Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Grace has apparently abandoned his council.’

      While she spoke, the torchlit depths of the quartz showed Avenor’s Prince Exalted mounting a handsome cream horse in the taciturn company of his Lord Commander.

      Morriel looked up. Her eyes sustained the drilled hardness of obsidian, opaque beside her younger colleague’s innocence. ‘He has left them, don’t you see? Let them know absolutely their money can’t buy his complaisant protection. Watch them. They’ll stew in his absence. They’ll sweat and pace themselves silly, then raise still more coin as a blandishment. Oh yes. Lysaer’s read their worth and their secret fears to an exquisite, fine point of accuracy. He’ll take his sweet time coming back. When he finally returns, his council and trade guilds will fall over themselves to welcome the policies they would once have argued past death to prevent.’

      The woman’s youthful features stayed blank, lips parted as she awaited the binding conclusion.

      ‘Lysaer will have to take Sulfin Evend’s council, now,’ Morriel mused, finger tapping the quartz, and her eggshell brow tucked with speculation. ‘He must hire talent to keep track of his enemies, if he’s not to find himself continually blindsided by the doings of Fellowship Sorcerers.’

      ‘How can you know this?’ the girl said, admiring.

      ‘Study the present,’ the Prime Matriarch instructed in dry malice. ‘The clues to unlock the future ever and always are written into the patterns of each moment.’

      The initiate furrowed her fresh brow and made a dutiful survey of the scenes logged and transmitted by the quartz spheres. Time passed, and the candles burned lower. Morriel Prime closed eyelids the webbed texture of dead leaves, her crabbed hands stilled upon the purple velvet in her lap.

      ‘Cast your net finer,’ she suggested, unprompted.

      The young woman started. ‘Yes, Matriarch.’ She deepened her survey, saw a ship with furled sails rock at chilly anchorage at Tideport. She watched torches weaving through the gusty night at the crowded settlement of Watercross, where the fallen from Caithwood were bundled like cordwood in the common rooms of the inns, or sheltered under the gust-slapped canvas of the field tents. She tracked the Prince of the Light, who hastened his column of guardsmen southward, then followed the galloping outriders who raced ahead to secure them a galley passage out of Riverton inlet. She traversed a chain of dockside taverns in Orlest, and tight knots of men at the trader’s wharf, where talk ran to raids and losses to the minions of darkness.

      ‘I see widespread fear of the Master of Shadow,’ she lisped in uncertain conclusion. ‘The moil seems unfounded. He’s far at sea, and surely no direct threat to the continent.’

      ‘At sea, yes.’ Morriel spoke with shut eyes. ‘Yet he has not withdrawn his presence or his interests. Look for connections. Cast your net finer still.’

      The girl fidgeted on her footstool, unable to find any relevance in the current view, of three trollops sharing gossip over hot chocolate in gilt cups, while a fourth one penned a letter in overdone script on the back of a secondhand parchment. Squint though she would, the initiate could make no sense of the contents. She raised a tentative hand and sketched a cipher for clarity, and watched the image shift from the prostitutes’ boudoir to the taproom of a seaside tavern, where a soap merchant with fat jowls and a marten collar lost a devastating hand of cards to the nerve-wound youngest son of the clanborn Duke of Alestron.

      ‘Nothing fits,’ she said, plaintive.

      Morriel scarcely stirred, patient as none before ever saw her. ‘The trouble with new servants is the tedious time teaching them who should and should not be admitted. Lirenda is here.’ Eyes still closed, the Prime added, ‘She will demonstrate the thread of reason your inexperience has overlooked.’

      The next instant, the latch clicked. The haughty, black-haired initiate swept in, a damp cloak on her arm, and her woolen skirts rimmed in the pale clay wicked up from the trodden-up yard of a countryside posthouse. She sank into obeisance, exuding the frost-keen scent of winter air. ‘I return from Araethura with word that the child, Fionn Areth, has been made our oathsworn servant.’

      Morriel’s pinched face tipped aslant in the candlelight. ‘How convenient for you.’ Her eyes opened, black glass flecked in spite and the false, warm reflections of flame. ‘Forgive me if I don’t reward you with credit until your vaunted plan brings a success.’

      Lirenda’s flare of rage was adroitly masked behind a façade of decorum. ‘How may I serve?’

      The Prime goaded, relentless. ‘Since you’ve come, you can show Selidie how to draw out the connecting thread for the Shadow Master’s interests on the continent. I hedge all my options these days. You’ll know that already, since you’ve assiduously applied all your training to sorting the rumors.’ A rim of worn teeth lent an edge to her smile as Morriel watched for the signs her baiting had chafed on a weakness.

      The former First Enchantress arose to full height, self-contained as a panther. She chose caution before argument. At the end of a difficult, cold-weather journey, this needling trap the Prime spun presented a mazework of pitfalls. Not least, the scrying would demand a calling rune set through the resonance of Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn’s true Name. The ignominy burned, since a near-fatal fascination with that same prince’s character had tripped her downfall from the Prime’s favor. Her meddling desire for personal revenge had upset the grand construct that had formerly failed to take the wretched man captive.

      Lirenda lidded her personal bitterness under a mask of humility. Morriel herself remained a cripple since that day, confined to the Capewell sisterhouse in the months that followed her collapse. Through her tedious convalescence, the most gifted of her healers yet failed to restore her lower limbs. While concern began to be fretted in whispers, that the Prime might never recover her lost strength and walk, Morriel herself was not sanguine. Burdened with the need for additional servants, and pinned between bedridden ennui, or the jostling discomfort of a sedan chair, her eggshell-frail bones and translucent flesh contained the irascible fury of a volcano denied any vent for eruption.

      Over that whelming maelstrom of infirmity, the frustration of balked will and spent hope, amid the perilous turn just taken by Tysan’s curse-driven politics, the Prime Matriarch still ruled her domain like honed diamond. Nor did she allow fraility to loosen her grasp upon current events.

      Lirenda knew better than to misjudge the request as a petty bid for vindication. She stepped forward and accepted the ice weight of the quartz from her Prime, set on notice by the play of cruel ironies that her character stood on trial yet again. She must perform this small office without flaw, or be judged inadequate to win back her lost rank as the Koriani prime successor.

      She dared not vent her towering rage, that her competency was being used to tutor the green candidate set up as her replacement. One deep breath, two; she reestablished her calm. Any work done in concert with quartz required absolute emotional control. Lirenda assessed the sphere held in hand, its directive the tuned key for the array of eight ranged in their stands about Morriel’s chair. One of the Prime’s unobtrusive servants brought her a claw-footed stool.

      She sat. Travel-stained clothing could not dim the innate poise of her breeding; she might as well have been offered a throne. The eyes she fixed on the young, blond initiate were antique amber, notched with pupils like primordial night. ‘One begins with the rune of relationship,’ she explained, her tone detached as struck bronze. ‘Such power draws the lane forces into alignment, that one quartz sphere will resonate with the next, letting a live current pass between them.’

      Her СКАЧАТЬ