Warrior (The Key to Magic)

by H. Jonas Rhynedahll

  While he saw a few of the Black Monks, a small number of other armsmen, and others that must be dock workers wandering amidst the carnage, there did not appear to be, as yet, any organized defense.

  Satisfied, he allowed time to resume its normal pace and descended to the cabin section deck near Truhsg. As if they had anticipated his intention, Scahll and Bear, both wearing the fugleman badges of their month-old promotions, were waiting with the legate. Each commanded one of the files of legionnaires that Mar had added to the regular compliment of Number One,

  "Truhsg, put half your crews on stand-by to provide cover fire if needed and have the rest prepare to sally with the half-section. I want you to test the mettle of the remaining defenders. Withdraw to Number One if you meet major resistance."

  The legate saluted and began calling out the names of ceannaires, directing quads to head below to fetch their weapons and armor.

  Returning to the bow, Mar ordered Ulor to move in toward the town. Even with the Shrikes gone, he did not have enough armsmen to seize and hold the port, but a probe backed up by Number One could reveal the numerical strength and morale of the garrison. That information would be of considerable use to Aerlon.

  Mar pointed out a relatively clear area on the southern quay to the marine officer. "Ground there and have the ramps put out. Hold position until Truhsg and his armsmen are back aboard."

  "Aye, my lord king."

  Mar took off again, flying ahead of the skyship. For just a moment, he smiled.

  Number One had been very much Telriy's ship and Eishtren, Truhsg, and the rest Telriy's crew.

  In the three months since Number One had returned from the Great Waste, he had made both skyship and crew his.

  But more than that, he had forged Number One and her crew into a terribly efficient weapon, a sword that he had used and would continue to use to harry and chasten his enemy.

  One day, he would plunge that sword through the very heart of the Brotherhood of Phaelle.

  TWO

  2170 by the Common Reckoning

  (3211 Before the Founding of the Empire)

  Oaurlervy Faction Investigative Section Headquarters

  Secured City of Dhiloeckmyur

  With the stars obscured by the city lights, the paired beacons of the Orbitals raced overhead in an unclouded black sky, their presence an insult of disorder that could not yet be eliminated.

  With long, firm strides that unabashedly declaimed his confidence in his place in the world, Compliance Officer Belter walked from the port circle across the broad, otherwise vacant sidewalk to the fortified entrance of the Investigative Section. For the fourth and final time, he checked the gig line of his uniform as he took the regulation precise salute of the guards. Outfitted in a manner expressly calculated to be flagrantly grandiose, the guards wore razor-creased ruby uniforms heaped with gold braid, pristine white gloves, broad-billed caps perched precisely on shaved scalps, and blindingly polished boots.

  As he passed each man, Beltr automatically examined the soldier's eyes for signs of fear, uncertainty, or concern, saw none, and offered a minute nod in approval. The guards were more or less ceremonial -- the magics of the entryway were its real defense -- but any deficiency on their part would have obligated him to administer immediate and effective punishment. No failures of any sort could be permitted here at the most important magical installation in all of the Faction Commonwealth.

  As a senior Compliance Officer, Beltr had the authority to inflict summary judgment for even minor infractions. As a superior sorcerer of the Elder Hierarchy, he had the ethereal power to incinerate a slacker so that nothing remained. Among the lower ranks, he had a deserved reputation as merciless.

  Beltr believed in absolutes. A demonstration of punishment that did not moderate behavior was useless. Consequently, the occasional total immolation was mandatory to maintain proper discipline.

  The great building towered above the street. A decorous monolith of synthetic stone, soaring buttresses, unmitigated grandeur, and blazing light, the headquarters of the Investigative Section had been designed to make a statement that none could ignore. Its massive size, shinny black granite facade, and sweeping, heroic architecture were the literal embodiment of the manifest destiny and unmatched achievements of the Oaurlervy Faction.

  Now that the final recalcitrants, those misdirected unfortunates of Kharae Holding, had been dealt with, the Faction had no serious rivals on this continent. It possessed unchallenged control of all of the rural and urban sectors of the highlands and eastern coastal areas. Within the year, Beltr expected that the remaining hold-outs, the incompetent and disorganized magicians of so-called Free Territories, which straggled unconnected along the fringe of the western coast, would as well make submission to the inevitable rule of the Commonwealth.

  Beltr marched through the open doors into the foyer, crossing warning lines painted on the floor that indicated the various protective wards in use, and felt a few light prickles on his skin as the spells determined whether he had permission to enter. Had they not, the insignificant dust of his vaporized corpse would have drifted practically unnoticed to the floor.

  In the cavernous lobby beyond, a second, smaller set of guards, all like him yellow-uniformed Compliance Officers and thus also combat specialized sorcerers, frisked him, closely inspected the items in his pockets -- an identity card and a touchstone -- and used various magical and mundane methods to manually verify his identity.

  The Investigative Section was also the most secure facility in all of the Oaurlervy Faction Commonwealth; not even the members of the Directorate Committee could gain entry without a thorough pat down.

