Grand Conspiracy (24 page)

His enterprising glance raked over the room, then lit on the partridge plump whore, gagged and bound, and running her eyepaint to a flood of imploring tears. He regarded her straits with stony practicality, then sorted ideas in the energetic, fast talk he was accustomed to sling at his brothers. ‘That squad downstairs haven't got a flea's hindparts for brains. Oh, they know which end of a girl dips their prick, and which orifice
to pour in the beer, but I'd bet coin that's their living limit. Shouldn't strain anybody's imagination overmuch to find some way to sneak you out.' He eyed Dakar's limpid posture askance. ‘Don't you mind. If you've missed your rendezvous, I've got my brother's state galley in port, packed to the gunwales with mercenaries. All you need do is say where to row. We'll take you to your master offshore.'

Flat with exhaustion, Dakar mumbled through the suffering clasp of his fingers. ‘Just so you make a clean job of the foray. I've no wish to revisit Jaelot in chains to burn for the crime of black sorcery.'

Within the half hour, the Fat Pigeon's landlord looked up from his polishing, aroused by a pounding commotion on his stair. Amid the grind of hobnailed boots and a falsetto shriek, came the deeper tones of men's laughter. Next, Parrien s'Brydion arrived on the landing, one thumb cocked in his belt and a smirk on his face. Over his shoulder, clamped by his mailed forearm, a pair of rouged feet thrashed, roped under what looked like the hem of a whore's lace chemise.

Behind clomped his mercenaries, whooping and clattering and clutching their ribs against cramping gales of mirth. The trio of conferencing merchants swiveled to watch, stiffened to prim disapproval. The alert crown examiner peered down his sharp nose, while the Fat Pigeon's landlord slammed down his cleaned tankard with a force that snapped off the handle.

His pealing howl wrecked the taproom's last peace, to no purpose. Parrien s'Brydion held to his course of abducting the corpulent Sashka. He dodged a kick masked in a whirl of petticoats and rounded the newel post of the banister, tossing a spate of cheerful instructions to the saturnine captain behind him.

In response, the mercenary hurled a jingling sack in a flying arc across the taproom. His aim struck the bar dead center. The loose drawstring slipped and let out a trilling, sweet chime of gold coins.

‘Ath!' Parrien landed a playful swat on the behind which jounced at his shoulder. ‘Your trollop's got spirit, I'll give her that. If she's half as good as you claim in the blankets, she'll be worth what I've paid for her upkeep.' To his captain he added, ‘Clear a path to the doorway.'

‘What of the layabout?' the landlord yelped back, not entirely
reconciled to the receipt of cold coin in exchange for his tavern's best attraction.

‘Left him trussed and locked in the closet, awaiting his trip to the midden.' Parrien threaded through tables, defending his prize from the questing grasp of the sailors, and with more gleeful force, the two-handed clutch of Jaelot's more enterprising mercenaries. ‘Quiet, girl!' His massive forearm swung in alternate rhythm to bludgeon faces, then to quell the heaving mass of skirts, while the gleam of white teeth nipped through a beard split in half by a tigerish grin. ‘I trust my coin also settles the three days he's cost you a room?'

Torn, the landlord understood he had only two options: block Parrien's egress, or rescue the gold spilled over his bar top before his customers starting pilfering.

‘You're a rank clanblood bastard!' he shrieked in frustration.

‘Yes to the first, but my dead mother would argue, legitimate down to the bone.' Parrien ducked a foot, spat out flying lace, and whooped in triumph as he shouldered his prize through the doorway into the street. His voice filtered back through the oaths of a carter forced to jerk his team short of collision: ‘If your whore wears me out like she did her last client, I'll send you back double payment!'

