Grand Conspiracy Read online

  ‘That’s well.’ Relieved to the point of embarrassment, the scout shifted aside for the boy, who moved forward, dripping, to find a cranny amid the wadded netting. The scout’s fox-thin features stayed trained toward the Sorcerer, pinched with frowning concern as he strove for politeness and subtlety. ‘In case you don’t know, there’s an Alliance war camp billeted next to the trade road.’

  ‘No setback at all.’ Asandir seemed removed, even distant, the seamed map of his features written in calm that verged on the borders of sleep.

  That appearance deceived. Behind closed eyelids, the Sorcerer extended his awareness. He cast his trained consciousness outward in a web that missed nothing, from the skeined lines of force that guided the winds, to the deeper tie strung between moon and water, which commanded the pull of the tide. His mind tracked each wavecrest. He knew the purl of scrolled sound as salt water splashed into foam, each single event one word in a language his ear understood. He sensed the invisible, lightning tracks of magnetic current where the earth’s lane forces coiled through Mainmere and trailed a cascading signature of charged energy through the deeps.

  His listening encompassed the fish in the shoals, and the gulls that bobbed, wing-folded in sleep on the swells. The sands of the seabed were singly made known to him, each grain by Name, their collective chord of existence laced through by streamered beds of kelp and live coral. The breadth of his thought embraced the four elements, and all else that touched upon the path of the fishing sloop’s crossing. To each varied and interlocked facet of existence, he gave solemn greeting, his tacit recognition a gift that awakened acknowledgment in turn. Through the vast stillness his announcement of presence engendered, he made known his need, then asked leave for the sake of the green trees threatened in Caithwood.

  His answer came back as a white flood of power that sang through flesh and bone in sweet resonance. On a phrase, he could have bidden the sea to launch from its channel and punch through the sky like a fist. Fish and birds, all would rise for his cause; even the staid stone and sand on the bay floor would unbind in an explosion of volatile force.

  Such was his strength, he asked none of these things.

  Gentle as a filament spun out of starlight, he aligned his intent: to see one patched Torwent fishing sloop to the far shore, his course a shot arrow of desire that blazed west-northwest and marked the wide cove where the trade road from Valenford crossed under the eaves of the forest.

  To that vectored appeal, he set mindful stays of limitation: that no life be harmed, and no bird become tossed or ruffled in flight from the recoil of contrary elements. That the tide’s rush through the estuary not falter, nor the anomaly his need would spin through the world’s wind unleash a stressed vortex that might seed a storm or drought later. He understood the flow of power, from force of element to breathing life, in all aspects of interlocked complexity. Rooted in wisdom, he shaped the offered gifts of the land with a feather touch of clean subtlety.

  Nor did he invoke any power but his own to spark his laid pattern of conjury. To an adept of his experience, the charge contained in just one grain of sand could lay waste to the entire planet; therefore, he would not disturb the spin of any one fragment of matter. A single deep breath, a precisely aimed thought, he engaged the quickened awareness of his spirit and plucked, like a harp string, the subliminal current of light and sound which gave substance its material polarity.

  Power answered through the greatest recognition of them all, the chime of affirmation that defined his own Name on the loom of unified existence.

  ‘An,’ whispered Asandir, the Paravian rune one that marked all beginnings since song first gave rise to Ath’s creation.

  A ray of touched force flicked the air like a moth’s wing and deflected a kink in the clasp of gravity that linked Athera in her partnered dance with the moon. At Asandir’s directive, the twist became a spiral that touched water and air as a tuned breath might test the highest note on a flute.

  Then change threaded through the coils of his conjury. The barest, soft shudder brushed the planks of the sloop as the bay arose in a swell of gleaming phosphorescence and nudged her. Changed breeze kissed her sails to a sullen flap of canvas, and the Torwent fisherman shot straight.

  ‘Ath’s deathless mercy!’ he gasped, shaken white as the helm went slack in his startled grasp.

  Eyes still closed, his face wholly serene, Asandir smiled. ‘Not so far from plain truth,’ he said gently.

  The wave at the sloop’s stern continued to build, rolling smooth and green, but not menacing. The small craft sheered ahead like a bead spilled down glass, her course west-northwest, though the tide roiled southward, its flow unimpeded by the loop newly wrought through its ebb. Then that first shifted breeze built into a gust that backwinded the headsail and clapped the main into banging frenzy.

