Читать книгу Grand Conspiracy: Second Book of The Alliance of Light - Janny Wurts, Janny Wurts - Страница 22

At Avenor, the victims of the Caithwood campaign were tended in a string of dockside warehouses donated to the cause by the city’s disgruntled trade guilds. The arrangement proved far from felicitous. Always before, the rich sea trade through Havish had ensured steady profits through the lull while the passes in Camris lay snowbound. Other years at midwinter, those same buildings were crammed with the fruits of industrious commerce. The fact this season’s goods were summarily displaced by a misfortunate company of sick men raised a clamoring chorus of complaint.

Where bribes had once sidestepped Havish’s crown rights of enforcement against galleys manned by slave oarsmen, now the wide-ranging deterrent of a Fellowship ward seal put closure to the market’s furtive evasions. With eight illegal craft snared outright by spellcraft, and no sign of reprieve in sight, the merchant factions sweated in their lace and brocades, and argued the dearth of alternatives. Their options were choked, they knew well enough. No palliative could salvage high losses. Not with the less direct route to the south closed by hazard, the land passage through Caithwood turned haunted by trees raised to wakened awareness.

In boneheaded fury, the most determined guildsmen attempted to bypass the forest. These dispatched slave galleys up Mainmere Narrows, or outfitted others with free labor at perishing expense to access the trade road beyond Ostermere. Few arrived there unscathed. Barbarian raiders roved the sea-lanes under sail, outfitted in the selfsame hulls the Spinner of Darkness had stolen from Riverton.

The wharfside taverns brewed up angry talk. Seasoned galleymen refused well-paid berths for fear of bloodthirsty predation. Clan crews lately reclaimed from chained slavery were likely to choose vengeance before mercy toward oppressors who had shown them the brand and the whip.

Alliance retribution would stay paralyzed until spring, when the royal marriage with Erdane’s daughter brought the dowry to launch the new fleet. In the dockside climate of snarling frustration, and the clatter of the mounted patrols sent out by Avenor’s Crown Examiner to redress the complaints against sorcery, one man handled the upsets of fate with ironclad equanimity.

In the wind-raked, cavernous warehouse jammed with stricken invalids, Avenor’s royal healer made his daily rounds in shorthanded resignation. He was a gangling man, given to brusque speech and a harried expression of perplexity. One cot to the next, he lugged his worn satchel with its chinking phials of remedies. An emetic prescribed here, and there, a soup of barley gruel and butter where one of his charges had lost flesh; the passing weeks had produced no improvement in the condition of Caithwood’s victims.

Their affliction followed no ordinary pattern of malady. Sprawled comatose on straw ticking, the body of the man he currently examined had lost neither tone nor vitality. The suspended state was unnatural. Muscle should atrophy from disuse, and the organs slowly fail in their function. Yet of the ninetyscore Etarrans afflicted that autumn, not one wasted from starvation. Wrapped in an uncanny hibernation, their heart rate and breathing had slowed. Their life signs languished, faint to near nonexistent, as though their animate function stood in abeyance. Somehow, they subsisted on infusions of broth, with most none the worse, while their bodily needs were tended in infantile helplessness.

Winter let in the damp drafts off the harbor, a seeping cold that defeated even the thickest wool stockings and waistcoat. The healer’s charges lay oblivious, muffled under blankets in thick quiet. A half dozen volunteer wives and a brace of overworked junior apprentices shuttled to and fro in the gloom, bearing trays of broth and hampers of soiled bedding, with the crown surgeon’s authoritative presence marked out by a bobbing circle of lanternlight.

For the twentieth time in an hour, sleeves rolled up and his cowlicks pushed back from his forehead, the royal healer peeled back the blankets and examined the next cot’s occupant. This one was a burly troop captain whose scars were by now familiar territory. He counted the man’s pulse rate and pinched slackened, papery skin for the first warning sign of dehydration. When the intrusive shadow fell over his shoulder, he barked from reflexive habit. ‘Please don’t block the lamp, boy! I’ve said so before. If you’ve stuffed all the cracks in the sea-side shutters, I need well water drawn and heated. We’ve got twenty more who need bathing today. No one gets supper till they’ve been groomed and dried.’

‘The wick in your lamp just wants trimming.’ That deep velvet tone belonged to no whining apprentice. The light brightened, set right by the same individual’s quiet touch. ‘The ladies in the factor’s office know your needs very well. You’ll find the tubs have been filled and heated already.’