Late Winter, 5654

At the Fat Pigeon, a brief interval after Parrien's departure, the resigned landlord at last finds a moment to attend the wretch left bound in his upstairs closet; except the gagged body he liberates is not the fat layabout, but the opulent Sashka herself, pink and naked and shrieking indignation over the theft of her jewelry and clothing, and queerly unable to recall name or face of the culprit who had first engaged her service …

In a closeted room in the city of East Bransing, Prince Lysaer seals a letter, then passes the document to a waiting foreign dignitary with the assurance, ‘Avenor has too limited an access during winter, and so cannot remain the operating capital for the armed heart of the Alliance. As my regency of Tysan passes on to my heir, there will be a change. If Etarra would bid to become the permanent seat for the Light, I'll entertain your mayor's offer to host an annual muster …'

In the state mansion at Erdane, a lady's maid cossets the daughter pledged to wed the Prince of the Light in the month after spring equinox; the house servants pack the trunks of her trousseau for her journey to Avenor when the thaw reopens the passes; and the captain of the city garrison picks his most reliable men to guard the new princess's dowry …

T
he cove, with its wide, protected harbor and barrier islets, was avoided by galleymen because of its entrenched reputation for haunts. A Second Age ruin overlooked the fractured rim of the cliff wall, which reared up in ramparts of basalt and porous gutters of worn lava. The old towers notched the skyline in shattered majesty, brooding and jagged as sheared obsidian against the thin, sheeting clouds which threatened soft drizzle by nightfall. The site was accessed by no inland road. The shifting sands of Sanpashir desert spread like black flint for the waterless leagues lying between Sanshevas and the ports to the west. Yet in the years prior to Desh-thiere's invasion, high kings' sons had been born there. The fortress had prospered in the flourishing, brisk trade that linked its deep harbor with the established sea route to Innish.

Although the ruin still sheltered stone cisterns uncracked by time or weather, the catch water was guarded by wild tribes who hunted outsiders with darts. Captains risked running their store barrels empty rather than suffer the climb, where a Second Age ghost or a shrieking desertman might harry a foraging party to their deaths.

In late winter of Third Age 5654, the barrier isles guarding the harbor still grew their rank tangles of brush. The thin, raked stands of salt-stunted cedar offered poor screening for a small
fleet of ships, unless their captains had the wily enterprise to strike yards and topmasts, and festoon hanging moss from the rigging.

When the s'Brydion state galley clove through the gap, shot spray from her oars pebbling the cove's turquoise shallows, her master and captain remained locked in hot argument over the need for a landfall. The steersman's shout silenced them. Turning, still flushed, both master and captain beheld a scrub forest whose roots were not landbound, but set into the raking, clean lines of three brigantines.

‘Damn me to Sithaer!' the captain exclaimed, through Parrien's whistled admiration.

Sharp orders from the bosun set the sweeps back. To his master's miffed grunt over usurped authority, the captain snapped, ‘Well, why tire good men? The breeze lies astern. Let the ship's drift lay her up alongside.'

When the leadsmen called aft that the waters were shoaling, the captain relinquished the details of anchorage to his mate, and only looked sour as Parrien bellowed through the hatch to roust up his laggard purser. ‘There
are
blighted ships here! Three of them, all painted dull gray and flying nests of moss as thick as my grandmother's dress wigs. You can release the fifty silvers I've lost to the Mad Prophet when he's sober enough to ask payment.'

A shout hailed back from a point belowdecks that Dakar was prostrate, courtesy of a cask found broached in the galley. ‘Fatemaster's own fury won't wake the sot now. He's bound to stay snoring until a tight bladder drags him back from oblivion.'

Bronzed muscles rippled as, shirtless, Parrien snapped the brass bands of his ship's glass closed. His vexation lifted to raised eyebrows and laughter. ‘Dharkaron's own Spear! Dakar found the cook's rotgut brandy? Then we'd better get him bundled back where he belongs before he gets staggering sick.'

‘Why not make things easy?' griped the state galley's captain. ‘Throw him over the rail and let him recover the senses to swim.'

There followed an hour of coarse comment and jibes, while the duke's red-blazoned longboat was swayed out, and Dakar loaded comatose into sailcloth and lowered in by means of a halyard; then the same process began in reverse as Alestron's tender hailed the brigantine
Khetienn
and asked for her flying jib's shackle to be freed and run over the forecastle.

‘We've got you a sluggard to haul bodily aboard!' Parrien boomed across the narrowing span of ruffled water.

