Grand Conspiracy Page 2

  Her streetwise instinct for survival gave warning the stillness had lasted too long. She moved on, bent, and tended the fire. While her cast shadow capered like a demon at her heels, she laid two logs of sweet-burning birch over the coals of spent kindling.

  ‘What earthly good will be served through creation of Arithon’s look-alike?’ Elaira fenced words with dispassionate tact. ‘No one familiar with his Grace’s presence could mistake his living character for a herder boy wearing s’Ffalenn features.’

  ‘We intend no replacement.’ Lirenda laid her thin gloves on the trestle and arose. ‘Morriel wishes Arithon of Rathain taken captive. To that end, she has ordered that his double should be raised as the decoy to draw out his enemies. If Fionn Areth stands trial for the Shadow Master’s misdeeds, outraged politics will brand him guilty. We believe the threatened execution of an innocent will lure the Teir’s’Ffalenn back ashore. He has an infallible heart, so you say. I know the arrogant pride of his line will not let him suffer another to die in his place. Whichever trait answers, his fate can be played straight into our hands on the puppet strings of his royal-born tie to compassion.’

  Elaira felt as if every bone she possessed had been opened to let in the cold. ‘What of Lysaer?’

  The amethyst rings on fingers and thumb flashed to Lirenda’s dismissive gesture. ‘Be sure we’ll find means to see him detained when the moment comes to take action.’

  Dizzy, sickened, all but crushed by despair, Elaira snatched at straws. ‘What of the child’s parents? How do you intend to gain their consent, and how many scheming truths will you hide on your course to persuade them? It’s a dangerous strait, to wear Arithon’s face, with the merchant guilds now funneling gold to arm Lysaer’s Alliance. Every headhunting band of unattached mercenaries is hiring itself out for the chance to spill s’Ffalenn blood.’

  ‘Why should the boy’s parents ever know?’ Lirenda inspected the cot, her dark, cut-silk lashes pinned wide in disdain. ‘These moorlands are isolated, long leagues from the trade road. Since the child is not yet six years of age, the sealed enchantment to remake his features can be tuned to unfold over time. No ignorant herder would distinguish the change from his normal growth to maturity.’

  Outlined by the leaping heat of the fire, Elaira let her stunned silence speak for her.

  ‘You have vowed to serve,’ Lirenda reminded. Her regard turned fixed in cruel fascination; as if, deeply hidden, she had a personal reason to savor her victim’s unfolding pain.

  ‘I have vowed to serve,’ Elaira agreed, her expressionless face feeling brittle as the crackled glaze on porcelain.

  The clear, topaz eyes of her tormentor stayed pinned on her, unrelenting. ‘But a vow is no guarantee of right action.’

  ‘You wouldn’t imply I’ve a choice in the matter?’ Elaira let sarcasm ignite into venom. ‘There’s a herdwife who lets rooms. She’s a wonderful cook. Stay here, and you’ll get nothing better than a half portion of stewed hare with pepper.’

  ‘Whatever unsavory supper you have planned, you need not share a morsel with me. I’ve dined already.’ Lirenda poked under the mismatched layers of bedding, then fluttered her hand to disperse the dust that wafted from the grass ticking. ‘Regarding free choice, your options are limited since the Fellowship can’t intervene.’

  She looked up, lips curved to a stabbing smile at Elaira’s wooden stillness. ‘Oh, be sure that’s accurate. Morriel made certain no Sorcerers would meddle. The Warden of Althain is this moment immersed in rebalancing the protections on a grimward. His earth-sense is deaf. By the hour he emerges, through your help we’ll have Fionn Areth’s clear and willing consent.’

  Elaira held firm through the wreckage of hope. While the wind moaned and hissed through the thatch overhead, she offset her distress with the tenacity taught by the arthritic old thief who had raised her. What use to dwell on the damning array of insupportable consequences? In the end, she must decide which part of herself to betray: the Koriani Order, with its merciless penalty for oathbreaking, which would obliterate her last conscious vestige of character. Or a price for survival that came dearer than blood: the coin of her love for a man who had become her very self, since one fated evening in Merior. Perhaps worse, she must violate a child’s blind trust, misuse his very flesh as the vessel to shape the design of her Prime Matriarch’s ordained purpose.

