Grand Conspiracy: Second Book of The Alliance of Light

‘This is pure outrage!’ Crown Examiner Vorrice ground out, hissing loud, whispered protests, even as his rival councilman snapped ringed fingers to a secretary, who responded out of trained habit. ‘No Sorcerer should be cozened! Fire and sword would make a fit ending––’

‘But not at the cost of six hundred lives,’ that glacial personage cut in. His eyes were steel filings snap-frozen in ice, and his voice chilling as he spoke in ultimatum to Sethvir. ‘Your hour will come, if not in my lifetime, then in that of my appointed successors. Light will stand firm against sorcery and darkness without making martyrs over principle.’

While the secretary shuffled parchment, then offered the pen for the endorsement, he signed with no trace of regret. His fulsome, flowery cursive spelled out name and title, Cerebeld, First High Priest to the Prince of the Light, Alliance precinct of Avenor.

In flawless, cast calm, he stepped forward. His own hand relinquished the document to Sethvir. ‘If the forest clan families will ally with the Shadow Master, if they continue to molest honest trade through bloodshed and raiding, rest assured, the Divine Prince and right action will annihilate them. Faith and sheer numbers must tell in the end. Lord Harradene of Etarra will no doubt be pleased to rededicate his city garrison for the purpose.’

Sethvir rolled the new edict into a scroll, his delight rebounded to an unwonted solemnity. ‘Dear man, you might hold an office granted by the hand of usurped mortal power. That gives no license to make choices Ath Creator would spurn for the sake of respect. Always ask before you make foolish promises concerning another man’s free will.’

The full truth, Prince Lysaer’s high priest would discover in due time: that a man who had once dreamed the peace of the trees was unlikely to return to a soldier’s life of trained violence. Of the crack Etarran troops imported to clear Caithwood of its meddlesome enclave of barbarians, not a one would arise in fit state to resume the way of the sword. They would garden, or farm, or live disaffected; some few would find their way back to waking contentment in the disciplines of Ath’s Brotherhood.

After knowing the tranquil awareness of the trees, Lysaer s’Ilessid’s war-bent call to religion would move them to open abhorrence.

Sethvir turned his back on Avenor’s delegation. In complete disregard of the magistrates’ dismay, the Lord Commander’s smoldering fanaticism, and the outrage of Lord Vorrice and the guards, he smiled to the master healer, who waited unforgotten on the sidelines. ‘See to your charges,’ he instructed, even as the first ripple of movement stirred through the stricken men on the cots. ‘They are released now, and waking, and will need human comfort as they find their way back to awareness.’

Someone groaned in the dimness outside the lit circle of candles. Feathers twitched, and fine fabric sighed to the sharp shift in tension as the magistrates craned heads to observe. During that one unguarded moment, the Fellowship Sorcerer slipped away. No one saw his departure. That single, uncanny second of suspension should not have allowed him the time he required to step out.

And yet he was gone. The outer door to the warehouse gaped open. Chill winds bored in, admitting a vindictive blast of snowflakes until a testy official barked for the page boys to shoulder the huge panel closed. Through the yammering complaint of Lord Vorrice’s indignation, Commander Sulfin Evend made incisive, dry comment that the old herb witch in her coat of rag motley had apparently disappeared also.

‘Sorcery! Evil practice engaged in our very presence!’ Vorrice gasped, his face red, and his indignant, ham fists clenched in his sunwheel cloak. He demanded an immediate hue and cry, until High Priest Cerebeld touched him silent.

‘Patience,’ said the man who was the Voice of the Light in Avenor. ‘Evil will not be banished in a day. Nor will our trial against darkness be won through pursuing one Sorcerer prematurely.’ His gaze of notched ice raked over his disgruntled officials, then the royal guardsmen, left empty-handed and shamed. ‘No one failed here.’ His fervor rang, end to end, through the warehouse, fired with faith and invincible conviction. ‘I charge you all, let the timing be Prince Lysaer’s. Tysan needs an heir to ensure the succession. Once the throne is secured, hear my promise. Our Alliance campaign will carry the Light forward. By the grace of divine calling, the minion of righteousness will see an end to sorcery and oppression. On that blessed hour, every city on the continent will rise under the sunwheel standard!’

By the advent of dusk, Avenor still seethed with the mounted patrols rousted out by the Alliance Lord Examiner. Men-at-arms had spent a long afternoon displacing indignant families. Their search swept street by street, and ranged down every midden-strewn back alleyway, seeking a renegade Sorcerer and an escaped convict named as an herb witch.

Evening closed in, gray under the swirling, thin snowfall that had dusted the city through the day. The west keep watch blew the horn that sounded the closing of the gates; the lamplighter made rounds with his torch. Neither fugitive was found, despite a posted crown reward, and the pointed fact the Fellowship Sorcerer was said to be wearing a conspicuous maroon velvet robe. As darkness deepened, and the keening wind blasted flaying gusts down the streets from the sea quarter, the guardsmen retrod old ground like balked hounds. They endured shrill abuse from shopkeepers and matrons, and dodged the rime thrown off the wheels of drays bearing cord wood, and live chickens caged in tied baskets of withies.