An unkempt head nipped over the brigantine's stern rail, with black wire hair swathed in a sun-faded rag. The scowl underneath was creased like shelled walnut, and jet bead eyes viewed the longboat's sprawled cargo with animate, darting suspicion. ‘Whoever gave the fat lout the wineskin?' The imprecations screeched on in the volatile accents of the desertman who served aboard the
Khetienn
as both cook and cabin steward. ‘I dice his gizzard, that one, for rock-head stupidity!'

‘Save the edge on your knives,' Parrien called back. He had donned a clean shirt and a weathered, old field tunic, and still fussed with the hang of his sword belt. ‘We've already had to placate our cook. It's his missing brandy that caused all the damage. And anyhow, your Mad Prophet had his good reason for seeking oblivion this time.' The fact the tender's oarsmen closed the gap to mere yards did nothing to dampen the gusto of s'Brydion enthusiasm as Parrien smoothed the last buckle and looked up. ‘Five burnings on charges of criminal sorcery happened in Southshire, work of some zealot crown examiner from Tysan. If not for a last-ditch masquerade with a whore's dress, your spellbinder would've been sixth.'

More interested heads appeared at the rail, while someone's barked order sent sailhands to free the line to salvage a carcass.

‘No matter.' The desertman evinced the peppery shrug that came ingrained with his breeding. ‘We done this before, two dozens of times. I've said, why not end it? Just put the rope round the whale fish's throat. But nobody listens. Not yet.'

Since any euphemism that implied a state of immersion was a Sanpashir desertman's mortal insult, Parrien tactfully changed subject. ‘It's your prince I'd like to have words with, anyway. Is his Grace of Rathain with the ship?'

The desertman's dark visage disappeared like a rat that had just ducked a club, and the request for an audience was taken in turn by the cracking impatience of a man with a Westlands clan accent.

‘You'll find him up the cliffside, inside the ruins.' The speaker appeared, one of Lord Maenol's surviving cousins to judge by the mink hair braided at his nape. ‘If you wait, we'll find you a man whose leathers and boots haven't molded. Stone's rotten sharp from salt weathering and storms. You'll want a guide to lead you topside.'

‘Send him on naked, or let him catch up,' Parrien countered, then ripped out an oath for the blighting detail which restrained him: his oarsmen could scarcely row anyplace else before the Mad Prophet was hoisted out of the stern seat.

Atop the seacliffs, the air smelled like flint. Hazed sun sweltered down on pitched dunes of black sand like a hammer sparking shards of light off an anvil. The hot ground burned even through leather-soled boots. Breathless from his climb up sheer rock, Parrien shaded his eyes with grazed fingers.

In Paravian times, when these ruins stood whole, the fortress had commanded the crest like a setting of filigreed ivory. Centaur masons had raised the ringwalls of white granite, with chains of inner courtyards connected by cloistered arches, most made melodious with fountains. Vast gardens threaded like grottos in the fanned shade of tall date palms or arbors of flowering grape.

Now, an invasion of abrasive basalt sands choked the smashed friezes of sunchildren, and thorn-tipped plants elbowed for survival where runoff from the walls afforded a rare patch of moisture. Here and there, the pale carving of the original arches stood intact. Their cloud-filtered shadows traced the barren soil in elongated, spider-legged grace, while the cloverleaf patterns of their pierced stonework whispered like hollow bones played by the wind.

The two men passed through with sword-trained distaste for the footing. Hobnailed seaboots sank into maws of dry sand, while the breeze fanned behind. Grit tumbled in hissing currents and erased every trace of living presence.

Parrien had no liking for the emptiness. Nor did the heat numb his senses to the point where he missed the fast, furtive movement that slipped through the tumbledown stonework ahead.

‘Desertmen,' the youthful clan guide informed him, then grasped his tensed forearm to stop the reflexive draw of his knife. ‘Don't rile them. They carry blowpipes and darts, and hit well enough to stick a man through the eye at eighty paces. There's always half a dozen come to guard his Grace's back whenever he makes his way ashore.'

Eyebrows tipped upward in rankling inquiry, Parrien wrenched free, while his instinct for survival took sobering note that these desertmen came and went with disquieting stealth. The insects still clicked and chirred undisturbed from their shaded crannies.

The clan scout rubbed a grazed palm on his leathers, and admitted, ‘In truth, the creatures unnerve me as well.'