  ‘You’ll have a few hours to think and decide,’ Lirenda said in dismissal. ‘For the interval, I wish to rest.’ She flicked out her mantle and arranged its rich folds over the cot’s tumbled bedding.

  ‘I thought we agreed, there was no choice to make,’ Elaira bit back in acerbity. Staunch in the face of explosive despair, she added, ‘If you’re dead set on pursuit of this evil, say when you wish to begin.’

  ‘Wake me in the hours between midnight and dawn.’ Lirenda plucked out the tortoiseshell combs confining the sleek fall of her hair. ‘At least, I presume by then the herder boy’s parents will be snoring the soundest in sleep.’

  Black hair cascaded in waves down the prim slope of her shoulders. Lirenda fluffed the crimped ends with crisp fingers, then settled herself on the cot, her limbs arranged in exquisite wrapped comfort in the thick folds of her mantle. ‘You do stock valerian? Then mix a soporific. The steps will go harder if the boy cries in pain as the shapechanging is sealed. If you agree to keep your sworn faith with the order, be ready when the quarter moon breaks the horizon.’

  Lirenda closed lids the delicate, shell blue of a songbird’s egg, and settled herself into sleep.

  So brief a time to measure a decision that held the potential to rock every facet of the world; Elaira reclaimed her seat and sank down in limp shock at the trestle. Around her, the tools of her trade seemed transformed into items of damning remembrance. Here, the stone knife that Arithon had once borrowed to slice the galls from an oak branch; there, the small chip in the enamel jar she had made in that fateful, first hour he had chosen to cross over her threshold.

  Knotted round her wrist, warm against the sped pulse in her veins, she still wore his leather cuff lace, with its unassuming abalone beads. That treasured, soft length of deerhide had been left behind as a thoughtless gesture; in the safety of dreams, she still savored the competent, steadying touch he had used to bundle her rain-sodden hair and tie the length into a plait.

  Each detail hurt now with unbearable force.

  Elaira gripped the round stone she used for a pestle, a futile effort to draw comfort from the river-smoothed grain of the granite. The crossroads she faced was unalterably plain. She could fail to arouse Lirenda at moonrise; for disobedience of a Koriani senior’s command, she would pay the ultimate penalty of losing all ties to conscious awareness. Forced enslavement would follow. The power of her free will would be called forfeit through the bonds of the initiate’s oath she had sworn into the matrix of the Skyron aquamarine. That option offered her peaceful surcease through the painless void of oblivion.

  The stone under her palms made her flesh ache with cold. Trapped in the knife-edged coils of irony, Elaira squeezed back angry tears. She could not live the lie. If she allowed her spirit free rein in defiance, that would be the easy way out. Her personal stake in the future might be absolved on a word of defiance, but Lirenda’s uncanny sharp interest had laid bare the fallacy behind simple refusal.

  Elaira set down the rock, reamed to the bone by the tireless drafts that sang through the chinks in her casement. She held no illusions. She was expendable. Her cooperative contribution became little more than expedience within the larger pattern of Koriani design. Should she yield up her identity, Morriel Prime would simply appoint her replacement. The Skyron crystal would retain a full record of her memories and experience. Given that borrowed template, another enchantress would study her perception of Arithon s’Ffalenn and replicate her personal insights of his character in her stead. Fionn Areth would come to suffer the same fate. The plot to arrange the Shadow Master’s capture would proceed, with or without her
consent to become the tool to enact his betrayal.

  The jaws of the quandary bit insidious and deep. Elaira raged, helpless before the inexorable truth. She wanted to rise, scream and rant like a madwoman, then break anything within reach in a manic spree of vindication. There seemed no justice, that the greatest sacrifice under her power to make would spare no one and nothing but her own peace of mind.

  She could wish she had chosen the good sense to die before this sorry hour should visit her. That misery recalled another night in chill drizzle, when she had walked the beachhead at Narms in fear for Arithon’s safety. Then as now, she had railed against the order’s restraint with seething rebellion on her mind. Unbidden, she remembered the warning a Fellowship Sorcerer had delivered, while in darkness and rainfall, the earth turned in balance, and the tidewaters ebbed from the bay: ‘I was sent to you,’ Traithe had explained in gentle sympathy, ‘because an augury showed the Warden of Althain that, for good or ill, you’re the one spirit alive in this world who will come to know Arithon best. Should your Master of Shadow fail you, or you fail him, the outcome will call down disaster.’

