Grand Conspiracy: Second Book of The Alliance of Light

Outside, the winds scoured over the moorlands. Drafts hissed through the boards where vermin had hollowed out nests in the thatch. The rafters smelled of damp, musty broomstraw, and the grease left from boiled mutton stew. Fionn Areth shoved back his tangled black hair. The ends needed cutting, an embarrassment he resisted, since his mother would use the same shears she kept sharp to fleece the steading’s herd of goats. Ungroomed as the wind-tousled ponies on the moor, the boy levered himself up on one elbow.

‘Pisshead,’ grumbled the small brother he disturbed. ‘D’you have to thrash about like a nanny with the gripes?’

‘Stuff your face,’ Fionn whispered. While his sibling muttered and subsided back to sleep, he listened, certain that someone nearby had just spoken and called him by name.

Below the loft ladder, the banked embers in the grate flared sullen orange as cold air eddied down the flue. The single-paned casement held whorled scrolls of frost, etched brilliant silver by moonlight. No one else stirred. His father’s saw-toothed snores rumbled uninterrupted through the downstairs doorway.

The call came again, no true sound, but a beckoning presence that prickled the nape of his neck. Fionn Areth shivered. He sat up. A prodding compulsion would not let him keep still. Careful not to jostle the sprawled limbs of his brother, he clutched his nightshirt against his thin chest and slipped from the warmth of the sheep fleece. His bare feet made no sound as he padded through darkness and groped his way down the ladder.

Gripped by the force of an uncanny summons, he reached the ground floor. A pause, while the arthritic herd dog by the hearth raised her muzzle to lick at his fingers.

‘Stay, Bounder,’ he commanded, and crept on.

The dog slanted her black-tipped ears and whined. She was too well trained to disobey. Quivering unease rippled her brindle coat, and her liquid, dark eyes tracked the boy’s progress past the baskets of carding left piled beside his mother’s spinning wheel.

‘Bounder, stay home.’ Impelled by an urge that seemed spun from dreams, Fionn Areth pushed up the door bar and latch, and silently let himself out.

The stone step was ice beneath his naked soles. More curious than cold, the boy stooped to scratch his scabbed shin, the one he had scraped while chasing a cat over a deadfall. The wind flapped his nightshirt and tousled his hair. Dry leaves still clinging to the crown of the scrub oak stirred like the whispers of old men. The ash trees beyond were already shorn. Their shadowy, thin skeletons flung contorted silhouettes against the stone wall by the hay byre. Stars burned in the autumn-still silence, while a risen half-moon lit the grass to a glittering, frost carpet of silver.

A little afraid, Fionn Areth fetched the stick he used to feign swordplay. His birth augury promised him battles and fame, or so he bragged when the herd families gathered and his peers drove the goats in for counting.

Already he could swing with a force to whistle air. When he slashed against the wind he imagined the sharp whine of tempered steel. Pressed on by his spurious craving for mischief, he decided to visit the orchard. On such a mad jaunt, he could fight shadow armies and spar with the crabbed boughs of the apple trees.

He gained a new scrape scrambling over the wall. His mother would scold if she noticed. Nor would she let him run wild at night, undressed and without his warm jacket. The gusts bit and burned across his bare skin. Fionn Areth gnawed his lip, unsure. All at once, his bed in the loft seemed more inviting than battering a stupid old branch with his stick.

‘Fionn Areth!’ The call came pure as struck glass out of the air just behind him.

The boy spun around.

A lady in shimmering violet robes stood limned in the moonlight by the hay byre. She cupped a jewel as cool as a glacier. Her long hair was braided and pinned into a coil the gloss black of a raven against her cameo skin.

Fionn Areth cried out. His terror redoubled as the crystal in the lady’s hands exploded into blank darkness. Sight became blinded. Ears became deaf. Launched to reflexive flight, the boy dislodged a rock from his perch on the dry wall. He overbalanced, fell, while the blackness expanded. Swallowed and suffocated, he never uttered the scream that struggled to burst from his throat.

Elaira caught Fionn Areth’s limp body before the child struck the ground. ‘Merciful maker, that was ill done!’ She glared past the dark, tousled head now cradled against her shoulder.

Unperturbed, Lirenda shielded the Skyron aquamarine inside a fold of her mantle. ‘I’d think you would thank me. If not, then you needn’t have argued my preference for sending him out on valerian.’

‘You could have broken his bones, or much worse,’ Elaira snapped. ‘If he takes any harm from your cavalier handling, may Dharkaron Avenger demand due redress in his name.’