The crown healer straightened, both fists knuckled into his aching lower back. He blinked, as if overstressed vision could be made to explain the mischievous old man waiting patiently at his left hand. ‘You’re here to help? That’s a gift and a miracle.’ Disbelief yielded to practical authority that would grasp and secure even chance-met opportunity before it slipped through the back postern. ‘We have women to manage the washing and towels, but the boys will be needed for the litters.’

‘They’re still busy stuffing the cracked boards with rags,’ the strange elder replied in his whiskey-grained baritone. Spry as a cat, his diminutive frame was doused in a shapeless old coat, cut from what seemed a ragpicker’s leavings, and mismatched swatches of worn blankets. Crimped white hair spilled into the riot of beard he contained in the grip of sensitive fingers. ‘I can manage one end of a litter well enough.’

The healer’s dubious glance met a pixie’s bright grin and turquoise eyes folded with laugh lines. ‘Did I not haul your water and roll in the washtubs?’ Then, in afterthought delivered with irreverent distaste, ‘Your magnanimous ruler might have provided something better than vats bought used from the dyer’s.’

‘They often have terrible splinters, I know,’ the healer apologized. ‘We’re pinched to the bone for expenses.’ Too honestly overworked to dismiss his good fortune, he tucked the blankets over the prone hulk of the captain and gestured toward the ramshackle shelving erected against the far wall. ‘Litters are stored over there. Our work’s laid out. A council delegation’s due here this afternoon, and the Prince of the Light won’t like their report if his former crack veterans are shabby with a week’s stubble.’

The old man retrieved the lantern in mild deference. ‘We’re trying to impress someone?’

‘You didn’t catch wind of last month’s proclamation?’ The crown’s master healer snorted his disgust. Granted the boon of unburdened hands, he stowed his loose remedies, hiked up his scuffed satchel, and threaded his way through the rat’s maze of invalids installed on their mismatched cots. ‘Avenor’s recruiting its own talent, these days. You know that snake-tongued Hanshire captain who’s been given the post of Lord Commander? Well, he’s pushed through a change in policy.’

A pause through a stop to adjust a slipped pillow, then a laugh that stabbed for its sarcasm. ‘Sulfin Evend’s said, for straight tactics, we need to sign mageborn into Alliance service. Use talent to divide and conquer the ranks, then make the ban against sorcery stick when all disloyal spellcraft’s eradicated. Now, every mageborn offender hauled in is offered a blandishment to practice for the Light. The one who can lift these Etarrans from ensorcelment will be awarded a paid crown appointment.’

The healer’s lips thinned to harried distaste. ‘The trials are held here. Stay and witness the farce, if you’ve got a fancy for uproarious entertainment.’

‘You don’t sound appreciative,’ the old man observed, his interest engaging, and his dreamer’s gaze grown astute.

‘I don’t like dead men. Or broken bones. Or amputations, or holes carved by arrows, not for any misbegotten cause made in the interest of crown politics.’ The healer secured the strap of his satchel and hoisted the pole handles of a litter, still talking. ‘Seen too much cautery and too many splints in this campaign to throw down the clanborn.’

The old man secured the lamp in a niche and stooped to bear up his share of the burden. ‘You don’t fear shadows?’

‘I should.’ The healer gave back a gruff, barking laugh. ‘Maybe I will, if I see any. You ask me, what we have is a crisis in trade that began with the bold-as-brass theft of crown ships by a scoundrel. I don’t see any Spinner of Darkness storming the kingdom by sorcery. His clan allies are left as convenient scapegoats, dragged in to vindicate the old hatreds.’

‘Strong words,’ the elder murmured in peppery provocation.

‘Men don’t burn in Avenor for opinions. Not yet, anyway.’ Arrived at the end of the near row of cots, the healer lapsed in his tirade. His scrutiny turned critical until he observed that the oldster knew how to raise and move a helpless man without causing careless injury. ‘Whoever trained you, you’re good with your hands.’ Then, the ultimate compliment, ‘Can I call you by name?’

The request raised a mumble drowned out by the scraping scuffle of footsteps as the litterborne man was conveyed toward the tiny, partitioned room that had formerly served as the warehouse factor’s day office. Sudden light knifed the gloom as a woman in a farmwife’s loomed skirts threw open the door to admit them.

