Alestron read a letter penned by his brother
Mearn, his iron brows bristled to irritation. Black bears in
Strakewood
huddled deep in hibernation. An old tree dreamed of rage, and a snarl
of stalled trade sent mounted couriers splashing through a rutted ford
in Camris, led on by torchlight, and given right of way by their rippling
sunwheel banner. A field mouse snatched kernels of corn from a granary,
and a shepherd child in Araethura complained of a deep ache in the bones
of his face. Southward, where windy rain fell, a brig with a white star
carved on her counter cracked out full sail on command of a fair-haired
female captain
…

For one moment, two, Sethvir's mind pinwheeled, hazed through
the gauntlet of images that came on as senseless bundles of color and noise. Then the innate mastery of his gift resurged. He recaptured those uncountable, disparate threads, deftly sorted their origins, and loomed them back into one web of exacting, immaculate order.

Moon phase and tides reset his awareness. The grounding solidity of the earth lent him roots to withstand the vast void of the sky. Then the vista of storm-ridden landscape around him regained continuity and rebalanced his position to the cardinal points of direction. Restored to his venue as Althain's Warden, Sethvir sat with closed eyes. In one snap-frozen second, he mapped the changed patterns of harmony and discord. Another fractional instant let him touch each of his distant colleagues with the informed assurance of his return.

Asandir stood, hip deep in a snowdrift on the Plain of Araithe, retuning a damaged stone marker that smoothed a confluence of earth's lane force; Traithe, on the storm-beaten strands of Lithmere, was completing the final ward in the chain forbidding landfall to slave-bearing galleys. Luhaine, an arrow of liberated joy, rode on a breeze that ranged southward out of Atainia. Kharadmon still stood on watch amid the sealed silence of the void. There, where the distant sun of Athera was reduced to a candleflame glimmer, the star wards raised against the mist-bound wraiths trapped on Marak posted a vigilant guard across arc seconds of darkness. Last, though in pain and peril, never least, Sethvir sensed the presence of Davien the Betrayer, lurking in self-imposed isolation in the caverns beneath the roots of the Mathorn Mountains.

Of Ciladis, as ever, his earth-sense found no sign, though he combed all the planet in vain hope and sorrowful reflex. Then, the raw cold offered welcome distraction from the razor-sharp pain of old grief.

Sethvir stirred from his stupor. Mauled by the teeth of the gusts, he closed slackened hands on the reins. The sleet seeded droplets of melt in his beard, and the horse underneath him blew a loud snort of impatience.

‘Brave one, I'm with you.' He stroked the stallion's wet crest, chilled by much more than inclement weather as he measured the days that the grimward's torn wards had engaged him.

Summer's hot winds had changed guard to midwinter. Five months had elapsed since he left Althain Tower, a grievous interval, but necessary. Any overlooked weakness in the complex ring
of guard spells could spin final havoc through Athera's stability. For one crisis averted, old problems had acquired vicious new impetus. Foremost among them, Sethvir tracked repercussions from the roused trees in Caithwood, an event that had seeded a canker of strife across the Kingdom of Tysan.

Asandir's stopgap action had jammed travel and trade to a strident halt. Balked merchants bandied damning accusations against sorcery, while their craftsmen hoarded every coin they could squeeze for the purpose of Alliance retaliation. While goods piled up on the barge docks at Watercross, and guild tempers frayed and shortened, tales of armed men falling prey to fell sorceries fretted the towns to hysteria. Quarn's mayor was left indisposed after five hand-wringing weeks of protestation. Valenford's treasury had been emptied in the purging belief that Lysaer's claimed divinity could avert the ruin of prosperity. Each passing day and each fallen victim lent Avenor's crown examiners refreshed cause to denounce the practice of magecraft as a felony. Despite the season, small troops of sunwheel riders scoured the backcountry settlements in search of herb witches and birth-gifted makers of talismans.

Sethvir shivered. Cloakless, hatless, and clad in holed leathers ingrained with a damning reek of cinders and brimstone, he knew he might need more than tact at the door where he stopped to ask shelter. He turned the stud's nose north and westward toward Riverton, then spoke into a back-cocked black ear.

