Grand Conspiracy (84 page)

‘Then who wakened the stones?' asked Arithon, conversational. He caught a stuffed chair and sat as the servant returned with a steaming basin on a tray, an aromatic tin of salve brought along with the requested linen for bandaging.

‘I was blind, scarred, and talented.' Pert under her shawls, the old lady tracked each sound as her guest declined Jasque's attentions and took charge of his hurt on his own. ‘Sightlessness came to resharpen those senses. What friends I have made over these long years have exceedingly subtle voices.' Her natural warmth and gratitude shone through like fine light as she finished her explanation. ‘The stones woke on their own, I think to ease my loneliness after the fire.'

‘A tribute and an honor,' Arithon allowed. He paused on a locked hitch of breath, the linen pressed tight to dam the fresh flood from the gash he had just given rigorous cleaning. To Fionn Areth, who looked ready to bolt from the queer turn the conversation was taking, he said, ‘Stones recognize honesty. They never speak false, and their loyalty, once given, is held sacrosanct. Trust me. You are protected and safe.'

The old lady concurred. ‘Young man, the granite foundation underneath us would shatter before even one Koriani sigil should gain entry and bring harm to your person.'

‘That won't be necessary,' Arithon said, arisen with the tinned salve in hand to inspect his companion's torn dressings. ‘We won't stay one moment longer than necessary.' He quelled the lady's instantaneous protest, his phrase to Fionn Areth just as brilliantly pitched with assurance. ‘I am healer trained. In fact, it was Elaira's own wisdom that taught me.'

‘You know her?' Fionn Areth blurted, the question jerked through his wall of distrust by surprise.

Arithon smiled. The expression was haunting – the features struck from the same mold as Fionn's own, but inescapably
not
.
The sharp planes of bone beneath sea-tanned skin seemed too sensitive, too fragile, too inescapably human and vulnerable in the light of the candle he lifted from the side table. Eyes and mouth held a fleeting, poignant exposure, doused like the flash on a fast-sheathed blade as he answered the query on Elaira. ‘I know her well enough to guess how angry she'd be if she saw how you'd treated her efforts to mend the wound on that forearm.'

Then Arithon subjected his double to the lingering inspection their straits had not allowed previously. He added in hasty apology to his hostess, ‘Lady, I'm sorry. Conversation must wait. This boy needs a meal, a bed, and a rest before he'll be fit company.'

The brass bell summoned Jasque, who received clear instructions to see their every need met.

‘How can we repay you?' Arithon said, a strange desolation struck through the firm weave of his voice.

The lady's scarred face tilted in its veils, the unassuming human beauty of her smile erased by her puckered scars. ‘Sing for me.' This time pleading, she added, ‘I heard your music just once, through the stones, when you chastised Jaelot twenty-five years ago. The memory has all but destroyed my sound sleep. No harmony since seems complete.'

Arithon arose from Fionn Areth's side. He stepped forward through the foil-thin glow of the candle, and bent, and lifted her malformed hand. The kiss he placed on her crumpled red palm was a reverence that seared eyesight to witness. ‘I will play you the stars and the moon, sweet lady, anytime that you ask.'

Two hours later, the lady awaited, still motionless in her chair. Immersed in deep thought, her lace veils lit to amber, she was like another stitched scene in the tapestries hung on the wainscoted walls. As if, after fire, her life had stopped in place, like the lover's idylls depicted in age-faded thread.

Quietly as Prince Arithon could move, she still sensed his presence at the doorway. ‘Come in. You're expected. Your tread on the stair is more springy than Jasque's.' She had not asked her servant to snuff out the candle. Under the friable glow of gold light, she seemed ephemeral, traced out in white and bullion-thread lace, and ethereal as the legendary cutter of life threads who enacted the Fatemaster's judgment. ‘Better sense says you should have settled for bed rest. Is the boy made comfortable?'

Arithon moved on cat feet to her side, found a low stool, and sat down. ‘He's sleeping, though in truth, an herbal tisane was needful to settle him.' With long, supple fingers, he massaged his temples, sun-browned from his years of sea voyaging. The trimmed ends of his hair licked his high linen collar as he described Fionn Areth's condition. ‘The left arm's been restitched. His knee is a problem that will have to be tended once the ice packs have drawn the swelling.'

‘You could do more for him.' That insight came piercing, through blinded eyes.

Caught off his usual guard by fatigue, Arithon flinched into recoil. ‘Ath, are you Dharkaron's own Spear, or the voice of my deathless conscience? Yes. I can do more.' Green eyes too steady, he regarded the diminutive figure of his hostess with a startled, even wary respect. ‘If you see that much, you'll also know the price of intervention could be punishing.'

Her silence held no judgment, but only generosity. ‘You came to ask something?'

His smile rewarded, sunlight through storm. For her gift of tact, he chose to answer the question she had carefully left unspoken. ‘I'll do all I can for the boy, come what may. He won't walk lame for life. The song for his healing will cost me a painful exposure. I'll support that, if you can, but there's an errand I need to run first.'

‘Outside?' The word reflected her sole apprehension, the tragic bounds of a courage that humbled all the more for the fact it had limits.

‘You'll keep the boy safe, here?' Arithon asked. ‘I give my sworn word, I'll be back.'

‘Sworn words are small use if you're dead, or taken captive. The Prime Matriarch's minions won't rest your case until they've garnered one or the other.' The old woman pushed straight, painfully slowed by the binding pull of her scars. She pawed aside shawls, then sorted through one of several silk pouches tied to her waist with wool cords. The belongings inside were well-known by touch. She found what she sought, drew it out with all the reverent care her malformed hands could still muster. ‘Take this as a keep safe.'

