Grand Conspiracy (36 page)

Sethvir's patience seemed to rise from the stones that weighted the unfurled scroll, whose lines described vistas of ocean. ‘His Grace knows already. Could you forget? He's still with you.'

Dakar groaned, while the pain danced in whorled black patterns across the shut dark of his eyelids. Since he hurt too much to focus, he extended his mage-sense to measure the motionless presence at his back. For ongoing, dreadful seconds, he listened. Tuned to Arithon's temperament like a brother, he waited, braced
for the soft, fractured breath that would reflect deeply buried distress.

‘Who were the victims?' Arithon asked instead in a tone that was frightening and ordinary.

The Mad Prophet mouthed a desperate, short prayer, poised for explosion, and foolishly lacking the cowardice to leave without giving an answer. ‘Your master shipwright.' His voice bound up on the unwonted memory of Cattrick, filled with feisty life and arguing over beer in a tavern.

Dakar coughed, resumed. ‘Ivel. That mule-stubborn caulker with the missing finger you lured on a challenge from the shipworks at Southshire.' No movement yet from Arithon s'Ffalenn, an ominous sign his reaction was going to defy every reasonable prediction. Yet the Mad Prophet dared not flag in his office until he had spoken each name.

The shipyard's master craftsmen who best served the Shadow Master's cause were now rotting in the tide beneath the seacliffs south of Hanshire. Each wore the severed ends of a noose on his neck, sent to the Fatemaster's judgment with his ankles lashed to a ballast stone.

‘Even the caulker,' Arithon mused, then broke into wild hilarity. ‘Parrien's brilliant! He can break my leg anytime in exchange for a strategy as thoughtful and well timed as that!'

‘What!' Dakar recoiled, shot straight, his horrified regard pinned to the Shadow Master's face. ‘You
can't
be glad of this!'

‘Why not?' Arithon's insane ebullience threatened laughter. ‘Lysaer's been hobbled.' He tripped the latch on a locker and tugged out a cloak, the original reason for his untimely appearance at the moment of Sethvir's augury. ‘The same body of officials my half brother needed to fund his new war will now insist he stay home. He'll have to suspend his armed interests in Tysan and cut back his bid to extend his martial foothold at Etarra. We're free, Dakar. We can now sail for years, unmolested. Not only that, for the few reputations that Parrien sacrificed, we still have two dozen left outside suspicion. They can safely stay covert and keep us informed of Avenor's upcoming policy.'

Dakar damped back his inimical rage. ‘Eight men are
dead
, and you've got no access to mage-sight. You
could not
have read so much into that scrying from Althain.'

‘No,' Arithon admitted. Unchastened, still pleased, he flung on the cloak, prepared to slip through the companionway. ‘My
ability to divine through straight sound still has limits. Why else should I trouble to ask after names?'

To the stones on the chart desk, safely unvolatile, Dakar said in cat-footed care, ‘Then you won't be aware those men were tortured by Parrien to buy off the others as innocent?'

‘But I heard him admit that.' The Shadow Master set his hand on the latch. His last whoop of laughter rebounded through the cabin as he let in the chill of the night. ‘Their bones were bull stubborn to break, that I warrant.'

‘Mercy,' Dakar murmured, overtaken by a sorrow to make his years of steadfast effort come to nothing. ‘Once, the friend I knew had the mark of humanity on him.'

Sethvir's voice reached back in gentle rebuke. ‘For five centuries' study under Asandir, you remain remarkably unobservant.'

Dakar pushed straight, disarranging a stone, which dropped with an indignant clatter on the timbers under his feet. ‘Don't say I ought to forgive the expedience. Those were living men, and companions who gave trust.' He strangled an uglier, deeper concern, that the
Khetienn
now sailed with two s'Brydion retainers. They had been sworn over to Arithon s'Ffalenn, but were placed in a chilling position if in fact they were spying for the duke.

‘Your suspicions are blinding you to the truth,' Sethvir said, the acuity of his earth-linked perceptions as always a galling embarrassment. ‘To distrust the integrity of those two clansmen will set the s'Ffalenn prince in danger.'

Dakar winced. Before the stone wandered to the heave of the sea and wound up battering his ankle, he bent and groped in the darkness. ‘Parrien s'Brydion might be a ruthless strategist, but I did expect better of Mearn.'