‘Don’t welter in pity. We have what we came for.’ Dark-lashed topaz eyes examined the child’s slack form with contempt. ‘You’d rather he shouted and roused the herd dogs to alarm? I’d thought we agreed that our task would go better if the household stayed soundly sleeping.’

‘The poor boy’s half-frozen,’ Elaira flared back. ‘If we had to draw him outside through a dream summons, you could at least have left him a moment of clear thought to find himself suitable clothing.’

‘Loan him your jacket if you fear he’ll take cold.’ In malice, her senior added, ‘You’re sure to catch fleas for the kindness. Though given the uncivilized life on these moors, I suppose you’d have memorized the sigil of remedy for vermin out of necessity.’

‘We don’t have your city population of rats,’ Elaira pointed out, her jacket already stripped off. ‘They breed more pests than the herd dogs.’

Lirenda picked a disdainful course between the broomstraw and briars, skirts raised to keep runs from the silk and her work satchel slung from her shoulder. Her kid boots she could do little to spare; the path through the orchard was a rut of gouged mud, slotted by goats and heaped with dung dropped by the steading’s milch cow. ‘Just don’t lag behind. We need to be finished before Althain’s Warden completes the new seals on that grimward.’

Elaira ignored the admonishment. ‘Shame on us if Sethvir’s awareness is all that holds our order to common decency. Forgive me,’ she added to the child as she wrapped his sturdy form in the fleece still warmed from her body. On impulse, she retrieved his dropped practice stick and leaned it against the wall where he could find it. ‘The seeress who cast your birth prophecy was most wise. You’ll need to start young to master the skills of a warrior.’

‘Stop wasting time!’ Lirenda poised by the canted gate of the orchard. Sulky irritation sharpened her face as the moorland elements played havoc with her costly clothes and fine grooming. ‘I want the seal wards in place before our young decoy sits up and recovers his wits.’

‘Should he waken, I’ll manage quite well without help.’ Mud and briars posed Elaira no hindrance as she followed in Lirenda’s footsteps. She dawdled where she could, well aware that her peer’s flighty nerves stemmed from worries of Fellowship vigilance. Asandir and Traithe might be engaged in distant lands across the continent. But the discorporate mage Luhaine would not stay diverted at Althain Tower for one second longer than Sethvir required to emerge from the grimward and reclaim the lapsed gift of his earth sense. Until Fionn Areth yielded willing consent, one Sorcerer’s notice could make ruins of Morriel’s plot.

Elaira dragged her feet as much as she dared, though she guessed her effort was futile. Lirenda was always meticulous in allowing a wide margin for mischance. The spiteful satisfaction offered small recompense, that for each minute the Koriani senior was delayed, the wind tugged wild wisps from her knotted, jet braid and chapped her pampered complexion.

Under the blown ink boughs of the orchard, the grasses lay tangled and damp. Frost-withered dock stalks crunched underfoot. The faint, silver foil of moonlight stamped through knotted trees and lapped light upon shade like ethereal wisps of cast floss. The wind smelled of winter in waiting. Each ice-sharp gust razed and rattled through the bare branches. The stars were snagged pinpricks, their beauty no boon on this night. In Elaira’s dark thoughts, cruel rain and black storm should have dogged every step since the demands of her vows forced compliance. Had her voice been her own, she would have screamed for Fionn Areth to waken and flee, and call down the wrath of his family.

No saving slip of good fortune arose. The stayspell held the boy quiet without mishap, until Lirenda found a clearing where a deadfall had been hewn down for firewood. The hollow where the roots had torn free offered shelter and natural seclusion.

‘Lay the child there.’ The disdainful flick of a finger indicated the boy’s head should orient northward. Under the waning moon, Lirenda seemed a carved ivory figure, mantled in ebony silk. She opened the satchel and unveiled a weighty, terminated rock crystal, chosen to channel the spells of transformation. The bared quartz seemed a flame’s heart sculpted in ice, paned in frost-polished facets. Like every major focus held in Koriani service, the stone had been mined on a world far distant from Athera. The etched mapwork of its natural formation had been buffed to a polish to obviate any unwanted features of character. The jewel was conformed as a tool, subservient to the order’s dedicated cause to further the needs of humanity.

Sick at heart, Elaira settled the boy on a soft patch of grass. ‘He’ll need to be conscious,’ she reminded. Dread lent her a stripping new edge of hostility. ‘That’s if you’re still planning to go through the pretense of asking for his consent.’