  All of the Section's essential functions being deep underground, he took the smaller descending lift. The upper thirty floors of the building were occupied by confinement cells, interrogation chambers, clerical offices, and the associated supplementary departments. Even were the League or the Republic to target and destroy the building and the entire city around it, the Investigative Section would survive, ten stories beneath the surface inside multiple layers of interlocked defensive wards.

  Or, at least, that was the theory. As far as Beltr was concerned, there was no magic defense for which some nullifying counter could not be devised. The continued escalation in magical means of destruction had reached a point where he privately believed that the capability to completely annihilate every being on the planet was soon to be an incontrovertible fact.

  This, naturally, was only an academic observation. The overriding purpose of his life was to ensure compliance with the Internal Magical Restrictions of the Directorate Committee. The IMR regulations were necessary to maintain appropriate civil order, insure the safety and security of the productive citizenry, and to prevent the extravagant and dangerous excesses of the unrestrained use of magic that were rampant in other political entities. Unregulated magic was the antithesis of proper order. Only with rigid, complete control of all magic could the compliant inhabitant of the Commonwealth be assured that he could productively pursue the goals of the Oaurlervy Faction.

  As he stepped out of the lift into the blindingly-lit lobby of the eleventh level and started across the white marble floor, passing the heroic statues of Compliance Officers who had given their lives in service to the Commonwealth, he again felt the slightly uncomfortable sensation of a ward scan. This spell did not, however, simply confirm his identity; it also analyzed his emotional and mental state, seeking any indication of vulnerability, disobedience, or treasonous intent. As he continued toward the check-in desk, a second and then a third scan irritated his magical sense without generating any noticeable physical response. These two more subtle ethereal investigations would evaluate his magical abilities and note flux residues of any sort. Had he recently engaged in any unauthorized magical activity, which a reading outside of established parameters would have indicated, he would have been subject to immediate arrest and interrogation.

  Without comment, the officer at the d
esk wrote his name in a paper log book. Given that all means of magical data storage could be easily suborned, the Investigative Section maintained all of its records in physical form.

  Beltr continued into the corridor that led to his duty station, the monitoring center for the peripheral provinces. At the blast door entrance, a final set of guards -- again entirely decorative -- braced to attention as he passed through.

  As always, Beltr had arrived at the exact time required to begin his shift. The previous shift commander, Dreal, was, as per standing procedure, waiting to be relieved just inside the high-ceilinged chamber. The center was one very large room, segregated by tall, glassite partitions into dozens of small cubicles. Most of these were occupied by technicians, the skryers and other magical specialists who performed the routine and constant oversight of the target provinces and their inhabitants.

  Beltr stopped and saluted in the prescribed official manner.

  "Compliance Officer Dreal," he stated in strict observance of regulations, "I relieve you."

  Dreal returned the salute, his blotchy face expressionless. "Compliance Officer Beltr, you now have command."

  Dreal immediately exited. Another more gregarious officer might have taken the time to inform his replacement of any current significant investigations, but Dreal was a droll and non-social person. Beltr did not personally care for the other officer, but Dreal was laudably competent in his duties and possessed the second highest violator detection rate after Beltr himself.

  While he marched along narrow aisles to his own cubicle, Beltr took note of the increased rate of agitation in what he thought of as the glass bee hive, with the technicians often clumped in consulting groups and assistants running notes back and forth. All of the modulation analyzers were in use, a somewhat infrequent event.

  He had hardly settled into his chair before his assistant, Szck, a senior rhingyll, hurried into his office. Though skilled and thorough, Szck had the sort of face that exposed his every thought and emotion. Now, his expression was deeply troubled.

  "Sir, we have detected reverberations in the ether that appear to be unauthorized wizardry."

  Szck had another feature that would betray his emotional state: he had eyes of different colors, one hazel and one light blue. When he came under more than moderate stress, both, as they were doing now, tended to twitch in a disconcerting manner.

  Beltr sucked in a sharp breath. "Has this been authenticated?"

  The rhingyll nodded with a nervous jerk of his head. "Yes, sir. We have confirmation from the Section stations in Ghaemeh and Pbgleond and from two mobile units."

  Beltr got to his feet, trying not to appear to hurry, and walked around the desk. "Do we have a location?"

  "We're working on it, sir. The disturbance was quite strong, but the afterimage is migratory. I've ordered more mobile units into the area and we should be able to triangulate the original exit point within a quarter of an hour."

  "Get me two apprehension teams and a support squad," Beltr ordered. "I'll take personal charge of the apprehension."

  After Szck hurried away, Beltr removed his field gear from his top desk drawer. With long accustomed movements, he snapped the comm and port bracelets on his wrists, clipped a portable skrying stone to his belt, and dropped his polished black cudgel into its holster. Most Compliance Officers used disabling or immobilizing spells to attempt to restrain malefactors, but he had always preferred the visceral certainty of a sharp blow to the back of the head. It had taken him some time to perfect the technique, but at this point he could knock a suspect unconscious with but a single blow at least ninety-nine percent of the time. That was not to say that the other one percent eluded capture, but rather that their subsequent condition forestalled interrogation. Most of his failures suffered brain injury, which was quite often a rapid fatal hemorrhage, but such a low breakage rate was safely within the guidelines mandated by his superiors.

