Grand Conspiracy (63 page)

Time returned him, unwilling, to the splashing plink of water and the revolting, acidic reek of rat. Thirst left him unmoored. He had no sense of the hour. Around him lay darkness fretted by the sultry, spent flicker of a pine knot torch. Someone's lent cloak, steeped in sage and lavender, muffled the worst of the cold. Under the cloth, bound in the heat of strong poultices, the ache of uncountable cuts and bruises throbbed in lockstep with his pulse. His sides seemed a mass of outraged flesh. The guardsmen had kicked him with hobnailed boots, and his bed of damp straw and sweat-clammy clothing combined to knot cramps in his sinews.

‘Keep still,' urged a female voice, one he recognized. ‘I have
seals of mending at work on your knee. Should you move, you'll unstring the fine energies.'

Fionn Areth shut his eyes. The splintering pound of blood through his swellings did little to refresh his memory. ‘I know you, I think.'

No answer came; only the icy breath of the draft across the exposed skin of his cheek. The competent restraint of the woman's hands as she bound the stitched cut on his forearm suffered no break in steadiness. Her face was obscured. Fionn Areth made out little more than a lit curve of cheek, sliced by a dark fall of hair. The tight-focused glare of the spell crystal she engaged cast an actinic halo too fierce for his unshielded eyesight.

Fionn Areth battled an overpowering urge to give way to leaden drowsiness. Through muddied thoughts and the torpor of drugged dizziness, he managed, ‘You're the healer who once lived in the cottage on the moor.'

Her hands paused, then resumed in delicate firmness. ‘Yes. That's how I knew for certain you couldn't be Arithon s'Ffalenn.' She tucked in the ends of the bandage and settled back onto her heels.

‘I look so much like him?' Fionn Areth asked, bitter. ‘No one seems willing to believe me.'

‘Hate has no ears.' Elaira pushed back the stray hair slipped over her brow. A small tuck of worry pinched the line of the forehead he remembered, as she added, ‘Nor are grudges in Jaelot ever too old to pursue.' She let the light in her quartz flicker out, then did something to his knee by the blood weak spill of the cresset. ‘I'll help you in every way that I can, and as far as the vows to my order will allow. Believe this, your predicament is serious.'

Fionn Areth caught in a wincing breath, then another as a flare of sharp warmth hazed through his stiffening tissues. ‘What's wrong?'

‘With your knee? Torn cartilage and a puncture.' She raised a hand, her wristbone chiseled in unsubtle shadow, and captured the lick of auburn hair which stubbornly troubled her eyesight. ‘I'm sorry for the sting. I'd rather be thorough than risk complications.' Her neat, narrow fingers flicked the stray lock into a braid and secured it behind her left ear. ‘You'd lose the joint if the wound became septic.'

Fionn Areth let his head loll back, unable to think while his innards twitched in sickly protest. When next he spoke, the
worst of his fear grated through. ‘The leg won't much matter if the mayor has his way, and I find myself on the scaffold.'

‘The leg matters,' snapped the enchantress, as though a raw nerve had been scraped. ‘As for the scaffold, don't hold any doubts. The Lord Mayor's misdirected justice landed Jaelot its trouble with the Master of Shadow in the first place.'

Fionn Areth shut his eyes against another surge of healing force, this one a sweeping rain like fine silver needles down his spine and into his leg. ‘You know him?'

‘Very well, thank you.' Another queasy pause, while the enchantress traced a seal and sigil over his flaming, sore skin. ‘Arithon of Rathain has a rife quarrel with anyone who trifles with his personal affairs or his loyalties. Now be still. The energies should soon settle into a closer alignment.'

Beyond the particulars of healing his damaged knee, the ramifications of her statement about the Shadow Master took a tangled minute to sort out. Fionn Areth pondered, while the cresset flared and spat dying sparks over the noisome stone wall.

‘I didn't come here to meddle in any sorcerer's private feud,' he protested at length.

The enchantress ran light, testing fingers over the traumatized tissues of the knee, cross-checking her meticulous work. The little braid of hair slid undone and escaped the constraint of her ear. She raked back the persistent strands with an unnerving, jangled impatience. ‘No. It's the mayor the Master of Shadow will target, once he hears what's afoot. Don't despair. He's lifted prisoners out of locked chains before.'

