Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ triumph over tyranny could be simple? Or did you believe the Fellowship of Seven would abdicate its stranglehold of power for this, our first stir of opposition?’ Avid as white flame, Lysaer paused. His gaze raked the choleric tangle of courtiers, and his rebuke rolled on like a dousing of pure arctic ice. ‘You amaze me, afraid as you are for your gold, when four companies of dedicated Etarrans lie stricken. They have offered their lives on foreign soil for a cause far more grave and far-reaching than a short-term hoarding of wealth.’

      ‘Our coin paid for those troops,’ a man in claret velvet dared from the rearmost ranks.

      ‘Are you so faint of heart you can cry for results, but not weather even one setback?’ Lysaer’s tone shaded into ineffable sorrow. ‘I am shamed, then. Count endurance so lightly, then expect to fall short! The course we embark on will not ride on one effort, nor even flourish without a concerted, long-range vision of sacrifice. Upon petty greed and divisive hearts will the Sorcerers and the evil embodied by the Shadow Master achieve our sorry defeat. Men will weep then, and not just for one season’s lost profits in trade. No. The suffering price will be written and paid by our children’s descendants for all time!’

      Tense stillness descended, stirred by the shifting of hats and corpulent weight, and the sweating of bodies discomfited by constraining state clothes and pressed velvets. Only Erdane’s man seemed unmoved, as a volatile defensiveness swept through the gathering, the smoldering spark of unease touched against their deep-seated fear of dispossession.

      Prince Lysaer gave the guildsmen’s sullen quiet no quarter. ‘Very well. If the great citizens of Avenor lack the character and dedication to sustain the full course of endeavor, I shall expend every resource I have to remember humanity first of all.’

      An eruption of protests rattled the salvers, with the shrill, angered cries of Avenor’s guild ministers ringing the loudest of all.

      ‘What’s to be done?’ snapped the Minister of the Royal Treasury. ‘You have no vast funds to wage a winter campaign, and your dowry’s been promised to the shipyard.’

      A hard, weighty pause; then Prince Lysaer turned his back. His appeal was presented to no one else but his steadfast Lord Commander. ‘You have my direct order, and an open note on my possessions. Sell every furnishing, every tapestry, every chest of gold plate in my household and use the proceeds to succor those fallen. Give all in my power to provide for their care. You will make free of Tysan’s crown resources, and call the full garrison back into field service. Their immediate muster will lend you the muscle to move every man stricken down into dry quarters and comfort.’

      Against the dismayed rustle arisen at his back, his words lashed with stinging reprimand. ‘Every captain or soldier who refuses my summons will be turned off without pay! More than that, any city too engrossed in self-interest to supply aid will be cast outside my protection.’

      He exhorted no more, spoke of no retribution. In suspense, his courtiers craned forward. They expected the usual smooth flourish of statecraft that would frame the grand plan to build forces and see justice done.

      Lysaer gave back the barest, leashed glance of exasperation. His carriage displayed his most acid contempt as he dismissed his Lord Commander to shoulder the duties set upon him.

      The impact struck home: outside of all precedent, there would be no fiery speech of inspiration, no brilliant new strategy to banish the perils of high sorcery.

      The Prince Exalted awarded the grave majesty of his regard to the mud-splashed courier, who sat dazed with exhaustion in his chair. As though that picked audience was intimately private, he bestowed the magnanimous accolade of his kindness. ‘For your care for your fellow Etarrans, please stay. Sit and sup in my place. Enjoy the best food and drink in good health, for in sad fact, my presence is wasted. The truth is a tragedy, as you see. Avenor begs for no guidance beyond the bare need to see its trade and its merchants feather their own nests, and I was not born, nor gifted with divine powers for the purpose of rich men’s protection.’

      A muted flash of his pearls underscored his gesture to summon his page to his side. Then the Prince of the Light stepped down from the dais. Without further ceremony, he swept from the hall, leaving Erdane’s delegate struck thoughtful, and Avenor’s state ministers gawping like fishes tossed onto shores of dry sand.

       Early Winter 5653

      Prime Enchantress

      At the private banquet in Avenor’s royal palace, two deferent servants sprang to open the doors for the Prince of the Light’s precipitous exit.

      Stunned silence reigned through the first, dizzy breath of disbelief. Then tumult resurged with a bang of wild noise that rocked echoes off the groined ceiling. On the high dais, seated in the royal chair, the road-muddied messenger who dispatched the bad news blinked over the abandoned spread of fine food. He watched Avenor’s state officers and trade ministers recover shocked wits and argue themselves into a fervent volte-face.

      Their claims of bare coffers only minutes before suffered a miraculous readjustment. New offers of gold to be pledged for the Light materialized from dim places. Like chain lightning, caches hidden in deeper pockets resurfaced in the spate of high feeling that rolled and rebounded through the room.

      Lord Eilish, Avenor’s Minister of the Royal Treasury, recovered grizzled eyebrows from the heights of his gray-fringed hairline. No fool, he clapped his hands to recall his scurrying secretaries. Then, shot to his feet, arms beckoning, he rousted pages and wine servers to clear aside platters of roast duck and strip the table near the door to bare boards. There, ensconced like a judge with a row of state witnesses and a brace of Prince Lysaer’s guardsmen, he dictated records and set under seal the promises that tumbled like charmed birds into his lap. He did not look up as Erdane’s delegate slipped out.

      But Gace Steward, who missed nothing, expected a fast courier would ride the north road before midnight. The impact of that evening’s masterful play of statecraft would make itself felt far and wide.

      Among the first to detect the fresh currents of change, an array of quartz spheres set in stands flashed to life in the stifling, close heat of a private chamber a hundred leagues distant from Avenor.

      There, Morriel Prime, Matriarch of the Koriani Order, sat her high chair in the sisterhouse at Capewell. Reduced by age and infirmity to a bundle of thin bones wrapped in a tissue of creased flesh, her robed form was propped upright in pillows. Wax candles burned like pale pillars at both elbows. A violet silk throw bordered with bullion ribbon mantled her lap. Her strengthless hands cupped another sphere of rock crystal, aligned by her trained circle of seeresses to fine-tuned spells of scrying.

      In momentous synchronicity, the image of Avenor’s disrupted state banquet danced to the sigils and seals their inveigling mastery had stitched through the stone’s aligned matrix. Morriel absorbed every nuance of the scene, intent as a cat poised over a glass bowl of goldfish.

      Her colorless lips pleated into vexed wrinkles, as, in distanced miniature, Lord Eilish arose and stretched, then closed and locked the boards of the ledger which kept his account of the Alliance treasury.

      ‘Clever man. Clever, clever man,’ she rasped on the tail of a stertorous exhale.

      Though her attendant page boys and servants knew not to respond to anything but her direct summons, the dewy, blond woman perched on the stool at her knee had yet to be curbed from such frivolous liberties. ‘Do you mean Prince Lysaer?’ Her fluttery gesture singled out another СКАЧАТЬ