  ‘Slacken the sheets!’ cried the captain to the terrified boy. ‘Move smart, don’t you see? This unnatural wind’s going to swing dead astern.’

  ‘Twenty points to starboard, in actual fact,’ said Asandir in mild correction. He opened his eyes, which shone silver-gray as a rain pool touched by the moon. ‘I thought you’d want steerage, since the standing wave we’re riding will bear us on at eight knots. You’ll get just enough breeze to keep headway.’

  ‘Aren’t like to toss supper, then.’ The fisherman rubbed his rope bracelets, his unsettled nerves transformed to trembling awe. ‘Who could’ve guessed? You’ve made us a passage so smooth a babe wouldn’t roll off the foredeck.’

  ‘We’ll make landfall by daybreak,’ the Sorcerer affirmed. His seamless act of grand conjury was dismissed as nothing outside of the ordinary. ‘Bucking the tide to windward, my spare clothes would get soaked. No one could have snatched an hour of sleep, besides.’ He folded lean arms, chin tipped to his chest, evidently prepared to take his own counsel in earnest.

  The boy hauling lines stood stunned and mute; the seasoned clan scout gripped the rail in queer exultation. His forestborn sensibilities could scarcely encompass the rolling mound of water that propelled the sloop steadily toward Taerlin.

  An hour slipped by. The moon rose in the east like yellowed parchment. Asandir dozed, while tide and wind danced, flawless, to the unseen tapestry of his will. The fisherman manned a helm that answered his touch like poured silk, and for him, the resentment cut sharply as grit ground into a wound.

  ‘How can you sit like a beggar and accept this?’ he charged the clan elder, crouched at the thwart with his hands lightly clasped to his weapon hilts.

  The younger scout spun from his contemplation of spelled water with a fierce, quelling motion for silence. ‘Mind your talk, man! Dreaming or not, yon Sorcerer hears what concerns him.’

  ‘So he does. Should that matter?’ The fisherman jabbed argumentative fingers toward Asandir’s motionless form. ‘If wind and tide can be turned on mere whim, why not act in kind to save children?’ Longtime friend of the clans, he had given passage to the pitiful bands of refugee families who fled Tysan to take sanctuary in Havish. ‘Your people deserve better help in misfortune.’

  ‘Oh, be careful,’ charged the elder, tense now as the scout, and braced with the same trepidation. He, too, had known the grief of the young mothers, and the misery of small babes displaced and chilled and afraid.

  The toll of ravaged lives brought by the Alliance campaign to drive the clan presence from Caithwood showed no sign of abating. Dogged by an outrage too sharp to contain, the fisherman would not stay silent. ‘Why not choose to spare human lives instead of a stand of inanimate trees?’

  Asandir turned his head, his cragged features not angered; yet the opened, gray eyes were tranquil no longer. ‘Our Fellowship has no license to use power to influence mortal destinies.’

  ‘That’s a damned heartless platitude!’ the fisherman shot back. ‘The ships stolen from Riverton will scarcely be enough to stem the inevitable slaughter.’

  Wholly mild, Asandir saw past temper to the seed of a deeper, m
ore subtle anguish. ‘I see you’ve met his Grace of Rathain?’

  The fisherman responded as though goaded. ‘Our village sheltered him when he crossed out of Tysan. He came soaked to the skin, exhausted from beating a course against head winds. He’d been ill. A blind fool could see he was in no shape to make passage, and the fat prophet with him was too seasick to offer him any relief at the helm.’

  Asandir drew a slow breath, the rise of his chest the sole movement of his frame as he marshaled his patience to speak. ‘Arithon of Rathain is safely offshore where the Mistwraith’s curse cannot touch him.’

  ‘Rumor claims you opened a grimward in his behalf.’ The fisherman twisted the braided, rope talismans that circled his sun-browned wrists. ‘I say, if that’s true, you could have done more, and more still for those families hounded by Prince Lysaer’s campaign of eradication. Folk born with mage talent suffer as well. Not just forest clansmen in Tysan will be dying while you gad about sparing trees.’