The horse picked sure steps down the ice-crusted slope, the reins looped slack on his neck. He had served as a Sorcerer's mount long enough not to balk at spell-sent directions. Sethvir tucked his fingers under his beard to foil the blasting wind. Lapsed into the half-tranced, dreamy inattention that widened his access to the earth link, he sifted the montage array of new images that knit each moment into the next.

Lysaer's thread of strategy snaked through the weave, steering Alliance interests to bind terrified trade guilds into a strangling dependency. Lord Harradene's Etarrans still languished unconscious. Now lodged at conspicuous expense at Avenor, they were made the graphic incentive to catalyze townborn distrust of sorcery. In disturbing, hard knots, Sethvir saw the cry for redress shift into committed resolve to take action.

All points converged toward an outbreak of war in the spring.

From the public misfortune of the comatose Etarrans, Lysaer s'Ilessid built doctrine in tireless speech and skilled statecraft. His
inferences became accepted as certainty, that Fellowship Sorcerers worked in collusion with the Spinner of Darkness. From close talks in town taprooms to the whispers of mothers threatening unruly children, the unrest took root in even the most far-flung farmsteads. Outside Tysan's borders, frozen roads rang to the hooves of fast horses bearing sunwheel couriers. Alarmed city mayors heard the ready advice of crown officers and assumed the bright badge of the Alliance.

The flow of gold and information moved from hand to ringed hand, born out of the festering frustrations that raged behind the closed doors of the guildhalls. Savaged by seaborne attacks from clan pirates, gouty ministers were shown the Alliance hulls under construction at Riverton as firm proof of the crown's promise of protection. Lord Eilish brooded over Avenor's thickened ledgers and notated his fussy entries under a crawling halo of candlelight. Beneath his cramped office, Sethvir could hear the iron strapping the piled chests in Lysaer's treasury sing to the pitch of struck currency tendered from cities across the continent's five kingdoms.

Harried by more than the season's chill winds, the Sorcerer traced the crosscurrents designed to consolidate power. Lady Ellaine's handfasting to Lysaer wrought shifts: Erdane's new-fledged ambition wound intrigues that stitched through state policy in clandestine meetings, and in the dunning of farm crofts for tithes in the cause to eradicate sorcery and shadows. The revenues outfitted forays in winter, when campaign was not normally feasible.

In Westwood, hare and sparrows fled the march of armed men, who scoured the forests to slaughter the wild game and starve out a dwindled encampment of clansmen. The earth link unveiled the gaunt faces of children, and the obstinate courage which kept bows and drawn steel in the hands of their driven parents. Death wrote its lines of spilled blood in the snow. In a bare, wind-raked hollow, Maenol s'Gannley's cousin miscarried a seven-month pregnancy.

On the black stud in Korias, Sethvir wept, aggrieved for the loss of an irreplaceable infant who would not live to see daylight. He traversed the storm-swept barrens of Korias, nagged to chills, while Avenor's high council convened in a snug tower chamber. Cosseted in furs and damascened silk, they sipped vintage wine and administered Lysaer's policy with fatal ignorance of the stakes their chosen path courted. While their armorers forged weapons to uphold a wrongful cause, and crown instigators
whispered their damning false testimony reviling minions of darkness, Kharadmon kept steadfast watch against a range of perils beyond the pale of mortal politics.

The massive, wrought ward ring that shielded Athera in the vast deeps between stars was never for a moment left unguarded. Should an invasion of free wraiths ever sweep in from Marak, a populace stripped of its natural-born talent would be left defenseless and wide open to threat of possession. Then would mankind have cause to fear, and women weep, and innocent children suffer horrors.

‘
I fear the same thing
.' Kharadmon's stray response reechoed across an incomprehensible distance as he affirmed the passing concern of Althain's Warden. ‘
All's quiet here, now. Too peaceful,
perhaps. Those wraiths never rest. Through the months when they
stalked me, they seethed and hated like a wasp nest stirred up by
fiends. My watch feels oppressive. Sometimes I worry that we're being
shown what we wish to see in a mirror
.'

