Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts
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the bad news blinked over the abandoned spread of fine food. He watched Avenor’s state officers and trade ministers recover shocked wits and argue themselves into a fervent volte-face.
Their claims of bare coffers only minutes before suffered a miraculous readjustment. New offers of gold to be pledged for the Light materialized from dim places. Like chain lightning, caches hidden in deeper pockets resurfaced in the spate of high feeling that rolled and rebounded through the room.
Lord Eilish, Avenor’s Minister of the Royal Treasury, recovered grizzled eyebrows from the heights of his gray-fringed hairline. No fool, he clapped his hands to recall his scurrying secretaries. Then, shot to his feet, arms beckoning, he rousted pages and wine servers to clear aside platters of roast duck and strip the table near the door to bare boards. There, ensconced like a judge with a row of state witnesses and a brace of Prince Lysaer’s guardsmen, he dictated records and set under seal the promises that tumbled like charmed birds into his lap. He did not look up as Erdane’s delegate slipped out.
But Gace Steward, who missed nothing, expected a fast courier would ride the north road before midnight. The impact of that evening’s masterful play of statecraft would make itself felt far and wide.
Among the first to detect the fresh currents of change, an array of quartz spheres set in stands flashed to life in the stifling, close heat of a private chamber a hundred leagues distant from Avenor.
There, Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, sat her high chair in the sisterhouse at Capewell. Reduced by age and infirmity to a bundle of thin bones wrapped in a tissue of creased flesh, her robed form was propped upright in pillows. Wax candles burned like pale pillars at both elbows. A violet silk throw bordered with bullion ribbon mantled her lap. Her strengthless hands cupped another sphere of rock crystal, aligned by her trained circle of seeresses to fine-tuned spells of scrying.
In momentous synchronicity, the image of Avenor’s disrupted state banquet danced to the sigils and seals their inveigling mastery had stitched through the stone’s aligned matrix. Morriel absorbed every nuance of the scene, intent as a cat poised over a glass bowl of goldfish.
Her colorless lips pleated into vexed wrinkles, as, in distanced miniature, Lord Eilish arose and stretched, then closed and locked the boards of the ledger which kept his account of the Alliance treasury.
‘Clever man. Clever, clever man,’ she rasped on the tail of a stertorous exhale.
Though her attendant page boys and servants knew not to respond to anything but her direct summons, the dewy, blond woman perched on the stool at her knee had yet to be curbed from such frivolous liberties. ‘Do you mean Prince Lysaer?’ Her fluttery gesture singled out another quartz, the end sphere of the array of eight, cradled in its silver stand, and positioned in a semicircle around the Prime Matriarch’s chair. ‘But his Grace has apparently abandoned his council.’
While she spoke, the torchlit depths of the quartz showed Avenor’s Prince Exalted mounting a handsome cream horse in the taciturn company of his Lord Commander.
Morriel looked up. Her eyes sustained the drilled hardness of obsidian, opaque beside her younger colleague’s innocence. ‘He has left them, don’t you see? Let them know absolutely their money can’t buy his complaisant protection. Watch them. They’ll stew in his absence. They’ll sweat and pace themselves silly, then raise still more coin as a blandishment. Oh yes. Lysaer’s read their worth and their secret fears to an exquisite, fine point of accuracy. He’ll take his sweet time coming back. When he finally returns, his council and trade guilds will fall over themselves to welcome the policies they would once have argued past death to prevent.’
The woman’s youthful features stayed blank, lips parted as she awaited the binding conclusion.
‘Lysaer will have to take Sulfin Evend’s council, now,’ Morriel mused, finger tapping the quartz, and her eggshell brow tucked with speculation. ‘He must hire talent to keep track of his enemies, if he’s not to find himself continually blindsided by the doings of Fellowship Sorcerers.’
‘How can you know this?’ the girl said, admiring.
‘Study the present,’ the Prime Matriarch instructed in dry malice. ‘The clues to unlock the future ever and always are written into the patterns of each moment.’
The initiate furrowed her fresh brow and made a dutiful survey of the scenes logged and transmitted by the quartz spheres. Time passed, and the candles burned lower. Morriel Prime closed eyelids the webbed texture of dead leaves, her crabbed hands stilled upon the purple velvet in her lap.
‘Cast your net finer,’ she suggested, unprompted.
The young woman started. ‘Yes, Matriarch.’ She deepened her survey, saw a ship with furled sails rock at chilly anchorage at Tideport. She watched torches weaving through the gusty night at the crowded settlement of Watercross, where the fallen from Caithwood were bundled like cordwood in the common rooms of the inns, or sheltered under the gust-slapped canvas of the field tents. She tracked the Prince of the Light, who hastened his column of guardsmen southward, then followed the galloping outriders who raced ahead to secure them a galley passage out of Riverton inlet. She traversed a chain of dockside taverns in Orlest, and tight knots of men at the trader’s wharf, where talk ran to raids and losses to the minions of darkness.
‘I see widespread fear of the Master of Shadow,’ she lisped in uncertain conclusion. ‘The moil seems unfounded. He’s far at sea, and surely no direct threat to the continent.’
‘At sea, yes.’ Morriel spoke with shut eyes. ‘Yet he has not withdrawn his presence or his interests. Look for connections. Cast your net finer still.’
The girl fidgeted on her footstool, unable to find any relevance in the current view, of three trollops sharing gossip over hot chocolate in gilt cups, while a fourth one penned a letter in overdone script on the back of a secondhand parchment. Squint though she would, the initiate could make no sense of the contents. She raised a tentative hand and sketched a cipher for clarity, and watched the image shift from the prostitutes’ boudoir to the taproom of a seaside tavern, where a soap merchant with fat jowls and a marten collar lost a devastating hand of cards to the nerve-wound youngest son of the clanborn Duke of Alestron.
‘Nothing fits,’ she said, plaintive.
Morriel scarcely stirred, patient as none before ever saw her. ‘The trouble with new servants is the tedious time teaching them who should and should not be admitted. Lirenda is here.’ Eyes still closed, the Prime added, ‘She will demonstrate the thread of reason your inexperience has overlooked.’
The next instant, the latch clicked. The haughty, black-haired initiate swept in, a damp cloak on her arm, and her woolen skirts rimmed in the pale clay wicked up from the trodden-up yard of a countryside posthouse. She sank into obeisance, exuding the frost-keen scent of winter air. ‘I return from Araethura with word that the child, Fionn Areth, has been made our oathsworn servant.’
Morriel’s pinched face tipped aslant in the candlelight. ‘How convenient for you.’ Her eyes opened, black glass flecked in spite and the false, warm reflections of flame. ‘Forgive me if I don’t reward you with credit until your vaunted plan brings a success.’
Lirenda’s flare of rage was adroitly masked behind a façade of decorum. ‘How may I serve?’
The Prime goaded, relentless. ‘Since you’ve come, you can show Selidie how to draw out the connecting thread for the Shadow Master’s interests on the continent. I hedge all my options these days. You’ll know that already, since you’ve assiduously applied all your training to sorting the rumors.’ A rim of worn teeth lent an edge to her smile as Morriel watched for the signs her baiting had chafed on a weakness.
The former First Enchantress arose to full height, self-contained as a panther. She chose caution before argument. At the end of a difficult, cold-weather journey, this needling trap the Prime spun presented a mazework of pitfalls. Not least, the scrying would demand a calling rune set through the resonance of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn’s