Grand Conspiracy: Second Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts

carries a vibration. If fire’s your base element, you would understand that water stands as the placeholder for emotion. Is your foot tapping yet? It would be, you know, as you moved on to insist the salt contained in the ocean must obey its coarse nature and negate every trace of transmission.’

      A toy to his whim, Lirenda returned nothing. The dream held her fast, while the stars rocked to the gentle roll of a ship’s hull. The hand that had recently known trials and illness held her course with relaxed and infuriating competence.

      ‘Then perhaps you need clues to unravel the riddle?’ Arithon grinned in provocation. ‘Very well. I’ll be generous. The sound I created was vibration also, if pitched for the octaves inside the range of hearing. The seed for my music is carried by air, the primal element of inspiration. Dear lady, wind wanders where it will. It knows no boundary, nor heeds human law, nor answers to the earth-grounding virtues of salt.’

      ‘I reject your rank meddling,’ Lirenda hissed back, slapped by the truth that he had just volunteered the keys to reclaim her self-control. ‘One day you’ll know sorrow. My hand will break you. I promise you then, no schoolboyish prank played on learned theory will spare your insolent autonomy.’

      A gust heeled the brigantine’s deck. Arithon glanced at a star to ascertain his heading, then spun his wheel two points to starboard to compensate. His green eyes lit then, alive to his shrug of apology. ‘No originality there. You’ll be one of a very large crowd falling over themselves to claim the first blood at my capture.’ He ended his byplay in corrosive apology. ‘There’s a curious reverse. I always thought you the type to rule the pack rather than follow.’

      ‘Demon!’ she gasped, riled into unwitting defense by his slicing truth of perception.

      Shamed to have yielded that morsel of insight, she rallied her scattered self-command and framed the sigil of negation. Once she set the dark seal to command air, the shock of forced severance tumbled her back into vertigo. While she raged in the threadbare shreds of her dignity, her naked mind rang with the contrary echoes of his laughter …

      The rinse of white static released her hobbled faculties and gave back the closed heat of the Prime Matriarch’s chamber. Lirenda shuddered through the moment of transition, whiplashed back to cognizant thought by the rasp of Morriel’s reprimand.

      ‘… must be a lackwit, girl! Haven’t I told you time and again? Keep that spell crystal doused in black silk!’

      A snuffling stir of movement, as the young initiate returned a dutifully weepy nod. She fumbled for the remedy bag hung from her girdle, loosened the strings, then shoved tear-drenched fingers inside.

      Morriel’s chastisement was instant. ‘Dry your hands! Never, never let salt near a crystal set into a resonant spell pattern!’

      Trembling now, the girl blotted her damp knuckles on her skirt; and Lirenda, caught aback, received the demeaning revelation that she had been led to engage the Named resonance of Arithon s’Ffalenn in the presence of her personal spell crystal. The misfortunate quartz had yet to be cleansed of the melody Arithon had imprinted to lay bare her vulnerable heart. The girl initiate had been given the task of lifting the impurity from the quartz; and though months had passed under Morriel’s direct tutelage, she had not only failed to master so simple a task, but had also neglected the basics of handling an activated focus pendant.

      The sheer magnitude of the incompetence rankled. The novice initiate Morriel had chosen to groom had raw talent without the brains of a flea. Lirenda contained her resentment, well aware that the Prime would discern far more than the young woman’s stupidity. She dared not invite the parallel comparison, that she herself had strong aptitude and skilled training, but a woeful inability to checkrein her personal feelings.

      Eyes closed, wrapped in the evanescent perfume of hot candle wax, Lirenda forced down her inner turmoil. While the girlish initiate restored the crystal to proper wrappings and retied the cords of her remedy bag, the older enchantress slowed the sped beat of her heart. She doused heated nerves and noosed the wild, wakened spate of her anger back into settled calm, then rebalanced the sigils which fused the burst web of the quartz scrying. Left to mark time, she bent her will back to the master sphere in her hand.

      Where the sigils of command already in place should have revealed Arithon’s image, the crystal hung smoke dark and veiled; no surprise. The effects of sea brine alone would inhibit the virtues of quartz scrying. In addition, the man would have cloaking spells and circles of guard set about him by Dakar the Mad Prophet. Morriel Prime herself had long since established the futility of scrying for the Prince of Rathain. Yet though his immediate presence stayed obscured, his peripheral connections were less ruly. In the marginal spaces, where random event and emotion spun loose ends, the quartz could tag subtle connections to Prince Arithon as the unshielded currents of conscious activity deflected the signature vibrations of the earth’s flow of magnetic lane force.

      Linked through the darkened rock crystal in her hands, Lirenda changed focus. She searched the bloom of movement and color as vision coalesced in the depths of the slave-linked spheres on their stands.

      One showed the stripped trees of a glen in Halwythwood. Under the night’s dusting of snowfall, a cluster of clan lodge tents, guarded by a large-boned, rangy man wrapped in a bearskin mantle. By the glint of bronze hair revealed as a woman passed by with a torch, Lirenda recognized the man as Jieret s’Valerient, caithdein and steward of the realm in the seafaring absence of its sanctioned crown prince. The trill of infant laughter that brought the smile to his lips would be his daughter, Jeynsa, named his heir by the Fellowship of Seven, and not yet aged one year. A steadfast adherent of the old charter law, the liegeman served as Arithon’s voice in Rathain. Like the Koriathain, Earl Jieret could do little else but wait for the day when his oathsworn sovereign chose to return.

      In a scene purloined from a fortified tower farther east, another sphere revealed the massive frame of Duke Bransian of Alestron, sprawled at ease in a chair with a hound’s muzzle propped on his knee. His war-scarred fingers stroked the dog’s ears, while a diminutive old lady with crab-apple features stabbed an ebony stick in ripe argument over his decision to appoint his state galley for a winter voyage down the south coast.

      In another, the clan chieftain who was High Earl of Alland broached a beer cask in a pine glade, while companions sharpened their knives for a cattle raid, and a runner sewed up a holed pair of leggings, his new orders to bear a message to a secret destination in the west.

      Yet another sphere reflected a high mountain in Vastmark. There a herder woman with bells tied into her tawny braids regarded the stars, and thought wistfully upon Arithon s’Ffalenn. ‘Luck ride your shoulder, wherever you are,’ she murmured in dialect, then appended the heartfelt blessing of her tribe.

      In the deserts of Sanpashir, an elder dipped a hawk feather in fresh blood and read omens in the scattered droplets. The augury received brought a spark to filmed eyes, and sent a young man to fetch darts and knives on his gruff bark of command.

      Arithon’s contacts were varied and many, Lirenda was forced to concede; in yet another sphere, three chattering whores in a Sanshevas garret sewed a marked strip of goatskin into a hem of pink silk.

      A minstrel playing a tavern in Etarra paused to converse with three dicers wearing the colors of the town guard; farther south, an innkeeper who owned a dingier dive in Ship’s Port threw silver to a galleyman, then engaged in whispered talk too faint for the crystal’s tuned matrix to capture.

      A scribe in King Eldir’s service penned a letter by the fluttering light of a candle, while elsewhere a vivacious woman in sailhand’s slops and a gaudy scarlet shirt locked horns in ribald language with a stiff-lipped customs clerk in Tideport.

      Immersed in close survey of the eclectic array, Lirenda could almost touch the intangible thread that tied each disparate player into a logical web of continuity. She sensed the flow of information and the movement of rumor. Yet whenever she grasped any piece of the puzzle and sought to find linear order, the pieces slipped, formless, through the sieve of hard cognizance. The pattern remained