Sethvir winced, brought back to earth as icy runnels of snowmelt snaked down his open collar. His sleeves were soaked through, his leathers grown soggy. Against his back, the undaunted winds scoured down with their barbed burden of ice. He endured the cruel blast without rancor. As ever, the world's broadscale tapestry of events left him small thought to spare for the nuisance of bodily discomfort.

Nor would another poured current of cold, just arrived through the barrage of gusts, allow him to dwell upon Kharadmon's ruffled foreboding.

‘You're back, and not one single moment too soon,' Luhaine carped from a backdrop of tenantless landscape. ‘Of course the Koriathain used the months of your absence to their unscrupulous benefit.'

‘You refer to the shepherd boy set under a change spell last autumn in Araethura?' Sethvir raised eyebrows the ice had grizzled like magnetized clumps of steel filings. His sharpened gaze tracked the invisible wraith flanking him. ‘Fionn Areth was beyond our protection from the moment of his ill-fated birth. Since Elaira could do naught to cast off the life debt he owed her, she was most wise to entrust his fate to Prince Arithon's devices.'

Luhaine rattled through a gorse thicket hunched under a leading of sleet. ‘Then you've already seen what Lirenda's wrought on the flimsy pretense of his innocent word of consent?'

Sethvir said nothing. The unnatural seals of regeneration which
guided the transformation of Fionn Areth were too bitter a subject for talk. ‘First tell me how long Asandir was convalescent before he left Althain Tower.'

‘Four days.' Luhaine whirled in place. ‘You're evading my question.' Presented with Sethvir's obstructive inattention at its worst, he stormed into motion again. ‘Asandir asked for his stallion to be––'

‘… sent on to the master of horse at the Red Water Inn,' Sethvir finished, unperturbed. The hostler there knew the stud's habits, and kept a clean stable with glossy, contented occupants. ‘I already saw,' he added, before Luhaine could drone through every mundane detail surrounding Asandir's departure. Mirthlvain had brewed up a new strain of predator, and no colleague's lingering weakness could excuse the dismissal of unpleasant facts. The spellbinder who stood guard as Methisle's warden could never have curbed the late outbreak of aberrants without a Sorcerer's help. ‘Just say whether Asandir was fit enough to be on his feet when he left.'

‘He blocked your inquiry also?' Luhaine poised, a circle of seized stillness where the downfalling sleet changed course in midair and slashed like white needles straight earthward. ‘That's worrisome.'

‘But scarcely the first time,' Sethvir pointed out.

The vortex of Luhaine's presence poured headlong through a barrier of blackthorn. ‘Stop hedging. I see how you're vexed.'

Althain's warden hunched his shoulders as the experienced stud plowed ahead through the winter-stripped branches. His answer came muffled behind his raised forearm as he rode a rimed gauntlet of storm-burdened sticks. ‘Asandir's never been foolish.'

‘Well, foolish or not, I couldn't hold him,' Luhaine retorted. ‘We stand too shorthanded for any one of us to mismanage the limits of our personal resources.'

Sethvir disguised an untactful snort by wringing the ice melt from the draggled ends of his beard. The earth link exposed the residual glimmer of the warding maze Asandir had set on his back trail. In trying to eavesdrop on his progress through scrying, his discorporate colleague had been spun in blind circles for three days.

Flustered and embarrassed, Luhaine snapped anyway. ‘Don't act so smug. Of us all, you know you're the only one who can match him and win.'

‘Not always, and never in a contest of straight force.' Sethvir stared back, his blue-green eyes wide in his guileless effort to invite a diversion through trivial argument.

But for the sake of the shapechanged child in Araethura, Luhaine fastened on like a terrier. ‘We should curb the plotting. That boy can't be left as a Koriani puppet to lure Arithon s'Ffalenn into jeopardy.
Morriel's meddling nearly drove his Grace
to insanity the last time!
How
dare
she presume to risk triggering Desh-thiere's curse again.'

‘We cannot interfere.' Sethvir's words were hammered iron. ‘Misled or not, Fionn Areth gave his unconditional consent.'