‘Wards first.’ This was no sheltered sisterhouse tower, where the metallic, formed rings of runes and spell seals laid down permanent defenses. Lirenda shot back a reproachful glance as she knelt beside Fionn Areth. She set the quartz point to one side, then unpacked an assortment of thin copper rods. These she assembled into a pyramid. A wide silver ring stained black with tarnish formed the structure’s apex, its position arrayed above the boy’s forehead. ‘Set the perimeter guard spells,’ she commanded, her lashes half-lidded in concentration as she placed the large crystal point downward in the cradling band of dark silver.

Elaira accepted the four directional tetrahedrons of cut hematite, then the pairing rods of black tourmaline whose screening virtues would defend against psychic attack. She cupped the burden of each separate mineral and invoked the focus of her personal quartz to recharge their properties of alignment. In a ritual older than written memory, she began the steps to lay out a circle of protection. East, to south, to west, to north, she demarked the points of direction. The tourmaline wands she placed like black arrows beyond the outer perimeter; at the base of each one, the hematite tetrahedrons, heavy to the hand as dark lead. If the properties of the tourmaline became overwhelmed, the next crystal in line would send harmful influence to ground before any breach could disrupt the innermost circle.

Invocation and seal raised a small spark to stand sentinel at each point of the compass. ‘Anient,’ she intoned, the Paravian invocation for unity. The summoned flecks of light bled round the ring in an active spiral, deosil. South met west, west meshed to north, north arced to east, and east closed the circle back to the point of origin, aligned by the glimmer of the polestar. A soft halo of phosphor glowed faintly pink and joined the four arcs into an unbroken figure.

‘Fariennt tyr,’ Elaira invoked over the traced runes of the set seal. ‘So be this construct, as I have defined.’

‘Begin.’ Lirenda engaged the energy closure, and the wardspell meshed into completion. She leaned over the rods supporting the large crystal and scribed a symbol into the base. A whispered invocation and a breath keyed the cipher’s activation. The quartz flared a sultry, actinic yellow. As its matrix imprinted and magnified the transmission, a pale flower of illumination touched the skin at the center of Fionn Areth’s forehead.

Lirenda murmured the incantation to waken only the mind. The words of her litany were framed in a tongue whose origins came from a world far removed from Athera.

Young Fionn Areth opened his eyes, but not to the autumn night he remembered. No moon shone above him, no stars. He did not perceive the bare branches of the fruit trees that shivered in the moan of cold winds. The spell seal cocooned his conscious awareness, and his senses stayed suspended, netted into disembodied quiet. The etheric web of a jewel’s charged lattice enclosed his sight like glass walls.

‘Where am I?’ His voice fell echoless and flat, splintered against that imprisoning silence.

‘You are in dreams, but awake,’ a woman’s voice answered. Her vowels struck through consonants edged with high-pitched harmonics.

Too distanced to be frightened, Fionn Areth searched the planes of the crystal’s lit heart, trying to make out the speaker. ‘Where are you?’

‘Here.’ Her laugh rang like glassine slivers of ice. ‘You shall see.’

A shimmer bit through the blank vista of perception; and he made out a dim figure muffled in dark purple silk. Veils of softer violet light shimmered amid the radiance thrown off by the activated quartz. Fionn Areth beheld a dark-haired woman with a face of marble serenity. She had lips of bleached coral and hands too ethereally fine to have toiled at birthing goats, or spinning fleece, or stirring an iron pot to render raw fat into tallow.

‘I know who you are,’ the boy ventured, determined not to be craven under her steady regard. Her brows were fine arches, and her eyes the rich, ruddy amber of the whiskey his father bought from the backwater traders. ‘You’re an enchantress. Why have you brought me here?’

‘To ask if you’re ready to lay claim to the fate your tribe’s seeress prophesied at your birth.’ The lady’s amused gaze seemed to measure him. ‘Are you brave?’

‘My sisters don’t think so.’ Fionn Areth gave their opinion his scornful dismissal. ‘I had to climb to the top of the ash tree by the brook to show them that girls don’t know anything. Are you like Elaira, the enchantress who saved my life the night I was born?’

‘She is there,’ said the lady, and pointed.

Fionn Areth noticed the second figure then, this one clad in the laced leathers and jacket she wore when she called bringing simples. To the woman he recognized as a friend, he need not cling to appearances. ‘You look sad. Why is that, lady?’