Which presumption was too much; Fionn Areth vented his flood of unease in outright disbelief. ‘He's also slaughtered thirty thousand at a stroke, on the field at Dier Kenton Vale. I came
here
,' the herder's son clarified in acid affront, ‘to sign on my sword with the ranks of Avenor's Alliance. A bloodletting criminal is as unlikely to stir a hand to spare me from his own laid fire as I am to run steel through his unmerciful heart.'

‘Do you think so?' Ill-tempered at last, Elaira sat down on her satchel. She fixed Fionn Areth with a stare bleak gray as the winter-frozen puddles on the moor. ‘Well, think first, and carefully. Because you may get your chance. Just like the mayor, you can strike out of prejudice before letting your victim speak in his own defense.'

‘That's unfair!' Fionn Areth chose argument, more than desperate to stave off the fear that whiplashed him toward an abyss
of unutterable terror. ‘No question exists over Arithon's guilt. Against the sealed record of evidence against him, his death would be named as a boon to society.'

But the enchantress appeared to reject his assured view. ‘Be quiet.'

Fionn Areth insisted, ‘Why hasn't your sisterhood stepped forward to proclaim his innocence?'

‘Be quiet, I said,' Elaira snapped, sharper. Head raised, chin turned toward the rusted steel grille at the doorway, she had gone rigid with tension.

Brushed to sudden chills, Fionn Areth subsided. ‘What is it?'

Elaira shook her head, frowning. She closed her grasp over the spell crystal chained to her neck, her sudden uncertainty palpable even in near-total darkness. ‘Something's gone wrong.'

‘Perhaps the Shadow Master's sorcery,' Fionn Areth suggested, still bitter.

‘No.' Inarguably certain, the enchantress clasped her quartz and stilled into concentration. Whatever the probing nature of her inquiry, the crystal flared into sudden, bloodred sparks of light. As though their touch stung, Elaira cried out, and her hands jerked away in recoil.

‘What was that, lady, if not some fell working of darkness?'

‘Not Arithon's,' the enchantress rebuffed. ‘The trace signature I caught was warped light, born of fire. And the charges of dark sorcery against Arithon are false, whoever claims otherwise. It's a little-known fact, but the Prince of Rathain lost his access to mage talent thirty years ago.' She held back the rest, that the event just picked up through the staid calm of earth had more likely been the caught resonance of a Koriani sigil. ‘I don't like what I feel.'

No time was given to survey the source of her qualms.

A wave of wild shouting filtered in from the street, hard followed by the crash of splintering wood. Excited voices echoed down from the upstairs guardroom, no dispute between bored sentries in disagreement over a dice throw, but a shouted confrontation between armed men bent on forcing their way into the dungeons.

One voice clashed and rose above the duty captain's protests. ‘Man, you haven't looked outside. There's unnatural lights all over the night sky! That sorcerer in your dungeon has been stirring dire portents. This time, we won't wait for sound walls and roofs to come clapping down in fell heaps. If you have the brains of an egg-laying goose, let us through. We'll slit the
spell-winding criminal like a herring and string out his tripes for the ravens.'

The captain's reply came fragmented between fist-shaking threats and the hot-blooded jangle of weaponry. Reference to the mayor's decree of due process became mown down in midsentence. ‘What need for a trial? Already the whole sky's alive with fell conjury! The wretch is as good as proved guilty with every man's eyes as my witness.'

Steadfast, the captain shouted back. ‘Then show me a sealed writ from his lordship granting you lawful right to dispose of the prisoner.'

There followed a slamming exchange of armed blows. The raw din of steel flung ugly reverberations off the stone walls and bare ceilings. A man's choked-off scream signaled somebody fallen. More swordplay followed. Then a stampede of feet in hobnailed boots thundered from the wardroom down the steep, lower stairwell.

‘Mercy, they're through.' Elaira shoved to her feet, her hand clenched to her spell crystal. A short step saw her to the locked and barred door, the studded, strapped steel marred like old blood with streaked rust stains. ‘Whatever happens, lie still. Say nothing. Wisest if we can make them believe you're drugged beyond reach of your senses.'