Steam billowed out, spiked by a ghost taint of apricot brandy, and a drift of female chatter. ‘Bring the dearie in here. Aesha’s got balsam to sweeten his bath, and Ennlie’s cousin’s new babe needs a wee syrup for the croup. Could you mix her the dose? We’ll see to your work with the razor.’

‘Have I ever refused you, love?’ said the healer, absorbed as he maneuvered the burdened litter through the constraint of the doorjambs, careful not to scrape the chapped skin off his knuckles. He added in snatched explanation, ‘These are widows of the men lost on campaign back in Vastmark. They’re all volunteers, and we would be paralyzed without them.’

‘I can prepare cough syrup,’ the old man offered. His quick smile reassured the redheaded Ennlie; the healer was given his calm list of the herbs in proper proportion for the recipe. ‘If you haven’t any cailcallow, fresh wintergreen will do.’

‘Ath,’ said the healer, amazed. He braced the litter on a tabletop, planted his stance, then eased the heavyset occupant into a waiting tub brimmed with suds. ‘Wherever you came from, we could use six others just like you.’

‘Petition the crown to stop burning herb witches?’ the old man quipped.

The healer’s solemnity gave way to the first belly laugh he had enjoyed in long weeks. ‘Now, that might see me arraigned for collaboration with evil.’

‘Surely not,’ the old man argued. ‘Avenor’s palace pages could scarcely fill your shoes as replacement.’

‘Well then, definitely don’t brag on your skills while you’re here. I’d rather be sure this court gets no leeway to decide my sharp tongue’s a crown nuisance.’ Smiling, the healer offered his satchel and the freely made gift of his trust. ‘Everything you’ll need for that remedy is inside. Just rummage away. Oh, and shout if you can’t read my labels.’

The morning streamed past in camaraderie and hard work, with the harried master healer relying more and more on the old man’s competent assistance. If the fellow seemed given to peculiar silences, his lapses of woolgathering seemed not to affect the compassionate skill of his hands. Nor was his remark about arcane connections entirely the lighthearted artifice of humor. He had a gift, or else an empathic touch that wrought an uncanny string of small miracles. Those victims whose vitality had faltered through their prolonged and unnatural sleep seemed to stabilize under his influence. When yet again the royal healer felt a man’s fluttery pulse rebound and steady for no reason, he glanced up.

The oldster was only washing the unconscious man’s hair, his hands wrist deep in dripping lather, and his expression vague as a daft poet’s. Except that no mind could decipher his reticent secrets, nor read into eyes that held the innocence of a spring sky.

The healer stared over the rim of the washtub, a swift chill of gooseflesh marring the skin of the fingers still clasped to the guardsman’s limp wrist. His attentiveness this time demanded the courtesy of a straight answer as he said softly, ‘Who are you?’

The old man in his whimsical coat of sewn rags turned his head. He smiled, disarming, then tipped his chin toward the closed door, a half beat ahead of a disturbance arisen outside of the warehouse. ‘You’re going to know very shortly.’ As the commotion resolved into the scouring rumble of cart wheels, and the clatter of a sumptuous company of outriders, his seamed features kindled into beguiling delight. ‘We have company? Your party of councilmen has arrived two and a half hours early.’

‘Dharkaron’s Black Spear!’ The crown’s master healer rammed to his feet in flustered annoyance. He pressed through the busy women in the factor’s office, cracked the door, and yelled to his youthful assistants, ‘Get busy lighting the sconces and candles! Now! Jump on it! His Grace’s high officers have no liking at all for musty dim corners and shadows that remind them of darkness.’

Abandoned in the wake of last-minute preparations, the old man retrieved the dropped pitcher. He rinsed the soapy head under his fingers, and without visible hurry, toweled the comatose soldier’s streaming hair. Then he left his charge in the care of the women.

‘Don’t scream if he stirs,’ he admonished on parting, his amusement damped back to a madcap twinkle in the artless depths of his eyes.

‘Ye’re moonstruck,’ the grandmother among them replied, laughing, and shooed him back into the warehouse.

There, he might as well have been invisible for all the notice anyone paid him. The frenzied scurry of preparations flowed right and left, banked candles and lanterns set burning at profligate expense. If the Prince of the Light went nowhere without ceremony, his high council officers emulated court style. The old man chose an unobtrusive stance against the sagged boards of old shelving. His ancient, patched coat flapped against his booted ankles as the large double doors that fronted the dockside were unlatched and dragged open.

