Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

came on as senseless bundles of color and noise. Then the innate mastery of his gift resurged. He recaptured those uncountable, disparate threads, deftly sorted their origins, and loomed them back into one web of exacting, immaculate order.

      Moon phase and tides reset his awareness. The grounding solidity of the earth lent him roots to withstand the vast void of the sky. Then the vista of storm-ridden landscape around him regained continuity and rebalanced his position to the cardinal points of direction. Restored to his venue as Althain’s Warden, Sethvir sat with closed eyes. In one snap-frozen second, he mapped the changed patterns of harmony and discord. Another fractional instant let him touch each of his distant colleagues with the informed assurance of his return.

      Asandir stood, hip deep in a snowdrift on the Plain of Araithe, retuning a damaged stone marker that smoothed a confluence of earth’s lane force; Traithe, on the storm-beaten strands of Lithmere, was completing the final ward in the chain forbidding landfall to slave-bearing galleys. Luhaine, an arrow of liberated joy, rode on a breeze that ranged southward out of Atainia. Kharadmon still stood on watch amid the sealed silence of the void. There, where the distant sun of Athera was reduced to a candleflame glimmer, the star wards raised against the mist-bound wraiths trapped on Marak posted a vigilant guard across arc seconds of darkness. Last, though in pain and peril, never least, Sethvir sensed the presence of Davien the Betrayer, lurking in self-imposed isolation in the caverns beneath the roots of the Mathorn Mountains.

      Of Ciladis, as ever, his earth-sense found no sign, though he combed all the planet in vain hope and sorrowful reflex. Then, the raw cold offered welcome distraction from the razor-sharp pain of old grief.

      Sethvir stirred from his stupor. Mauled by the teeth of the gusts, he closed slackened hands on the reins. The sleet seeded droplets of melt in his beard, and the horse underneath him blew a loud snort of impatience.

      ‘Brave one, I’m with you.’ He stroked the stallion’s wet crest, chilled by much more than inclement weather as he measured the days that the grimward’s torn wards had engaged him.

      Summer’s hot winds had changed guard to midwinter. Five months had elapsed since he left Althain Tower, a grievous interval, but necessary. Any overlooked weakness in the complex ring of guard spells could spin final havoc through Athera’s stability. For one crisis averted, old problems had acquired vicious new impetus. Foremost among them, Sethvir tracked repercussions from the roused trees in Caithwood, an event that had seeded a canker of strife across the Kingdom of Tysan.

      Asandir’s stopgap action had jammed travel and trade to a strident halt. Balked merchants bandied damning accusations against sorcery, while their craftsmen hoarded every coin they could squeeze for the purpose of Alliance retaliation. While goods piled up on the barge docks at Watercross, and guild tempers frayed and shortened, tales of armed men falling prey to fell sorceries fretted the towns to hysteria. Quarn’s mayor was left indisposed after five hand-wringing weeks of protestation. Valenford’s treasury had been emptied in the purging belief that Lysaer’s claimed divinity could avert the ruin of prosperity. Each passing day and each fallen victim lent Avenor’s crown examiners refreshed cause to denounce the practice of magecraft as a felony. Despite the season, small troops of sunwheel riders scoured the backcountry settlements in search of herb witches and birth-gifted makers of talismans.

      Sethvir shivered. Cloakless, hatless, and clad in holed leathers ingrained with a damning reek of cinders and brimstone, he knew he might need more than tact at the door where he stopped to ask shelter. He turned the stud’s nose north and westward toward Riverton, then spoke into a back-cocked black ear.

      The horse picked sure steps down the ice-crusted slope, the reins looped slack on his neck. He had served as a Sorcerer’s mount long enough not to balk at spell-sent directions. Sethvir tucked his fingers under his beard to foil the blasting wind. Lapsed into the half-tranced, dreamy inattention that widened his access to the earth link, he sifted the montage array of new images that knit each moment into the next.