Althain's Warden said, oblique, ‘You might then ask why they had to sink the remains, and the stone you can't find has lodged by the locker a half a pace behind your left heel.'

Dakar rested his forehead against the salt-flocked parchment of the chart. His head hurt too much to pick apart circumstance, and his heart ached too deeply to unwind the next flaw Desh-thiere's curse set in Arithon's character.

‘At least take the time to admire the science.' Across distance, Sethvir sounded rueful. ‘Arithon's ear for true sound has set a new precedent if he's learned to differentiate the separate bands of animate vibration from the broad scale of the life chord.'

The Mad Prophet retrieved the errant stone. ‘I'll leave the
riddling nuance of the present in favor of hearing your take on the odds for our future.' Exhaustion made all his bones feel cased in lead. He smoothed down the ruffled edge of the chart, where Merior and the sands of the Scimlade hook interfaced with the unexplored leagues of the Cildein Ocean; his hand shook as he replaced the weight on the corner. ‘How long are we free to seek the Paravians before the next threat on the continent forces the Master of Shadow to react?'

From the Warden at Althain, a measuring silence, while the running swell under the
Khetienn
's keel kept time to the fair weather course that carried her outside known waters. Amid night and ocean, his sight tracked her hull as a tossed seed of warmth at the driven whim of the elements. In the dimmed stern cabin, shut away from the sailhands who diced at the galley trestle, Dakar caught the secondhand imprint of power as Sethvir engaged his wide vision. He could almost feel the unborn currents of cause and effect as the Sorcerer attuned his will to plumb the forward progression of time.

Still touched in light linkage, the Mad Prophet sensed the tunnel of years, laid out in seasonal rhythms and the coiling cycles of storms. Through Sethvir's gift, he traced Athera's binding webwork of energies, from the living, molten fires of her core to the secrets encrypted in crystalline bedrock. Wrapped warp through weft with the world's breathing aura, her quickened tapestry of flora and fauna unreeled, each tempered strand etched in fine imprints of light. The riddles set into their patterns lay beyond his understanding. Dakar lost the translation as the ranging expanse of overwhelming minutiae frayed away cognitive reason.

A mere spellbinder's training could not plumb that intricate geometry. Nor could Dakar sort the movements of men from the endlessly shifting individuality of wind-scoured sand grains. Sethvir worked under no such limitation. The forces he commanded through vast wisdom and experience let him tap the grand mystery. His mind accessed realms where Athera's law did not rule, and the undying song of Ath's creation expanded beyond the darkened constraints of dense matter.

Power rode on that cusp, at the threshold interstice where the sensory boundaries dissolved into the spectrum of higher vibrations. There, rarified energies linked the light-dance of form, made accessible through disciplined mage-sight. Like a particle swept up in a comet's lit tail, Dakar received glimpses
of Sethvir's mastery. In flashes and bursts, he snatched trains of sequence he recognized: the seasonal budding of leaves and the lightning of summer storms, stitched through by the lane currents which guided the birds in migration. Between those he sensed the Naming ceremony for Havish's young princess, hard followed by the birth of a brown-haired royal brother. Through the shuttling passage of uncounted trade ships, and the veils of dust raised by toiling caravans, he heard the marching of men under the sunwheel banner.

His effort to milk that image for more knowledge entangled with the late-autumn belling of stags. Blue-and-gold banners streamed from the towers at Avenor to commemorate the birth of Tysan's next prince. Other visions unreeled, scraps too jumbled to decipher, until Sethvir's artistry winnowed the morass and distilled rampant chaos to a final cascade of clear focus. Dakar caught the echo of what could have been Lirenda's proud form, pacing the floor with rapacious anticipation.

Then, through pearly dusk and a dank, autumn rain, he saw the enchantress Elaira, huddled by a smoking fire under the massive white oaks of Halwythwood. She was alone, face pressed into shivering hands, while wet beaded her collar and masked her distraught, silent tears. Then that sequence cut off.

What remained was the last fated link, a disjointed fragment of latent event that Sethvir had earmarked as a closure. Dakar shared that sight: of a straight-backed young rider on the road leading from Araethura's broad moors toward the lakeshore town of Daenfal.

Sethvir said, crisp, ‘You might have fifteen years, but no longer.'

