Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ tangle of clapboard cottages, each with a cow and a garden patch. The steadings were inhabited by the families of serving girls who had married rivermen or drovers, and raised sprawling families whose lifeblood was tuned to the movement of commerce.

      The summer’s campaign to suppress Caithwood’s clansmen had spurred wider change. The inns were jammed to screaming capacity, each room and attic housing crown officers and stockpiles of perishable supplies. In response to demand, every Watercross resident had rented out bedrooms and haylofts at extortionist prices, then relocated their displaced and bickering offspring in the crannies of pantries and woodsheds. Talk of new building abounded, while tents and picket lines crowded the riverbank, and more timber fell to clear acreage. Amid the chewed ends of stumps and the trodden, pocked earth quilted over with flame-bright swatches of fallen leaves, the orderly tents of an Alliance encampment nestled into the river’s south bank. Its hub of command was a sagging board building that, in springtime, had served as a pig shack.

      The sow and her farrow had long since graced the pot. Under the damp thatch that had been their last shelter, Etarra’s Lord Harradene snapped off his gloves and stamped the caked mud from his boots. The day officer delivered the most urgent news through the noise of his jangling impatience, while a gesture saw the wrapped packets of dispatches accepted by his breathless equerry. Harradene stilled as he heard the reports. His cliff-edged frown stayed quarried in place as he learned that the camp north of Caithwood had withdrawn in disorder back to Valenford.

      ‘No, don’t repeat that,’ he snapped. ‘I heard damn all the first time. Puling ninnies, every milk-nosed captain who let his company turn tail. Fact’s known well enough. Fellowship conjury never kills.’ He slapped the royal writ on the trestle with the maps and glowered at his ring of cringing officers. ‘I don’t care horse apples if some fools have fled from a display of arcane posturing! Your prince wants a fire. Therefore, this stand of wood’s going to burn! We’re driving clan dogs out of hiding with singed tails, and the crown’s bounties won’t wait for the hindmost.’

      Through a spattering of cheers, someone’s raspy question prevailed. ‘Is this wise?’

      The boldest of the sergeants appended a protest. ‘The Sorcerer claimed he would waken the trees.’

      Lord Commander Harradene spun back, his spiked brows still furrowed, and the shoulders under his sunwheel surcoat bristled as a bear’s before a charge. ‘Oh, did he indeed?’ His rankling, Etarran sarcasm thundered, sifting fine dust from the thatch. ‘And what will that mean, do you think? That hundred-year-old oaks are likely to rise up and walk? That greenwood is going to bear steel?’ He turned in a tight circle, leaving no officer unwithered by his scathing contempt. ‘Is there anyone else present with the brains of a chicken?’

      No one spoke or moved. Pent silence expanded like poison, sawn through at a distance by barking dogs and the wailing of some mother’s toddler.

      ‘Good!’ Lord Harradene slapped the wet ends of his gloves against the dulled mail of his byrnie. ‘Now show me you’ve kept the two bollocks Ath gave a newborn. In one hour, I want ten relays of messengers assembled. They’ll bear my orders the length and breadth of Taerlin. By dawn on the day of the new moon, every man marching in the service of the Light will be in position to torch trees. We’ll have archers in line to take down the flushed clansmen. Hereafter, these roads will be safe enough for a naked virgin to travel unscathed!’

      Ahead of all argument, Lord Harradene snarled his ultimatum. ‘Any man who fears trees may turn in his insignia right here, right now, and go home stripped of all honors. Ones who run later, or ones who drag feet will be burned and run through by the sword as no less than Fellowship Sorcerers’ collaborators!’

      The pig shack emptied to a stampede of boots, and the last couriers streamed away well ahead of the hour allocated for their departure. Some galloped north and east, mounted upon fast horses and given escort by tried veterans in sunwheel surcoats. Others ducked spray from the oars of swift boats, commandeered from trade service by crown authority. These careened downriver into the wilds, their course sped by the winding ribbon of the Ilswater’s lower branch in its rush to meet the sea estuary.

      The trees dripped and brooded in the mist-heavy air. They exhibited no change as their sovereign territory became invaded by the Alliance couriers, who dispersed the written orders for Lord Commander Harradene’s campaign of fire and sword. Their stillness magnified the trepidation of the men, who rode with ears tuned to the wind in the leaves and heard nothing, only autumn’s chorus of dying vegetation as the unmoored foliage chattered and danced in the gusts. In the boats, beneath breaking cloud, sweat-drenched oarsmen watched the shadowed deeps on the bank, prodding at waterbound roots with unease as they moored to make camp for the night.

      Yet no living tree displayed any sign of an uncanny movement. The fiery pageant of changed maples unveiled at each bend in the river, their outlines punch-cut and serene. The hollows wore carpets of scarlet and gold, turned by the furtive brush of night’s frosts presaging the advent of winter.

      Whatever the Sorcerer Asandir threatened, no Alliance scout’s sharpened vigilance detected anything untoward or amiss. Mice continued to nest in blankets and stores, seeking shelter against the chill; the hunting owls sailed the starry dark, silent and sleek as lapped silk. Days, the hawks circled and called from a blue enameled sky. Geese clamored south in straggling chevrons as they had for time beyond memory. No one saw oak groves tear up roots or talk. If every place a man trod to seek firewood, his steps felt stalked by hidden watchers, that unease more likely stemmed from the clan scouts who shadowed their movements, unseen.

      The spate of outrageous speculation peaked and subsided, restored to a general complacency as Lord Harradene’s orders reached the far-flung Alliance encampments, and the days waxed and waned without incident. The rank-and-file troops who occupied the deep wilds were experienced and staunch. They curbed all explosions of foolish hysteria lest they draw in the prankish attention of iyats, the invisible fiends that played living havoc with a man’s kit and gear. Evenings were spent wrapping fire arrows with cotton, or binding oiled rag to pine billets. The casks of pitch and resin that would fuel their brands were drawn from supply, and tallied in readiness for action.

      Across Caithwood, the ordered companies marched into position, unmolested beyond the nipped flush of cold fingers and the paned skins of ice on the bogs. No signs appeared of arcane workings. The only change any troop captain could pinpoint was the scarcity of traps set by the lurking bands of clansmen.

      ‘Well enough, they know when to tuck tail and run,’ dismissed Lord Harradene when the duty officer drew the oddity to his attention. ‘We already know they were warned by that Sorcerer. Should they stay, do you think, just to burn?’

      The eve of new moon arrived in due course. Over the jittering light of night campfires, tucked under cloaks against the wind, the archers waxed longbows and cracked bawdy jokes lest the silence be claimed by the rush of tossed leaves, or the bared scrape of oak twigs find voice. Dawn would see all of Caithwood aflame, by the grace of Prince Lysaer’s dispensation. If some men who had families lay awake out of pity for clan children and wives destined to fall in the carnage, Tysan’s headhunters celebrated. Other scarred, grizzled veterans recalled the bloody knives that had dispatched their wounded with no mercy given at Tal Quorin.

      ‘’Tweren’t natural,’ those whispered. ‘Our wounded all died, throat-cut and choking, done in by the hands of mere boys.’

      Two hours before the new moon’s pale dawn, at chosen locations across Caithwood, every man not on watch as a sentry sharpened and readied his weapons. The archers checked arrows and quarrels, and positioned the casks of oil and pitch. No one sensed any flare of worked sorcery. Trees loomed dumb as they always had, amid their shed mantles of leaves. Against black, forest СКАЧАТЬ