Two pages entered, their deep blue crown livery adorned with sunwheel sashes. Next followed a herald, his tabard roped with gold, the glittering white silk smirched with a dusting of snowflakes. While the chill swirled and flowed to the farthest-flung crannies, and candleflames streamed with the draft, he bawled out his formal announcement of the imminent presence of crown officers.

Two magistrates stepped in as the echoes died away. They wore their formal robes of judgment and collars of gleaming links. With them came the Lord Crown Examiner, robed in ermine and white silk, and a second figure of impressive presence and seal-colored beard and hair. Diamond studs shot scintillant fire, warmed by a linked chain of dragons masterfully wrought in tooled gold. The inclement weather had not ruffled his fine clothes, which meant that somewhere outside, a stoic pack of servants had borne a closed litter or palanquin.

The argumentative clutch of clerks trailing the first pair did not merit such nicety. They wore snow in their hat brims, and discommoded expressions of forbearance. Last came the lean and predatory form of the Alliance Lord Commander at Arms. That one strode in like a hungry hawk, his black-hilted weapons and alert carriage in sharp contrast to the disdainful court secretary who waddled, self-important as a citybred pigeon. Six sunwheel guardsmen escorted the retinue, their glittering trappings and ceremonial helms buffed to a dazzling polish. These ushered in their turn a trio of curiosities: a tall woman trailing a sequined train and a shoulder yoke of pheasant wings and peacock eyes. Next came a skinny, bald man robed in sable and purple velvet; then a wizened creature of indeterminate sex, with one gouged-out eye socket and a blackthorn walking stick capped with a crow skull and fringed with rattling bone beads. Four liveried footmen brought up the rear, loaded chin high with oddments and bizarre paraphernalia.

The array was eclectic. From his unobtrusive vantage outside the hub of activity, the old man picked out several portable bronze braziers, clay vessels stamped with runes, and two amphorae of ruby glass. Less wholesome than these, stained with the aura of dark usage, was a goblet made from a cranial bone rimmed in tarnished silver. A trailing tangle of embroidery identified the filched mantle from a ransacked hostel of Ath’s Brotherhood. Two matched onyx candlesticks wafted a perfume of heavy incense, even through the rampaging wind that rushed in, rank with the salt rime razed off the harbor.

Through a sifting swirl of snow, the rattle of bone beads, and the sonorous flourish of the herald, the page boys wrestled the heavy doors shut. There panoply paused. The crown’s master healer hastened forward and bowed under the gimlet regard of the Lord Commander. The high councilmen looked bored, and the clerks stood resigned, while the countrywomen whispered from the inner doorway of the factor’s office, their capable hands pink from wash suds.

Their interest was matched by the old man in the rag coat, tucked in his corner with the pert fascination of a house wren. ‘You know that’s a necromancer’s stick?’ he commented to no one in particular. ‘Very rare. Dangerous, too. I wonder whose unpleasant little sigil lends it power?’

Across the warehouse, the official with the resplendent dress exchanged smooth talk with the healer. His seamless, court bearing set each gesture apart, while the more heavyset Lord Examiner shifted from foot to foot in resentment, and the servants divested their burdens with thinly concealed distaste. The guardsmen and the robed magistrates looked on like cranes, overseeing disposition of the eccentrics, who were named as prisoners under arraignment for the practice of unlawful sorceries.

Their condemned status notwithstanding, they argued. The discord swelled into an arm-waving clamor concerning who held right of precedence. The magistrates deadlocked over whose authority should silence them, while the herald, resigned, waded in and settled their shouting with a peasant’s practice of drawing straws. In decorous language, the clerk of the court then assigned each mismatched contestant to a cot with an unconscious occupant.

The bald man jabbed his splayed fingers and demanded that everyone stand back.

‘What, for you?’ the woman retorted, skirling in spangles to face him. ‘Why should we give way one inch for a showman who couldn’t draw spells to drop fresh dung from a pig?’

The altercation flared, while the withered oldster caught in between remained single-mindedly oblivious.

‘Good people!’ the herald called in vexation. ‘There will be no specialized treatment between you. The Lord Examiner and Avenor’s crown magistrates will judge merit upon equal standing!’