Struck dizzy by transition back into the present, the Mad Prophet returned to himself, hunched over the course log on the chart table. Beneath him, the
Khetienn
rose on a swell. She shouldered through the crest, creaking stout timbers, and rolled through a shattered fall of spray. Brushed by phantom fear, Dakar broke into chill sweat. ‘Ath, who was the rider on that moorland pony?'

But Sethvir's steady presence had withdrawn back to Althain, leaving the question unanswered.

Alone in the sea-humid gloom, sight reduced to the tiger-lily flare of the flame through the soot-smoked glass of the sconce, the Mad Prophet could but wonder whose future action would trigger the next round of heartache.

The tangle of posed implication became altogether too vicious.

Dakar slammed his closed fists into the chart desk. ‘Howling Sithaer!' Pained by the burden of Sethvir's late forecast, he thrust to his feet. Fool that he was, and tied up in sentiment, he could not sit by and leave the s'Ffalenn prince to his cavalier attitude.

‘Cattrick and seven shipwrights have died in true service,' he howled to the echoing darkness. ‘That has to mean
something
. Or else you've become the cold, heartless bastard the Alliance has claimed all along.'

On deck, the night was a buffeting scarf of black wind, loomed to wet silk by humidity. This far offshore, no horn lanterns burned. Every drop of oil was hoarded to fuel the flame to light the binnacle, with even that wick set to minimal use on clear nights, when Ath's stars could be used in place of the magnetic compass. That hour, a low cloud cover lidded the sky. The waters beneath were roiled ink, sheared into foam off the bow as the
Khetienn
plowed on her close-hauled course.

Dakar clawed his way from the aft companionway. The wood under his tread was drenched glass, doused by the spray that plumed over the bowsprit. He reached for the rail to steady his way to the quarterdeck, and found his wrist vised immobile by sword-callused fingers.

Then, in tones of warning, ‘His Grace of Rathain has specifically asked that you not be allowed to disturb him.'

‘Ath's own grace, Talvish!' Dakar tugged, peevish for the fact the s'Brydion retainers had taken s'Ffalenn interests so swiftly to heart. ‘I'm not Arithon's enemy!'

The grip did not loosen; in painful fact, was cutting off vital circulation. ‘For tonight, his Grace might think otherwise.'

Dakar's foul language fell short of his pitched irritation. ‘His Grace would not still be alive to sit sulking if steadfast friends had not broken his door and invaded his damnable privacy. Let go. You won't like the headache you'll have in the morning if I need to use spellcraft to pass you.'

‘Then fell me,' said Talvish, his clipped laugh indication he found the contest amusing. ‘I haven't drawn steel against you, after all. By rights, you're unarmed. Unlike yours, my service is honorable.'

‘This isn't a law court!' Dakar snapped through clenched teeth. Braced for the lash of the Shadow Master's temper, he had no patience left for ridiculous impasse or argument. Yet before he
engaged dire forces to win free, he sensed more than felt the presence that stalked upon his exposed flank.

He snap-turned his head, saw the upraised sword pommel in time to dodge under the blow. ‘Vhandon! Desist! This goes beyond sanity.' Frightening to watch this pair act together, each move a dance step made in lethal concert; Dakar backstepped in surrender. Already the retainers from Alestron guarded their royal charge like men bloodborn to s'Ffalenn service.

While the brigantine slammed smoking through another black trough, the Mad Prophet pleaded. ‘Eight men are dead who served Arithon's cause. As well as he knew them, he's not shown one shred of natural grief for their passing. That behavior is worrisome, in light of the curse. If you knew the man's twisted nature as I do, you'd help plumb the bent of his thinking.'

Vhandon lowered his blade, but did not sheathe the steel. A stalwart presence of masked shrewdness and subtlety, he held his ground with the obstinacy of a siege wall. ‘Your prince isn't mourning. He believes that Cattrick and the others still live.'

Dakar swallowed. ‘Self-blinded delusion,' he husked. ‘I saw the corpses in a scrying sent by Sethvir. Arithon caught the resonance of the vision through his bard's gift. When I gave him the names, he was blithe as a man undone by a surfeit of gin.'

‘Delusion or no, he's not so blithe now.' Disdainful of talk, Vhandon snapped a curt gesture toward the quarterdeck.

There, to judge by the uncanny, straight course the brigantine slammed through the cross swell, Arithon manned the helm without the assistance of ship's mate or quartermaster.