Candlelight danced like fey gold through the veils of a beautiful, polished quartz sphere. Touched deep by the radiant, soft peace of its presence, Arithon sucked in a fast breath. ‘That's no talisman, to be handed by whim to a stranger.'

Indeed, the crystal was wakened, a living awareness whose being shone fair in a room choked with confining shadow.

The woman extended her offering, and waited.

Pained to impatience, Arithon stood. ‘You know that bright being would shatter with overload if a Koriani sigil should cross me.'

‘I trust you not to try foolish risks.' The woman caressed the smooth surface of the sphere. The stubbed-off remnant of her thumb sensed beyond the seared nerves that stole away tactile awareness. ‘Listen. Stone has character as well. Given the freedom to exercise preferences, this one speaks for you by choice. If you reject the honor of that, you must phrase the discourtesy yourself.'

Arithon laughed. ‘I haven't the sheer arrogance.' He accepted the sphere, held it cupped between reverent hands, then whistled a clean phrase of melody.

The sound drew an ecstatic, white flash of light from the heart of the stone in his fingers. The old woman cried out. She clapped deformed hands to her cheeks, stunned by wonder as her talent sensed the resonance of the crystal's reply to him. ‘Oh, you are blessed, to be gifted with a language to stone that mortal ears can perceive! Why should you question the gift of their protection of you, in return?'

Arithon looked away. In the draftless, close air sealed in by wool tapestries, the clasp of his hands on the quartz sphere became a ghost's grip that threatened to tremble. He did not have the words, then or ever, to explain that for him, Vastmark shale had done murder. For this reclusive old woman, whose gentle nature had brought needed respite in his cause to spare Fionn Areth, the impact of too many truths would become a consummate act of unkindness.

‘You both know me too well, and not well enough,' Arithon said finally, subtle in his effort to warn her against the perils of incautious confidence. Humbled by the simpler majesty of quartz, he tucked the crystal sphere into a pocket under his jerkin. ‘Expect my return before sundown, on my word as Rathain's sanctioned crown prince.'

The lady tilted her head in acknowledgment, amused by the perspicacious awareness of an oath given rarely, and never without weight and thought. She made light response in an effort to ease the burden she sensed on his heart. ‘My liege, the boy will be safe until your return. My Jasque will have hot soup waiting.'

‘No liege,' quipped Arithon. ‘Just a mountebank gallant who took sad advantage of the retiring primrose. For a keepsake, I'll bring you yellow ribbons from the market.'

The last thing she felt of his presence on departure was a tender, dry kiss on a cheek that had known no such sweetened touch throughout the lonely, long years of a lifetime.

Outside, the winter cold sliced down to the bone. Arithon tugged the mantle borrowed from Jasque around his shivering shoulders. Poised on the stair of the kitchen exit, he knew where he stood. The grand, high house with its queer, wakened stones crowned a crest, and below him, the hillside fell away, snow dusted in the crazy-quilt jumble of cobbled gutters and skewed, slate stairs. Local tradesmen called the byway Spinster's Alley; now, to his sorrow, he knew why. The anger spurred on by that thoughtless cruelty amazed him. He refused the distraction. Above anything he needed clear focus.

He was a hunted fugitive in a city that had condemned an innocent to sate its vindication. The soured fury of its citizens cast an ephemeral aura of disharmony that clouded his mood to uneasiness. Over the distant barking of dogs, he picked out the hobnailed march of men-at-arms; the iron-shod hooves of war-horses bearing lancers, and from seaside, the wail of an officer's horn. The thin snowfall had abated. A sky of flat white outlined the roofs, etched gray and pewter, and dull charcoal. Gulls wheeled and cried above the emptied fish market. Their circling flight changed direction too often, and the grind of the drays up the incline from the docks seemed diminished. The more sensible carters kept to their homes before braving the unrest in the streets.

A lone servant girl bearing an errand basket hurried by, head down, disinclined to share gossip or greeting.

Arithon tucked the plain wool hood against the tugging, damp clasp of the wind, then set off, brisk paced, for the ramshackle stalls of Beckburn Market. He did not choose the straight course, but ducked through courtyards and closes, passed on light feet through the dead stems of flower gardens and under rose trellises, where, in summer, young lovers met sweethearts. Now the dried canes shook to the sea winds, and ice choked the stepped ledges of the fountains.

Alone, the Master of Shadow moved fast. He knew the old city as well as the back of his hand. His bard's ear warned which lanes
were obstructed and which ones offered clear passage. The sphere of loaned quartz always warmed to his touch where Koriani scryers swept the byways. Other searchers' activity seemed stiflingly muted, the morning's hysteria subsided into a poised and explosive apprehension. Tight-faced tradesmen clumped on the street corners. No matter how innocent each passerby seemed, they whispered, disturbed glances cast over their shoulders to take note of anyone watching. The shutters stayed barred on the mansions. Wrapped in Jasque's mantle, Arithon became what he seemed, an anonymous lackey sent out on an errand too trivial for high-ranking house staff.

Where he did not wish to be seen or heard, he masked his presence with shadow. As much as he could, he kept out of the thoroughfares. The back alleys and servant's gates, the footpaths across middens, and the dank, narrow gaps between buildings where the runoff from overlapping eaves spilled melodious droplets into the brick-channeled gutters; he knew the mazed byways which led to the twisting, hillside stairs and the weed-grown plots of the commons. There, in swift passage, he trod unpaved earth, and first noticed the queer note of resonance.

He paused, listening, teased by the feeling that something unsettled traveled through the ground. Yet if aught was amiss, its signature energy left too faint an imprint for a bard's ear to capture in sound. His blocked mage-sight, of course, told him nothing.

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.