  Tonight in Araethura, the burden of that scrying became as a spike through the heart.

  Elaira looked inward in brutal self-honesty and understood that her personal integrity amounted to nothing. The Koriani sisterhood’s supreme penalty for willful disobedience was no more and no less than a coward’s rejection of responsibility. Her love could heal no one in witless obscurity. Cornered by obligations of duty and emotion, she perceived that the conscious road led to a thorny and desperate gamble. No matter the cost, she might go forward and embrace the most tenuous hope: the odds on a hell-bent course toward disaster perhaps might be routed by Arithon’s sharp penchant for cleverness.

  Fionn Areth’s adult future might rest on that razor’s edge of possibility. She dared not entrust a replacement to act for her. Another initiate appointed in her stead might eclipse that slim chance for reprieve. Yet for Elaira to stand vigil to guard that small opening, she must first keep cold faith with her order. She must place both the child and the man in jeopardy to preserve her stake in the outcome. And if the s’Ffalenn gift of ingenuity did not prevail, she must in turn live out the appalling consequence.

  Held firm by her street waif’s obdurate tenacity, Elaira fixed her resolve.

  ‘I will trust you,’ she murmured to a prince whose own burden of adversities drove him unhearing leagues out to sea. ‘Before my own peace, I will not bow to failure. You must be the axis upon which Morriel’s wicked plot stands or falls.’

  Sucked hollow by a dread that threatened to break her, Elaira masked her face in chapped hands. For nearly an hour she listened against hope to the empty wail of the winds. No Sorcerer answered her silent appeal. The Fellowship had once given their promise that Arithon s’Ffalenn was qualified to withstand any dangers that might arise through her bound service to the Koriani Order. Yet their steady, wise counsel lay far beyond reach on this night. She must carry on alone and suffer the risk that their judgment at Narms still held true.

  Outside the casement, a spill of washed silver reflected the first rise of the moon. Elaira exhausted every filthy word she knew, then mastered her bitter distress. She put aside the insidious dread, that the Teir’s’Ffalenn might prevail; he might escape Morriel’s snare and stay free, and never understand or forgive the betrayal she now chose to enact out of faith.

  ‘Ath’s mercy on us both, if that happens,’ Elaira whispered.

  Worst of all, she feared for the agony she might inflict on a man whose strengths had been expended again and again in the desperate cause of necessity. Choked by hot tears that were useless to shed, she rummaged through her stores and boiled water to brew an infusion of valerian. Let her vindictive bustle of noise awaken the former First Senior.

  Lirenda stirred, raked back onyx hair, and blinked like a milk-fed lynx. ‘There could be compensation,’ she murmured as she measured the steel in the junior initiate’s smoldering composure. ‘When Arithon’s taken, you might ask to keep his shapechanged double for your servant.’

  Elaira said nothing, the response to such baiting beneath her utmost contempt.

  ‘Well, I might ask for him then. Such a tempting potential for amusement and irony! He could bleach my soiled linens and brush my suede shoes.’ Lirenda uncoiled from the cot in disaffected exasperation. Her feint had provoked no sign of insolence or challenge, disappointing proof that tonight the mouse was too wise to play for the stalking cat. ‘We’ll need an hour to set preliminary wards and ready a circle for grand scrying.’

  Elaira bowed her head and gave her, not words, but a curtsy that swept to the floor. There existed no half measures. Her irreplaceable integrity and the desperate plight of Fionn Areth’s future must rest in Arithon’s hand. Her vindication now stood or fell on the strength of the Shadow Master’s character, to defang the jaws of Koriani design and upset the Prime Matriarch’s plotting.

  Autumn 5653

  Sentinel

  As Lirenda had arranged by scheming design, on the one fated hour when the half-moon arose over the moors of Araethura, the Fellowship of Seven had no hand free to delve into her order’s machinations.

  Yet the boundaries the Sorcerers maintained to keep faith with the terms of their sworn compact were far from weakened or hamstrung. The wild lands under their charge remained free, and the ward rings they guarded held true. The Law of the Major Balance they lived by had never been breached or broken in two ages of recorded history.