Light speared down the stairwell, felted with the distorted shadows of angry men brandishing mismatched weapons. A straight silhouette against that juddering spill, Elaira held her stance by the doorway, her quartz pendant tucked in her right palm. She raised her free hand to frame sigils of protection in the air. Conjured light spilled like ribbon from her moving fingertip. Seal paired with counterforce and locked the raised energy in stasis. A chained mesh of spellcraft laced like thread foil across the threshold of the cell. Before the insane paranoia of mob panic, her concentration stayed clear as stilled water. Through sheer force of will and her order's stern discipline, she would not admit fear in distraction. Her arm remained steady. Though the effort stippled sweat on forehead and temple, her quartz burned hot and bright as glass set above open flame.

‘If you pray,' she said through clenched teeth to Fionn Areth, ‘better hope there's an ally in this town who has enough power to uphold your right to fair judgment. For if I should fall defending your innocence, believe this. Your vaunted Alliance fanatics will see us both dead without even one second's thought.'

Fionn Areth said nothing, too paralyzed with dread to do aught but feign limpid unconsciousness.

Elaira had no words of encouragement to spare him. The first wave of the mob surged down the staircase in a battering press of torches, bristled with bared swords and cudgels. The front ranks encountered her chain of defense wards and slammed to a stupefied stop.

‘Go home!' cried the enchantress in the face of their wrath. ‘You'll do no more murder in cold blood this night. Not as long as I stand to oppose you!'

Far north of the disturbance in Jaelot, light snowfall and a knifing, cruel wind raked over the Skyshiel Mountains. Snug in the privacy of her palanquin, the Prime Enchantress of the Koriani Order sat awake by gold lamplight, tatting a band of spelled lace. Aged hands etched down to tendon and cartilage picked and rearranged the ebony pins stuck on her frame of dark velvet. Her bundled spools of metallic thread dangled. Glints caught like thin drizzle in the flare of the wick as they swung to the twist and turn of her weaving. Her lace was not fashioned from ribbon or linen. The patterns she knotted were strung into chains of sigils and seals, their filaments drawn steel and copper.

The bobbins were carved bone, stained dark with age. The drafts which rippled through the curtains of the palanquin clicked them like primitive amulets, causing the dutiful apprentice successor to blink with unease at her post.

‘Selidie,' Morriel rasped. Her frailty grown disturbingly pronounced, she raised a peremptory hand, as if the young woman had never grown to maturity since the hour of her selection. ‘I'll need the canister of tobacco infused with tienelle. You may pack the stone pipe with the snakeroot stem and have the striker ready. Then fetch me another opium taper from the lacquered box in the herb chest.'

‘Your will, Matriarch,' Selidie replied, her voice sweet with childish sibilance. She attended the first chore, then crossed the cramped quarters as though balanced on eggshells, each movement infused with awed reverence.

The senior seeress crouched beside Morriel's pallet remained absorbed over the quartz sphere she used for clear scrying. Her murmur cut through the shriek of the gusts that clawed through the black spruce outside. ‘Your moment is nigh. The Mayor of Jaelot has been roused from his bed to quell the vigilantes
storming his dungeon. As you wished, Lirenda has convinced the town magistrates of the need to place spells of protection over the walls of the city.'

Bone spools clacked as Morriel plucked a pin and preset the next stage of the pattern. Her fingers looped threads like a spider's legs, spinning webs to net hapless prey. ‘Well-done. The timing's immaculate.' An interval passed as she tied off a thread, one knot in the ritual rune of ending. ‘Selidie!' she snapped. ‘Quickly now! Light the taper. Then drink the posset in the corked flask on the stand by my pallet. The herbs I've prepared will allow you to sleep undisturbed throughout this night's work.'

The seeress looked up then, inquiry written into her wrinkled face.

Morriel returned a quelling gesture. ‘You'll stay. Your skills are yet needed.'

‘Matriarch, your leave,' lisped the young initiate. She placed the lighted taper on its stand, then curtsied and uncapped the squat wooden flask. The contents smelled bitter. She wrinkled her nose, then dutifully drank, while the restless drafts toyed with the curtains. Morriel watched, eyes half-lidded. As a sated cat might follow the movements of a mouse, she surveyed each detail of the girl's smooth limbs as she stripped to her shift and snuggled into her cot by the corner post. Morriel sat without speech or movement. Limned in the unstable flicker of flame light, she appeared as a death's-head amid a catafalque of pillows and quilts.