A strained truce prevailed, while the master healer looked irritated, and the contestants who had rudely invaded his domain reclaimed their sundry paraphernalia. Under the frosty regard of the Lord Examiner and the unnamed, dapper high officer, they began setting up with businesslike self-importance. The heavyset secretary broke out his lap desk and uncorked his inkwell, while his chilblained apprentice sharpened his quills, and the robed clerks readied the sunwheel seal and gold wax, and snipped lengths from a spool of white ribbon. The magistrates shook melting snow off drooped hats. They peered down long noses to render judgment as the woman unclipped the clasp at her throat, shed her train amid an electrical jitter of reflections, and undertook the first trial.

She began by spreading her sequin train over her assigned victim. She lit tapers. The ancient, carved sconces streamed cloying smoke as she waved long-nailed hands to a chiming descant of silver bracelets. For an interval, the officials coughed and dabbed runny eyes, while she circled the cot and muttered a singsong incantation.

‘A farce, indeed,’ muttered the old man in the shadows. His eyes became piercing, narrowed to slits as the flashy train was whisked off to unveil the man underneath. His pale face was still, the comatose limbs no more responsive than before.

The magistrates straightened from their whispered consultation. The elder one rapped out his verdict. ‘The accused is proved guilty of fraud.’

‘Another charlatan!’ the Crown Examiner concurred. He pronounced the lighter sentence. ‘The objects used for this act of chicanery shall be burned without recompense. The offender will be fined ten silvers and set free with a warning not to repeat her offense.’

‘No more have I coin, since your constables ransacked my lodgings!’ the woman yelled in defiance.

The magistrates lent her outburst no credence. ‘If she has no relations to dun for her fine, give her penury and hard labor with the city’s slop crews.’

The secretary scribbled the added amendment, and the woman resorted to curses. Her shouts turned shrill as two burly guardsmen ushered her, struggling, through the door and remanded her into the custody of the garrison men-at-arms posted in the snowfall outside.

Due process ground on, as ribbons and seal were proffered by the clerks, under candles that flagged in the draft as the outer doors were shoved closed. The healer masked his face in weary hands, and the raggedy character with the crow skull stick flashed a triumphant smile celebrating a rival’s departure.

‘Next defendant,’ droned the magistrate. ‘Make your case for the court.’

The man in gaudy velvet strode forward. Chin held high, each gesture theatrical, he unwrapped a set of shell rattles, then lit something in his brazier that gave off a reek like singed wool and cat piss. His display opened with patterns chalked in a circle around a row of candles, moved on through a muttered consultation with a smoky quartz scrying ball, then broke into rattling, witha swaying ululation over a brush tied from a hanged man’s hair. The act ended in daubing a sticky decoction over the face and the feet of his still unconscious subject.

The fine for his failure was double the woman’s.

‘Well, at least they recognize a fake when they see one,’ the old man said, bemused from the sidelines. His expression now shaded toward genuine concern, as though he perceived something more than straightforward trial and judgment.

Last came the shapeless oldster. The shed hood revealed female gender and a filthy bristle of white hair. She wore a necklace of pig’s teeth. The necromancer’s stick pinched within her twig fingers seemed to glare blue for an instant as she bent and ignited the twisted black rootstock she had shredded in her brazier.

‘No!’ The old man flipped up his cowled collar and strode out of the shadows, no longer deferent, but charged to a startling, sharp air of command. ‘You will not light that here, madam!’ Nor was his authority less than absolute as he entered the circle of candlelight. ‘The herb you’ve chosen will cause harm in this case, and that stick is an unclean implement with which to recall a man’s blameless, strayed spirit.’

‘The lad will awaken,’ rasped the crone, the glint in her single eye sullen.

‘Pass the Wheel, more likely,’ the old man corrected. The improved illumination fully revealed him, even to the peculiar, detailed threadwork that patterned his coat of drab motley. The boots he wore underneath the long hem were a horseman’s, scuffed with hard wear and marred at the toes with small holes that looked punched by cinders. For some reason beyond logic, that oddity lent his presence a fierce credibility.

The royal guardsmen deferred to his onslaught of aimed purpose. The Lord Examiner’s bellowed query passed unheeded as the old man burst into the inner circle, quashed the sullen, smoking coal in the brazier with a bare-handed touch, then faced the herb witch head-on.

‘My lords, beware!’ snapped the Alliance Lord Commander, spurred to an explosive rush forward. ‘This newcomer wields true magecraft.’

The old man in his motley turned not a hair, despite the scrambling retreat of crown officers, then the Lord Examiner’s outraged order to stand firm, and the subsequent cry for the royal guards to form a defensive cordon.