  Too often, past and present, the foundation of that integrity remained steadfast at punishing cost. As the presence of the Paravian races had waned, the Fellowship had been left as caretakers of Althain Tower, with all of its attendant perils and additional obligations.

  Not the first fortress built, but among the oldest, and by lengths the most well defended, the tower had been raised at the dawn of the Second Age. Those times had seen the world’s brightest hope plunge awry, when the primal purity of Ath’s song of creation had turned, and the maligned power of the dragons’ true dreaming had spawned new life out of discord and conflict. The Paravian races sent to the world to bring healing had been met with slaughter, the shining grace of their example brought down in sorrow and bloodshed. Ripped raw with wounds and punishing grief for a triumph undone in doomed war, the Ilitharis Paravians had fitted and sung the keep’s mortised stone with grand conjury. Antlered heads bent, torsos and haunches straining to shift half-ton blocks on log ramps, they raised the blunt-fisted height of this turret at the edge of the Bittern Desert. Here, where the winds still sang their laments for a grasslands spoiled by drakefire, and the spring rains fell too seldom to ease the imprinted horror of the dead torn down in battle; as if the land itself refused to relinquish its pain for the unicorns who had held the front line. Pure spirit made flesh, they were the promise of Ath’s unconditional redemption. Conceived as a gift, they had died as a sacrifice, unable to contain in pure love the aberrated creatures that had, for need, been cleansed from the face of Athera: a graceless expedient of survival last enacted by scouring conflagration.

  Now the old, warded granite housed the records of those all-but-forgotten years: the Names of those Paravians slain, and the memories of their passing by sword and by fire; by claw and cruel fang; and never least, loss, and bloodshed grown too overwhelming to endure. The tower’s fast vaults held ancient wonders. Here resided the bright and dark threads of Athera’s history – the faded maps and primal ciphers; the arcane keys to earth’s mystery – a detailed body of knowledge that could unlock the bound gates of time. Through the years, as the Mistwraith had choked out the sunlight, the Paravians departed from the continent. On leaving, the eldest centaur guardian had oathsworn the Fellowship Sorcerers to safeguard the legacy of Althain Tower’s contents.

  That trust had endured for five centuries. Nor was the tower ever left untenanted those beleaguered, rare times when its Warden passed beyond reach of the earth link. The mig
hty endowment of vision he possessed had been ceded by the last Paravian. Its tied power married Sethvir’s awareness to all that transpired in the world. Few could have endured that grand flux without losing their minds to insanity. Sethvir had done more, had embraced and encompassed the whole by surrendering every aspect of his being to address the needs of Athera.

  Forgiveness for an unspeakable past had come to him in that moment, that his heart had mastered the challenge.

  On the night hour Fionn Areth fell prey to Koriani design, the discorporate Sorcerer Luhaine kept displeased vigil. His ingrained penchant for fussy detail could never match Sethvir’s broad perception. A cast-iron pessimist, Luhaine grumbled. He had never loved solitude; his natural preference bent toward comforting lectures when he faced untidy loose ends. Nor would he compromise his innate, plodding accuracy, a trait that often abraded his colleagues to fits of exasperation.

  Had Luhaine still been enfleshed, he would have vented his stress by stuffing himself on muffins and butter. Left to life as a shade after a catastrophic mishap, he could only shed aimless static, his frustration built to a fulminating crescendo by the second month of his tenancy.

  ‘Far better for everything if those meddlesome Koriani had never set foot on Athera!’ He hissed past a balustrade in the Second Age library, goaded to a brisk, snapping breeze since the Prime Matriarch’s instructions had dispatched Lirenda to Araethura.

  Elaira’s renewed role in her sisterhood’s affairs boded the worst sort of trouble. The Fellowship Sorcerers were already spread thin. Their concern now redoubled since the Koriani had failed in their first attempt to take Arithon as their order’s string-puppet captive. Luhaine knew best of any: their ancient Prime Matriarch would not abide her defeat. The enchantresses’ current intervention in Araethura gave warning of a new strategy, with no Fellowship Sorcerer at hand to track their intent through surveillance.