      Lysaer’s thread of strategy snaked through the weave, steering Alliance interests to bind terrified trade guilds into a strangling dependency. Lord Harradene’s Etarrans still languished unconscious. Now lodged at conspicuous expense at Avenor, they were made the graphic incentive to catalyze townborn distrust of sorcery. In disturbing, hard knots, Sethvir saw the cry for redress shift into committed resolve to take action.

      All points converged toward an outbreak of war in the spring.

      From the public misfortune of the comatose Etarrans, Lysaer s’Ilessid built doctrine in tireless speech and skilled statecraft. His inferences became accepted as certainty, that Fellowship Sorcerers worked in collusion with the Spinner of Darkness. From close talks in town taprooms to the whispers of mothers threatening unruly children, the unrest took root in even the most far-flung farmsteads. Outside Tysan’s borders, frozen roads rang to the hooves of fast horses bearing sunwheel couriers. Alarmed city mayors heard the ready advice of crown officers and assumed the bright badge of the Alliance.

      The flow of gold and information moved from hand to ringed hand, born out of the festering frustrations that raged behind the closed doors of the guildhalls. Savaged by seaborne attacks from clan pirates, gouty ministers were shown the Alliance hulls under construction at Riverton as firm proof of the crown’s promise of protection. Lord Eilish brooded over Avenor’s thickened ledgers and notated his fussy entries under a crawling halo of candlelight. Beneath his cramped office, Sethvir could hear the iron strapping the piled chests in Lysaer’s treasury sing to the pitch of struck currency tendered from cities across the continent’s five kingdoms.

      Harried by more than the season’s chill winds, the Sorcerer traced the crosscurrents designed to consolidate power. Lady Ellaine’s handfasting to Lysaer wrought shifts: Erdane’s new-fledged ambition wound intrigues that stitched through state policy in clandestine meetings, and in the dunning of farm crofts for tithes in the cause to eradicate sorcery and shadows. The revenues outfitted forays in winter, when campaign was not normally feasible.

      In Westwood, hare and sparrows fled the march of armed men, who scoured the forests to slaughter the wild game and starve out a dwindled encampment of clansmen. The earth link unveiled the gaunt faces of children, and the obstinate courage which kept bows and drawn steel in the hands of their driven parents. Death wrote its lines of spilled blood in the snow. In a bare, wind-raked hollow, Maenol s’Gannley’s cousin miscarried a seven-month pregnancy.

      On the black stud in Korias, Sethvir wept, aggrieved for the loss of an irreplaceable infant who would not live to see daylight. He traversed the storm-swept barrens of Korias, nagged to chills, while Avenor’s high council convened in a snug tower chamber. Cosseted in furs and damascened silk, they sipped vintage wine and administered Lysaer’s policy with fatal ignorance of the stakes their chosen path courted. While their armorers forged weapons to uphold a wrongful cause, and crown instigators whispered their damning false testimony reviling minions of darkness, Kharadmon kept steadfast watch against a range of perils beyond the pale of mortal politics.

      The massive, wrought ward ring that shielded Athera in the vast deeps between stars was never for a moment left unguarded. Should an invasion of free wraiths ever sweep in from Marak, a populace stripped of its natural-born talent would be left defenseless and wide open to threat of possession. Then would mankind have cause to fear, and women weep, and innocent children suffer horrors.

      ‘I fear the same thing.’ Kharadmon’s stray response reechoed across an incomprehensible distance as he affirmed the passing concern of Althain’s Warden. ‘All’s quiet here, now. Too peaceful, perhaps. Those wraiths never rest. Through the months when they stalked me, they seethed and hated like a wasp nest stirred up by fiends. My watch feels oppressive. Sometimes I worry that we’re being shown what we wish to see in a mirror.’

      Sethvir winced, brought back to earth as icy runnels of snowmelt snaked down his open collar. His sleeves were soaked through, his leathers grown soggy. Against his back, the undaunted winds scoured down with their barbed burden of ice. He endured the cruel blast without rancor. As ever, the world’s broadscale tapestry of events left him small thought to spare for the nuisance of bodily