  The scout gasped. ‘Merciful Ath, we’re not ungrateful! Kingmaker, forgive. Clanblood has asked for no intercession.’

  Denial or warning, the words came too late. The Fellowship Sorcerer gripped the thwart and sat up, a stark, lean shadow against the silver-webbed foam sheered up by the sloop’s sped passage. He linked his large-knuckled hands at his knees. His unshaken calm in itself framed a dangerous presence, while the waters off the stern rose green at his bidding, and the winds curved the sails, whisper light and responsive to the tuned might of his will.

  ‘Our use of grand conjury is not subject to whim,’ he stated. ‘Crowned heirs who bear royal ancestry act as our agents, under the strict terms of the compact our Fellowship swore with the Paravians.’ That intercession spanned more than five thousand years, when sanctuary had been granted to humanity at the dawn of the Third Age. As if that agreement was not all but forgotten, or its tenets misconstrued for the gain of town politics, Asandir resumed explanation. ‘Prince Arithon’s born compassion is our granted legacy, no less than King Eldir’s gift of wise temperance. As rulers confirmed under Fellowship sanction, they have the right to receive our assistance. But they must ask. And then we can act only by the Law of the Major Balance, inside a prescribed set of limits.’

  A brief pause, while the Sorcerer’s terrible bright eyes turned down and regarded the linked clasp of his hands. ‘I opened a grimward for the sake of Prince Arithon’s safety,’ he said, steel and sorrow gritted through the admission. ‘Thirty-eight sunwheel guardsmen pursued him inside, driven on by duty and hatred. Of those, only one escaped with his life. Willful pride and rank ignorance brought the rest to their doom. Their deaths were chosen, not forced.’

  ‘Why could you not save them?’ the fisherman pressed. ‘The power was yours.’

  ‘The power is mine,’ Asandir affirmed. ‘But not then or ever, the arrogance to enact intervention!’ He sat sharply forward, stern as chipped granite. ‘The compact was sworn on mankind’s behalf, but its tenets were designed to guard the land. Paravians hold our vow against greed and misuse. That grants no authority to impair human freedom, however the trade guilds cry tyranny. We take no license to enact judgment on others, except as the weal of this world becomes threatened. Town councils ignore this, yet the bare facts remain. Humanity exists here on sufferance. Forget at your peril! Your race would be homeless without our sworn surety that Athera’s great mysteries stay sacrosanct.’

  ‘You’re saying––’ began the fisherman.

  Asandir cut him off, ruthless. ‘We who are bound know better than any how a yoke chafes and how spirit can languish without the grace of free will. By Fellowship choice no child born under sky in this place is destined to live as a pawn!’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ the fisherman whispered, mollified at last by the unsheathed pain he had aroused in the Sorcerer who confronted him.

  ‘You couldn’t know, but our people remember.’ The gray-headed clansman stirred in the uncanny stillness that locked the air, between the lisp of turned waters and the matchless, steady breath of the wind, which even now held to the intent of Asandir’s unimaginable control. He glanced at the Sorcerer, who granted a sharp nod of leave. ‘The Fellowship of Seven were drawn here, long past, by the dreams of the dragons that no mind in creation can deny. They were charged and tied by a ritual magic wrought from drake’s blood to ensure Paravian survival. That oath taking gifted them their knowledge of longevity. Record among the clans says their lives stay the course of a service that could last to the ending of time, if need be.’

  ‘The drakes claimed us through the flaw of our own violence, and by the stain of slaughter already on our hands,’ Asandir qualified. ‘We were called as a weapon to destroy the drake spawn that could not be weaned from unconscionable killing. Only when Paravian survival is assured will our lives be set free once again.’

  There passed an interval when only the wind spoke. The gruff, weathered fisherman could not bear to turn his head and suffer Asandir’s magnanimous acceptance. Moonlight edged the tableau in metallic, cold lines, and the lisp of the waves carried the salt tang of primordial beginnings. The Sorcerer sat, rock patient throughout, while the occupants of the sloop who still owned their mortality came to terms with the history of his Fellowship.

  ‘I have never understood,’ the young clansman ventured, made bold by the Sorcerer’s mild tolerance. ‘When the drake spawn were contained, or put down in the wars, were you not given liberty to break the drake’s binding and reclaim your own will once again?’