Bedraggled and wet, a mounted patrol slogged across Avenor’s central plaza, startling a flock of brown-and-white sparrows. The birds’ circling, short flight set them back down. They pecked at the crumbs thrown by a beggar who sat, huddled against the brick buttresses of the council hall, sharing his crust of stale bread.

‘Damnfool waste of time,’ the patrol sergeant grumbled, spurs gouged to his equally disaffected gelding. ‘Sorcerer’s long gone, you ask me. Ought to be Lord Vorrice himself out here, freezing his tail in the saddle for rabid love of divine principles.’

‘Dharkaron’s black bollocks, man!’ snapped a companion, brushing off snow that melted against his soaked thighs. ‘You’d rather be home warming your ears under your old lady’s wasp tongue?’

‘I’d rather be settled with a hot meal and beer at the Goose,’ another man grumbled. ‘Fiends plaguing wind’s like to give a man frostbite where the goodwife won’t ever need her sick headaches for excuses.’

The deadened clop of hooves passed on by, then faded to the jingle of bit rings and mail. No man on patrol paused over the oddity, that any natural wild bird should have flown to roost before sundown. Nor had a one of them challenged the beggar for loitering. In hindsight, had they shown a half second’s thought, even their horses had behaved as though the fellow had been part of the stone-and-brick cranny where he sheltered.

Crouched on his hams in the silting snowfall, the beggar himself seemed strangely contented, his gnarled hands mittened in a pair of cast off stockings with holes poked through for his thumbs. He had no cloak. Only a torn and moth-eaten blanket which should have done little to cut the wind. The incessant gusts skirled and spun, and ruffled the feathers of the birds, who crowded and pecked to snatch handouts.

A woman with a basket of fish passed homeward from the dockside market. Next came a rib-skinny street cur and a thin child in rags. The dog and the boy received the divided last portion of the bread crust. The beggar seemed not to care that his generosity had disposed of his remaining bit of supper. He sat with his arms wrapped around tucked-up knees, and resumed conversation with the wind devil that coiled into slow eddies before his crossed ankles.

‘Your suspicion is true, Luhaine,’ he mused, while the diamond fall of snowflakes caught light from the streetlamp and spun in lazy spirals that strangely seemed not to disturb the cluster of still hopeful sparrows. ‘The s’Ilessid scion’s already drawn a born talent into his cause. His high priest, Cerebeld, is no sham, but a natural telepath who has tapped into gifted clairaudience.’

‘His inner guidance is Lysaer s’Ilessid?’ Luhaine whispered, a voice suspended in shadow. ‘If so, the maternal gift of s’Ahelas talent gives rise to an ill turn indeed.’

‘I witnessed the transmission,’ Sethvir said, bleak. ‘Cerebeld can send, and hear in reply the prompt of a master he believes to be god-sent. His presence this afternoon carried more than just chilling conviction. He did not lie when he claimed to speak as the word of true Light on Athera.’

‘A misfortune to raise armies and provoke vicious bloodshed, if Cerebeld should acquire a circle of gifted collaborators.’ The shade of the Sorcerer concluded that thought with uncharacteristic brevity. ‘Then you fear as I do?’

The sparrows took flight, a flurried storm of small wings, and the beggar looked up, his gaze soft as rubbed antique turquoise. ‘I fear any landfall, even for provisions, will jeopardize Arithon’s safety. Time becomes his deadly enemy, for Cerebeld is no fool. He will certainly go on to appoint his hierarchy and successors by the criterion of his own precedence. He’ll have no one admitted to the inner circle of his priesthood who cannot discern the unfailing, true word of the man he has named Blessed Prince.’

The posed possibility of instantaneous communication between the far-flung factions of the Alliance bespoke dire odds for the future. Sethvir’s broadscale awareness tracked events well beyond the flight of his game flock of sparrows, who wheeled and alit upon the snow-frosted roof of the cupola set at the center of the circular plaza.

‘We’re not going to get the reprieve that we’d hoped for, to gain insight against Desh-thiere’s curse. Nor will those restless free wraiths left on Marak hold their peace if they bridge themselves passage while we’re torn to shreds by the dangerous momentum of a holy war.’ The vortex that marked Luhaine’s presence surmised, morose, ‘You’ll return to keep vigil at Althain Tower?’

‘That seems for the best. Warning of this new development can be sent most easily from there.’ Sethvir arose, dusted crumbs from his sleeves, and adjusted the fall of the blanket that mantled the wind-snagged, white aureole of his hair. His unseen colleague kept pace at his shoulder, and while yet another party of armed searchers plodded by, Sethvir paid them as little heed as the previous ones.

‘I’ll require a diversion, if you wouldn’t mind,’ Althain’s Warden requested. ‘One that won’t draw lasting notice.’

Luhaine whisked ahead in derision. ‘Be glad it’s I, and not Kharadmon, at your side to mask your departure.’

