Grand Conspiracy (83 page)

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

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?'

Eyebrows tipped upward in inquiry, Arithon trailed the man's gentled tread down a hallway lined with antique serpentine vases. Each one overflowed with dried flowers, bunched and
tied years ago with faded lengths of starched ribbon. The candles in their glass sconces were wax. The air trapped their musk scent and the crisp tang of citrus oil used to polish precious wood furniture. From a drawing room to one side, Arithon picked up the genteel perfume of lavender and spikenard the wealthy in Jaelot used to anoint the heavy tasseled pulls on their curtains.

The lady was well set, whoever she was.

A glance sidewards established that Fionn Areth was still trembling, his limp grown pronounced since a misstep in flight had worsened his damaged knee. Before the boy's mood of stifled desperation could raise argument with the old man, Arithon said, ‘Relax. This household is not under sway of the Koriathain.'

The old man's stiff protest, ‘I should say not!' collided with Fionn Areth's clashing glare of distrust.

Arithon smiled, head tipped in deference to the disgruntled servant. ‘I have a bard's ear,' he explained in swift effort to quell the riled nerves of both parties. ‘Since the stones on the threshold asked for my Name, I surmise the lady in residence is no friend to a faction who treat their crystals as tools without consciousness.'

‘I'm not one to speak of such things out of turn.' The old man paused before another closed door. ‘The mistress will share her confidence as she chooses.' He raised the bronze latch, pushed the panel inward, and gestured toward a room left in stygian darkness. ‘Go in.'

At Fionn Areth's balking, flat pallor, Arithon spoke in that steel-gloved gentleness that best masked his own trepidation. ‘I'd far rather face this than die on a pike in the streets. Shall I lead?' He did not wait for the herder's answer, but shouldered the price fate's favors had dealt him and strode boldly over the threshold.

His first footfall tapped the same wax-polished wood. The next sank into rich, piled carpet. Incense rode the air, too faint to be cloying. By the deadened lack of echo, he determined the walls were probably hung with wool tapestries. When no voice addressed him, or offered direction, he opened with wary courtesy. ‘May I trust the invitation of your servant gave us your sanctioned leave to enter?'

A thin rustle of silk carved sound from the darkness. The reply held an old woman's quaver. ‘There is truth to the rumor you were mage-trained, I see. Your careful choice of language would mark you, had the stones at my door not already given their own fair endorsement in your favor.'

‘Sweet lady,' said Arithon, enchanted by her phrasing, ‘not all things are as they appear, in my case. Is the shadow for your sake, or mine?'

She laughed, her gaiety vivacious as a girl's. ‘Oh, you are priceless for nice manners alone. The darkness is for my vanity, as well as your comfort.' The admission bald-faced, ‘I am fire scarred.'

‘I would ask light, then,' said Arithon at once. ‘There is no ugliness about you.'

The melodious laugh this time held a caught edge of grief. ‘Suit yourself. If you're shocked, I won't see the offense.'

‘You are blind?' The question matter-of-fact, delivered in between a flow of deft movement as Arithon felt his way to a side table.

‘Since the fire, yes. I was a young girl.' No pity, but acceptance framed that placid statement. ‘There's a striker in the lacquer box to your right, and a candle a handspan farther on.' A pause, while a citrine feather of light bloomed to her guest's ministrations. ‘Ah, I am sorry. You're not left-handed by choice, is that so?' Reclined on a settee, the diminutive old lady raised a porcelain, fey wrist draped in lace-worked shawls. She jingled a little brass handbell.

The door cracked, admitting a grudging spear of illumination. The old man, who must have been waiting without, poked his balding head through the jambs.

‘Jasque, if you please, a basin and clean linen for bandages.'

‘Mistress.' The servant's deference held earnest concern as he left on the requested errand.

The woman who owned such selfless loyalty was tiny, erect, every inch of her frame endowed with a graceful air of self-command. Yet no dignity could erase the cruel marks of deformity. The fingers she tucked in her lap were pink stumps. Her exquisite, fine bonnet of starched lace could not soften a face cruelly wasted to scar tissue; nor the unearthly, high timbre of voice, sadly due to the drawn flesh left by fire inhaled in her trial of agony.

‘Sit,' she invited, courageous despite Fionn Areth's inadvertent hissed breath. ‘I'm a friend of the Fellowship Sorcerers. My welcome extends for as long as my house can safely provide you with sanctuary.'

‘Lady, in gratitude, we owe you our lives.' Arithon restored the striker to the box, but stayed standing, where the free-fallen blood from his wrist would drop without harm on the tabletop. ‘You were told we had need?'

Again, the lucent laugh of amusement. ‘I dislike the Koriathain, as you guessed. What they want, I would deny them.' Old bitterness colored her sigh as she qualified. ‘They asked for me, you see, as one of their initiates. I refused, and the Fellowship enforced my born right to stay free. No one ever proved that the charges for dark witchcraft which saw me to the faggots were made by the order's arrangement. But my mother believed so 'til her hour of death. This house was my sister's, though she has passed also. I live here with Jasque, who first served my father as a message boy.'