  Asandir looked up, his eyes bleak with remembrance and his shoulders too straight against the moving weave of the wavecrests. ‘We had only the methuri left to attend. They posed a minor threat, and Ciladis, who hoped to transmute their warped offspring, saw no need to hasten their final disposition. We all failed to foresee how our obligation would compound on the hour that refugee humanity discovered this world of Athera.’

  Now the fisherman looked puzzled. Perhaps out of weariness, the Sorcerer chose to unveil the depth of the Fellowship’s tragedy. ‘The terms of the compact reinstated the drake’s binding all over again.’

  ‘But why?’ The fisherman’s incredulity clashed like snarled thread with the Sorcerer’s shaded, soft sorrow.

  ‘Because once, we were a large part of the reason why humanity needed refuge in the first place.’ The confession was a bald-faced statement of fact, devoid of self-pity or guilt. Long since reconciled to the horrors of past history, Asandir seemed a figure carved out of oak. The sliding foam of the wake, and the stitched needles of reflection the night’s moon and stars streaked across heaving waters were made to seem transient by comparison. ‘We impair no man’s free will by the Law of the Major Balance, that we are charged never to violate. But our peril in these times holds a razor’s edge. For you see, if the Mistwraith’s curse that drives the two princes to hatred wreaks havoc enough to break the compact, the guiding charge of the dragons will reclaim us.’

  The pall of the quiet held nothing of calm, as the old fisherman shrank at the helm of his boat, and the boy slept, oblivious, curled in oilskin. The elder clansmen for decency averted his face, aware as his younger scout was not of the weight of admission forthcoming.

  ‘You don’t understand, still?’ Asandir’s remonstrance came gentle, grief and tears bound in iron that must meet the crucible unflinching. ‘It’s the fear we live and breathe with each waking hour since the Mistwraith breached South Gate five centuries ago. If mankind upsets the balance, if the grand mystery that quickens renewal and life here ever comes to be threatened, then the Paravians who are Ath’s blessed gift to heal the dragons’ transgressions will fade from Athera forever. Our Fellowship will be called to act ere that happens. We will be forced to carry out the directive the drakes set upon us, to ensure Paravian survival no matter the cost of the sacrifice.’

  All the subtle, deft power that now cajoled wind and tide potentially turned to destruction, even to arranging the extinction of the one race whose want
s and ambitions brooked no restraint. Spoken language fell short of expression; renewed anguish seemed chiseled by the unconscionable memories stamped into the Sorcerer’s lined face.

  Yet no resonance of bygone sorrow could prepare for the impact as Asandir concluded in stripped pain, ‘We could be forced to call forfeit our redemption, don’t you see? If the compact is broken, then our Fellowship must enact the annihilation of humanity all over again.’

  Only this time, they would be compelled to the act of mass slaughter in full cognizance, causation set into a lens of awareness refined by ten thousand years of arcane wisdom. Sympathy faltered, and language became inadequate to express that stark weight of remorse. No mercy could soften the cruel edge of the paradox. Nor did means exist on a boat under way for the Sorcerer to recoup his privacy.

  Sorry at last for the temerity of his questioning, the fisherman wept at the helm. The clan scouts maintained staid and dignified silence, while Asandir showed the grace of a humbling courage to grant them release from embarrassment. In unstudied diplomacy, he settled back on his blanket roll and slept.

  He stirred once, at slack tide, to fine-tune the draw of the water that propelled the sloop on her heading. No one spoke to interrupt his dialogue with the elements. The boy was rousted up to handle the lines, and the sails were hardened upon the opposite tack to steady the keel against the shift in the current. When the last sheet was cleated, the Sorcerer moved his blanket roll to windward. Again he dozed, his large hands abandoned like driftwood in the hollow of his lap.

  Dawn brightened the waves to opaque, leaden gray. Gulls dipped and called against a sky like smoked pearl, layered with shredding drifts of light fog. The merciless light touched the Sorcerer’s face and revealed his exhaustion, demarked in pinched lines, and sharp angles where the bone pressed against his thinned flesh. No one rushed to be first to awaken him, even when the shoreline of the estuary loomed ahead, notched with the torn sable outline of the forest he had come to spare from the torch.