‘The stick,’ the stranger demanded. Each word fell distinct through the wail of bared steel. As though disconnected from the surrounding consternation, his attention remained fixed on the woman as he extended his hand. ‘I’ll dispose of it safely.’

‘This is a rank outrage!’ Avenor’s Lord Examiner elbowed past the dumbstruck secretary and clerks, his slab jowls jerked to a tic. ‘Who are you?’

The old man smiled, the turn of his lips beneath beard and hood disarming as new butter. ‘Someone you’d dearly enjoy burning, no doubt.’ Still focused on the hag, he asked, ‘Woman, what do you fear?’

‘No fear!’ shrilled the crone. ‘Not of you! None for him.’ Her distraught gesture encompassed the diamond-still presence of the state official who had thus far not deigned to speak. The moment of impasse gained force and momentum, while the crone clutched the stick, and a cold like spun current ran off its incised runes and shaved the air brittle with danger. The court magistrates stopped their clamor; the guards froze to a man. Lord Examiner Vorrice turned his nose sharply, a hound on a scent, then snarled at the Lord Commander at Arms, whose hard restraint trapped his wrist.

‘What do you fear?’ the old man repeated. His entreaty held a note of compassion that belled through explosive stillness.

The woman’s gaze fell. ‘I fear to burn. You know this.’ The stiff, clawlike hand clasped to the artifact spasmed to trembling frailty. Whatever malevolent force the stick channeled seemed poised, unstable as the suspended cling of a waterdrop.

The old man surveyed her desperate stance and discerned deeper meanings behind her simple admission. ‘You’re cold. The winter is cruel where folk are made fearful of those who sell the old remedies. You may take my word for your safety and the promise of shelter.’ He shed his rag coat in one fluid motion. ‘Go to freedom in Havish in exchange for leaving that stick.’

‘You have no right to release a crown convict!’ pealed the Crown Examiner in flushed rage.

‘But I have, in this case.’ Underneath the drab motley, in startling transformation, the old man wore wine red robes with edged borders of black interlace that looked newly made from the tailor’s.

‘Your bond, I can trust,’ the crone relented. Her short laugh held an unlooked-for delight as she yielded and curtsied, and let him accept the stick from her unsteady grasp.

The pending sense of danger built and trembled on the air. Though the candles burned straight in the draftless atmosphere, the stone floor seemed to rock without movement.

With no fanfare, no warning, the old man ran his gnarled palm hard down the length of the wood. The staff spoke, a chilling vibration of sound like the wail of a terrified child. In shattering contrast, the light that bloomed under his sure touch was wrought out of limpid clarity. A wash of bound energies whined past and dispersed. The candles streamed then, and the scentless backwash ruffled the feathers and damp hats of the magistrates, and shot queer, starred pulses off the steel of the guards’ helms and weaponry. Nor was the staff scatheless. The carved runes dissolved in a spatter of red sparks, licking scintillant fire through the odd, silent courtier’s pale ermines and exquisite linked diamond studs.

What remained in the old man’s hand was an oak stick, polished and plain, now innocuous as a countryman’s walking cane.

‘Thank you, grandmother.’ The elder returned the stick to the crone with unstudied, gallant courtesy.

At his back, the Examiner’s outrage inflamed the bunched mass of courtiers.

‘You’ve no right to grant a reprieve to crown prisoners!’ Lord Vorrice burst out. To Avenor’s taciturn Lord Commander at Arms, he ordered, ‘Restrain him, at once.’

The guards moved. The metallic notes struck off their mail and edged weapons splashed echoes the full length of the warehouse.

The old man glanced up, droll. ‘Are you foolish?’ He engaged the masked gaze of Lord Commander Sulfin Evend, even as the royal guards closed and surrounded him.

Amid the official party, the sleek crown councilman seemed the only other man to appreciate the irony of the challenge.

Nor was Sulfin Evend either hot-blooded or rash, to rise to the old man’s baiting. His calm called a halt on the guardsmen’s aggression, and his speech stopped them cold between strides. ‘Sethvir of Althain,’ he addressed, his formality reamed through by corrosive sarcasm. ‘Why have we the pleasure?’

The named title electrified the gathering to fear. A hairsbreadth from bloodshed, guardsmen gripped their weapons, and the magistrates shrank, feathered hats and jeweled finery shuddering to the beat of sped pulse.