‘A pity,’ Sethvir disagreed, tracking pigeon-toed prints toward the center of the plaza. His grin came and went like the moon through the cloudy mass of his beard as he stepped over the barrier chain on the stair to the raised platform where the minions of Light dispensed shadowbanes to the poor every noon. ‘Cerebeld and his ilk were all raised on sour milk, to have matured with no sense of humor. Kharadmon’s style would quite likely bait them to a fatal fit of apoplexy.’

He ducked through the railing rather than trouble to round the staged landing. There, a forlorn figure with the threadbare hem of the blanket trailing, he paused beneath the pillared cupola. The stone underneath the raised dais was far older, laid down in past ages by the great centaur masons. Their work had framed the focus for a power circle neither time nor mortal building could erase.

Standing in the brittle, cold breeze with the blanket slipped to his shoulders, Sethvir heard the imprinted echoes of their song. The notes twined a descant like spun silver through the actinic static that marked the flow of earth’s lane force. He clasped stockinged hands, closed his eyes, and lapsed into what looked like innocuous contemplation.

Luhaine, nearby, could sense changing resonance thrum through the focus like a sounding board. He judged his moment with fussy precision, and incited two lurking mongrels to chase someone’s cat down an alleyway. A twist of false sound made them appear to turn on each other and engage in a snarling fight.

Shutters clapped open. Outraged citizens cursed the racket and hurled basins of water to quash the yapping disturbance, while the flared pulse of light raised for Sethvir’s departure came and went in an eyeblink. Unremarked in the pale swirl of snow, the Warden of Althain tapped the lane-fired energies of a star at the zenith and left Lysaer’s royal city of Avenor.

One by one, the sparrows that had comprised the energies of his ward of concealment blurred and faded from the onionskin roof of the cupola. They vanished away into thin air, leaving no trace and no track behind them.

Midwinter 5654

Twins

While deep winter’s blizzards howled in whiteout gusts over the northern passes, the soporific perfume of citrus rode the southland breeze that rustled glossy leaves of the merchant’s gardens in the Shandian trade port of Innish. Yet tonight, other scents warred with the fragrance wafted through the cracked window of Fiark’s cramped garret office; his twin sister, Feylind, leaned on the sill in her slops. Her presence admitted the distinct bite of ship’s tar and a robust, smoky fug carried out of the seedier shoreside taverns.

‘That’s a ripe crock o’ bilge, and you know it.’ Arms folded over her breasts in black temper, Feylind bore into her argument. ‘To Sithaer you don’t know the names of his contacts, and the place he makes landfall also.’

Fiark tallied the last line in the ledger and fastidiously blotted his pen nib. Unfazed by rank language and accusations, he laced his hands above his head and stretched the kinks from his back. Clean fingers and unstained lace cuffs gave sharp contrast to his sister’s chapped hands and the sweat-stained string of the turk’s-head bracelets worn for luck by most blue-water sailors.

‘Whose contacts?’ he inquired, his disinterested reference to her nameless subject no less than a jabbing provocation.

‘Well, damn you for a spoon-fed liar!’ Feylind sprang off the windowsill, her long, yellow braid wisped silver at the ends from overexposure to strong sunlight. ‘For that, I should plow a fist through your jaw ’til your teeth greet the nape of your neck! You never kept secrets before this.’

‘Before this, there weren’t sword-bearing fanatics lining up to swear undying service against Darkness.’ Fiark regarded her, his hands clasped at the brass-buckled cuffs of his knee breeches, and his eyes tranquil blue in sincerity. ‘I see sunwheel talismans sprouting like mushrooms for each galley lost to a clan raid. The knowledge you ask for holds fatal stakes, and Prince Arithon swore his oath for your safety. You can’t reward the gift of his care without staying mindful that danger dogs every rumored move that he makes.’

His sister returned a spectacular, balked scowl, fists cocked on the belt which hung her man-sized cutlass. ‘Damn him to slow death on Dharkaron’s Black Spear! I was eight years old at the time of that pledge, and besides, his word was given to our mother!’

‘He’s still in the right.’ Fiark laughed in the irresistible way that made shreds of her need to stay angry. ‘You’re no whit less wild now that you’re grown, and anyway, eighteen’s not considered your majority. Not by the tenets of old charter law, which Prince Arithon is charged to uphold by crown obligation.’

‘You talk like a foppish, mealymouthed lawyer. And dress like one, too,’ Feylind grumbled. She paced, her agitation intractable as a caged lioness, while the clomp of her seaboots across the bare floor raised a bellowed complaint from the downstairs tenant.

Fiark closed the boards of the ledger and locked its bronze hasp fastening. ‘You know, you’re disturbing honest folks’ sleep.’ When his sister refused to abstain from her racket, he returned her spirited sniping. ‘Also, on the subject of clothing, you’re nobody’s walking example. You’d have trouble courting a draft ox, done up as you are like a sailhand on course for a tavern bash.’

His sister regarded the toes of her boots, her grin wicked, and her laugh deep and rich with enjoyment. ‘I need the brass caps to fend off randy suitors.’ For effect and demonstration, she stamped on the floor, which intimidated the disgruntled downstairs tenant back to meek suffering and silence.