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

      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,