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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      Twins

      While deep winter’s blizzards howled in whiteout gusts over the northern passes, the soporific perfume of citrus rode the southland breeze that rustled glossy leaves of the merchant’s gardens in the Shandian trade port of Innish. Yet tonight, other scents warred with the fragrance wafted through the cracked window of Fiark’s cramped garret office; his twin sister, Feylind, leaned on the sill in her slops. Her presence admitted the distinct bite of ship’s tar and a robust, smoky fug carried out of the seedier shoreside taverns.

      ‘That’s СКАЧАТЬ