Grand Conspiracy. Janny Wurts

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СКАЧАТЬ treasured, soft length of deerhide had been left behind as a thoughtless gesture; in the safety of dreams, she still savored the competent, steadying touch he had used to bundle her rain-sodden hair and tie the length into a plait.

      Each detail hurt now with unbearable force.

      Elaira gripped the round stone she used for a pestle, a futile effort to draw comfort from the river-smoothed grain of the granite. The crossroads she faced was unalterably plain. She could fail to arouse Lirenda at moonrise; for disobedience of a Koriani senior’s command, she would pay the ultimate penalty of losing all ties to conscious awareness. Forced enslavement would follow. The power of her free will would be called forfeit through the bonds of the initiate’s oath she had sworn into the matrix of the Skyron aquamarine. That option offered her peaceful surcease through the painless void of oblivion.

      The stone under her palms made her flesh ache with cold. Trapped in the knife-edged coils of irony, Elaira squeezed back angry tears. She could not live the lie. If she allowed her spirit free rein in defiance, that would be the easy way out. Her personal stake in the future might be absolved on a word of defiance, but Lirenda’s uncanny sharp interest had laid bare the fallacy behind simple refusal.

      Elaira set down the rock, reamed to the bone by the tireless drafts that sang through the chinks in her casement. She held no illusions. She was expendable. Her cooperative contribution became little more than expedience within the larger pattern of Koriani design. Should she yield up her identity, Morriel Prime would simply appoint her replacement. The Skyron crystal would retain a full record of her memories and experience. Given that borrowed template, another enchantress would study her perception of Arithon s’Ffalenn and replicate her personal insights of his character in her stead. Fionn Areth would come to suffer the same fate. The plot to arrange the Shadow Master’s capture would proceed, with or without her consent to become the tool to enact his betrayal.

      The jaws of the quandary bit insidious and deep. Elaira raged, helpless before the inexorable truth. She wanted to rise, scream and rant like a madwoman, then break anything within reach in a manic spree of vindication. There seemed no justice, that the greatest sacrifice under her power to make would spare no one and nothing but her own peace of mind.

      She could wish she had chosen the good sense to die before this sorry hour should visit her. That misery recalled another night in chill drizzle, when she had walked the beachhead at Narms in fear for Arithon’s safety. Then as now, she had railed against the order’s restraint with seething rebellion on her mind. Unbidden, she remembered the warning a Fellowship Sorcerer had delivered, while in darkness and rainfall, the earth turned in balance, and the tidewaters ebbed from the bay: ‘I was sent to you,’ Traithe had explained in gentle sympathy, ‘because an augury showed the Warden of Althain that, for good or ill, you’re the one spirit alive in this world who will come to know Arithon best. Should your Master of Shadow fail you, or you fail him, the outcome will call down disaster.’

      Tonight in Araethura, the burden of that scrying became as a spike through the heart.

      Elaira looked inward in brutal self-honesty and understood that her personal integrity amounted to nothing. The Koriani sisterhood’s supreme penalty for willful disobedience was no more and no less than a coward’s rejection of responsibility. Her love could heal no one in witless obscurity. Cornered by obligations of duty and emotion, she perceived that the conscious road led to a thorny and desperate gamble. No matter the cost, she might go forward and embrace the most tenuous hope: the odds on a hell-bent course toward disaster perhaps might be routed by Arithon’s sharp penchant for cleverness.

      Fionn Areth’s adult future might rest on that razor’s edge of possibility. She dared not entrust a replacement to act for her. Another initiate appointed in her stead might eclipse that slim chance for reprieve. Yet for Elaira to stand vigil to guard that small opening, she must first keep cold faith with her order. She must place both the child and the man in jeopardy to preserve her stake in the outcome. And if the s’Ffalenn gift of ingenuity did not prevail, she must in turn live out the appalling consequence.

      Held firm by her street waif’s obdurate tenacity, Elaira fixed her resolve.

      ‘I will trust you,’ she murmured to a prince whose own burden of adversities drove him unhearing leagues out to sea. ‘Before my own peace, I will not bow to failure. You must be the axis upon which Morriel’s wicked plot stands or falls.’

      Sucked hollow by a dread that threatened to break her, Elaira masked her face in chapped hands. For nearly an hour she listened against hope to the empty wail of the winds. No Sorcerer answered her silent appeal. The Fellowship had once given their promise that Arithon s’Ffalenn was qualified to withstand any dangers that might arise through her bound service to the Koriani Order. Yet their steady, wise counsel lay far beyond reach on this night. She must carry on alone and suffer the risk that their judgment at Narms still held true.

      Outside the casement, a spill of washed silver reflected the first rise of the moon. Elaira exhausted every filthy word she knew, then mastered her bitter distress. She put aside the insidious dread, that the Teir’s’Ffalenn might prevail; he might escape Morriel’s snare and stay free, and never understand or forgive the betrayal she now chose to enact out of faith.

      ‘Ath’s mercy on us both, if that happens,’ Elaira whispered.

      Worst of all, she feared for the agony she might inflict on a man whose strengths had been expended again and again in the desperate cause of necessity. Choked by hot tears that were useless to shed, she rummaged through her stores and boiled water to brew an infusion of valerian. Let her vindictive bustle of noise awaken the former First Senior.

      Lirenda stirred, raked back onyx hair, and blinked like a milk-fed lynx. ‘There could be compensation,’ she murmured as she measured the steel in the junior initiate’s smoldering composure. ‘When Arithon’s taken, you might ask to keep his shapechanged double for your servant.’

      Elaira said nothing, the response to such baiting beneath her utmost contempt.

      ‘Well, I might ask for him then. Such a tempting potential for amusement and irony! He could bleach my soiled linens and brush my suede shoes.’ Lirenda uncoiled from the cot in disaffected exasperation. Her feint had provoked no sign of insolence or challenge, disappointing proof that tonight the mouse was too wise to play for the stalking cat. ‘We’ll need an hour to set preliminary wards and ready a circle for grand scrying.’

      Elaira bowed her head and gave her, not words, but a curtsy that swept to the floor. There existed no half measures. Her irreplaceable integrity and the desperate plight of Fionn Areth’s future must rest in Arithon’s hand. Her vindication now stood or fell on the strength of the Shadow Master’s character, to defang the jaws of Koriani design and upset the Prime Matriarch’s plotting.

       Autumn 5653

      Sentinel

      As Lirenda had arranged by scheming design, on the one fated hour when the half-moon arose over the moors of Araethura, the Fellowship of Seven had no hand free to delve into her order’s machinations.

      Yet the boundaries the Sorcerers maintained to keep faith with the terms of their sworn compact were far from weakened or hamstrung. The wild lands under their charge remained free, and the ward rings they guarded held true. The Law of the Major Balance they lived by had never been breached or broken in two ages of recorded history.

      Too often, past and present, the foundation of that integrity remained steadfast at punishing cost. СКАЧАТЬ