‘You said they guard Arithon.' Parrien scanned the way ahead, but saw nothing else beyond sun-blasted rock, sheeted in mounds of dark sand. ‘Why?'

‘The tribes here invoke the blessing of their mother goddess, Darkness. Shadows, they say, are her infant sons.' The clan scout shrugged. ‘They think Arithon's god-touched. He explained in plain words that his powers were no better than mortal. A mage's birth gift gave him command of the elements. You knew?'

At Parrien's nod, the guide finished, ‘Well, none of the desertmen wanted to listen. The local tribe elder just patted his Grace's shoulder and insisted their luck and their goats would increase if the tribesmen give him protection.'

Another shrug; then a kicked bit of gravel that ricocheted through the embittered conclusion. ‘No one of us cares if their tribal belief stems from worship or augury. Their vigilance brings no harm, and keeping the Shadow Master's favor won't hurt. My blood for surety,' the scout swore in fierce words that shocked instant respect from any man raised to clan heritage, ‘a light-based religion will show these nomads no tolerance. If Lysaer plays the Mistwraith's curse into an excuse for a holy war, his new breed of soldier-priests are likely to pass the wild tribes under Fate's Wheel for heretics.'

‘Religion?' Parrien forgot about desertmen and knives. ‘What claptrap is this?'

The clansman glanced aside, his uneasy eyes and the lift of his jaw too sharp for the youthful stubble on his chin. ‘Hasn't a sunwheel priest chapped on Alestron's postern yet? Well then, as the one Alliance ally who won't wish to spurn the old order, your duke better think what he'll say. The day will come when he's asked to swear faith and string shadowbanes on the stiff necks of your family.'

Parrien laughed. ‘I pity the dimwit who dares try!'

‘Tomorrow, that might not seem funny.' The guide skirted a ruckle of stones where the sea storms had chewed the foundations. ‘High council in Tysan claims Prince Lysaer's the manifestation of righteous good come to save us. They say he won't age, and call him Divine Light. You've been to Southshire. The ports on the coast are buying the lie. The mayor at Innish let that sunwheel examiner dispossess the sea-quarter herb witches as well.'

‘More fools, they!' Parrien bristled, his eyes trained ahead and his fingers tapping a nerve-wrought tattoo on his dagger hilts. ‘Let five months go by, they'll be tripping over the pregnant whores kicked out in the streets begging charity. If their cities don't like starving babes underfoot, they'll wish they'd left at least one of the old besoms her practice.'

No lighthearted quip came back from the clan scout. ‘What will Alestron do when the sunwheel banner becomes a rallying cry for religion?'

‘Duke Bransian will probably skewer the first messenger who declares himself Lysaer's priest.' Parrien flashed a wicked, insouciant grin, while the indignant wind lashed the white strands licked through the seal hair at his temples. ‘That's if my brother Keldmar didn't seize his chance to handle the idiot first. He's said before that sunwheel tunics make tempting targets for archery. He's been frothing at the mouth to sharpen his aim in case things come to a brangle.'

Through the shade of another etched archway, the scout said, ‘Lysaer has a way of bending allegiances.' His shrewd glance measured. ‘Once, we counted on Cattrick.'

Parrien scraped sweat from the nape of his neck, bristled to sudden ill temper. ‘You imply we'd turn? Or that Mearn would?' His outrage slapped echoes off dusty stonework like the portentous growl of thunder. ‘Alestron's not sanguine with Alliance affairs. My brother's no dreamer. He's set new revetments in his battlements and kept the armory forge fires busy for the time this charade of arse-kissing amity breaks open.'

Yet even for a Westlands boy marked with a galley slave's brand from Lysaer's crown policy against clansmen, the ultimate loyalty of the s'Brydion armed forces was too forthright a question to ask.

The moment for more probing inquiry was lost in any case. Past the crumbled shell of a bastion and the miniature tracks stippled by a foraging scarab, a poured avenue of sand shimmered across the gapped portal to what had been a spacious bailey; nor was the space empty, or desolate, or dead.

Out of that sun-fired shell of baked stone poured a shimmering cascade of pure harmony. The tenor and pitch was liquid and minor, wrought of a stark tension to lacerate peace and wring tears from dry eyes to succor the tortured desiccation of the earth.