The person revealed as a Fellowship Sorcerer stepped away from the crone, his fingers clasped behind his back like a child caught out stealing sweetmeats. ‘Oh, shall we bandy words, now, instead of engaging with weaponry?’ He winked at Sulfin Evend. ‘For one thing, there will be young wives in Etarra who want living husbands brought safely home to their hearthstones.’

‘The crown would be grateful,’ Sulfin Evend agreed, as cutting as any unsheathed steel in this surprise ambush of courtesies. ‘Though your charitable thought is of questionable standing since your colleague was the one who cursed these men to enchanted sleep in the first place.’

Sethvir raised mild eyebrows, offended. ‘Asandir did no such thing. He merely allowed Caithwood’s live trees to respond to an unfair endangerment. Or did you not make your eloquent case in Lysaer’s state council to sue for a decree of burning and destruction?’

‘This is rubbish!’ broke in Vorrice. ‘A tree can bind three whole companies of fighting men into a lethal coma? What an asinine flight of fantasy!’

‘Actually, no. They prefer not to kill.’ Sethvir sidled another half step, disarmingly patient. ‘Nor will they, if everyone stays reasonable.’ While the crone snatched her chance to melt into the shadows, he coughed politely, craned his neck, then raised his hand to fend off the converging bristle of pole arms. ‘How uncivilized we are,’ he chided. ‘After taking the trouble to travel in winter, I’d rather not step out beforetime.’

Under Sulfin Evend’s unflinching regard, the guards stiffened their weapons and held their ground.

Sethvir shrugged. ‘Have things your way.’ He dismissed the Lord Commander as he might have abandoned an instant’s idle survey of a fly. ‘You overdressed blunderers make a splendid display, intimidating all the wrong people.’ All devilment, he beckoned to the cowering royal secretary. ‘Come forward, man. Stop shaking as well. Nobody’s going to skewer someone’s liver on a pike. Your wooden-faced high councilmen are merely going to set royal seal to an edict that pledges the heartwood of the forests Lysaer’s grant of protection, for all time.’

‘You won’t get the Prince’s signature,’ the Lord Commander interjected in venomous loyalty. ‘I’ll kill if you try to use these poor victims’ lives for extortion.’

Sethvir actually smiled. ‘Impasse. I can leave.’ As Sulfin Evend shifted forward to engage the guard, he added, ‘Don’t make your men party to an embarrassing mistake. No mere unsheathed steel can gainsay me.’

‘I will find your weakness. Take that as my warning.’ The Lord Commander’s burning gaze took weight and measure of Sethvir’s timeworn features before he signaled his men to lower their weapons and stand down. ‘Go from this place. Make your way back to your tower in Atainia empty-handed. We can afford to lose every man who lies here in the cause of true service to the Light.’

Again Sethvir raised tangled eyebrows. This time his inquiry focused on the smooth countenance of the one crown councilman, whose silence was now striking, and whose masked intelligence bespoke deeper motives behind unobtrusive restraint.

‘Every living man’s sword counts in this war against shadow,’ that glittering personage contradicted. ‘Nor will your evil works claim even one who lies stricken for the sake of another’s stiff pride. You may dictate your terms,’ he said to the Sorcerer. ‘Rest assured, I hold the authority to sign documents in the absence of his Grace, the Blessed Prince.’ Wholly contained, his hair combed silk under the uncertain flutter of candlelight, he finished in unruffled majesty. ‘Make no mistake. This is not capitulation. We are large enough in the strength of our faith to meet your demands and recover.’

‘You can’t yield,’ Lord Examiner Vorrice interrupted, his breath thickened to fury. ‘Prince Lysaer would never bow to a threat, nor give this enemy any footing for demand.’

‘Peace, Vorrice,’ murmured the high councilman, unperturbed, his collar of jewels like pinned points of ice hung on a nerveless wax statue. ‘There is no demand our Alliance cannot grow to overcome, given time.’ To Sethvir, he assured, ‘My writ will be honored. The secretary and the clerks can draw up a document in state language, and the ring on my hand will stand as the seal for Prince Lysaer’s personal bond.’

‘A parchment inscribed with your signature will do,’ Sethvir said, neither set back nor moved by that claim to a regent’s high sovereignty. ‘True intent of the heart can be read from such things, and a tree has small use for wax-impressed symbols and words penned in noble formality.’

‘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