  After a moment's thought, he spoke the code phrase to unlock the lower drawer and removed the gold-trimmed dark wood case that it contained. Placing his left palm on the top of this, aligning his fingers precisely with the spectral points on the carven peacock design, he said, "Ancestors, I live to serve."

  This simple but ancient and powerful spell released the lid and he removed it with care. Here he paused as he extended his hand to the interior, but he forged immediately through the instinctive hesitation and extracted the large silver and ruby pendant that nestled in the purple velour lined cavity. A centuries' old legacy of his maternal line, the pendant had once belonged to the queen of a long vanished kingdom and was imbued with a plethora of unique, proactive defensive and protective spells. Such ancient magics were deemed subversive contraband by the Faction and he had been permitted to continue in its possession solely due to his position in the Investigative Section. On the first day of each quarter, regulations required him to resubmit a lengthy application for a temporary dispensation. If he removed it from its authorized and remotely monitored container, he was obligated to submit twelve different forms to eight different senior Compliance Officers and to subsequently appear in front of a review board to provide a detailed justification. Should the review board ever determine that his use of the pendant had been inappropriate, his career as a Compliance Officer would be over.

  But if there was a wizard on the loose, he would almost certainly need it today.

  The first step that the Faction had taken when it began to expand its control of the continent had been to arrest and execute the only two practicing wizards known to reside in the subjugated dominions. Their laboratories, personal possessions, records, and apparatus had all been seized and in most cases subsequently destroyed.

  Wizardry was the most powerful magic known, capable of disturbing past, present, and future. While theory postulated that there was a considerable inertia to collective human action that even a master of time and space could not overcome, a wizard with sufficient ability that intervened in the right place at the right time could literally rewrite events, changing the established course of history.

  Given the famously disorderly inclinations and meddling proclivities of the discipline, it was an accepted Faction doctrine that an unrestrained wizard would be inclined to attempt to undo all that the followers of Oaurlervy had accomplished. This, of course, could not be permitted.

  If some new practitioner had developed wizardry spells, then that individual was a supreme danger to the proper order and his or her capture and eventual elimination was obligatory.

  Beltr exited his cubicle and wound his way through the maze to what he considered the top end of the glass bee hive, the correlation hub of the grouped desks of the senior technicians.

  Rhingyll Szck was there along with all the heads of the various technical units. The senior technicians were mutely intent upon their instruments, but Szck and the other supervising rhingylls were standing in a tight clump, receiving paper reports and directing the vast magical detective machinery of the Investigative Section as it sought to pinpoint the location of the offender.

  "The teams are standing by, sir, ready to port at your order," Szck reported as soon as Beltr arrived. "We've pinpointed the individual that shows the wizardry trace and narrowed his or her location to a rural area at the southern end of the province. In five minutes or less, we'll have the exact spot to within a hundred paces."

  "You can't lock an identity?"

  "No, sir. The ether surrounding the individual is extremely convoluted, possibly a side effect of the wizardry. None of the standard descriptive markers are clear enough to extrapolate."

  "Could that be some sort of intentional masking?"

  "We have technicians investigating that possibility, sir."

  "Who are my team leaders?"

  "Enforcement Officers Dlygm and Nhilsi, sir. Rhingyll Zhaevyr commands the support squad."

  "Excellent."

  Beltr had worked with both officers on several previous occasions. Dlygm was a staunch, long-time Fac
tion member and Nhilsi was young and eager. Both were supremely competent, ruthless, and obedient.

  One of the technicians waved at Szck. The rhingyll went over to receive a note from the woman and then hurried back to Beltr. He immediately read off a string of numbers to the Compliance Officer.

  "Those are standard map coordinates?"

  "Yes, sir. It looks to be a hundred paces due north of the village of Bournegyll."

  "Order both teams and the squad to meet me at the center of Bournegyll. The perpetrator will likely try to go to ground in the village. We'll set up a cordon and put him in custody in very short order."

  "Yes, sir."

  Beltr tapped his port bracelet, experienced an instant of vertigo, and then stood in the darkened main square surrounded by older, mostly stone and brick buildings. Like many of the rural population centers, Bournegyll did not have street lights. That would soon change under the enlightened leadership of the Faction, but for now, Beltr would have to make do with starlight and his own light enhancing spells.

  He made a subtle arcane gesture with his left hand and to his eyes the scene became one of shadowed, pinkish outlines no worse for seeing than twilight.

  The thirty soldiers of the apprehension teams ported in almost simultaneously, their oversize, hulking armored forms suddenly filling the square.

  His reinforced boots mutely clanking on the cobblestone pavement and his servos whispering, Dlygm, who was senior, approached and saluted. "We have a lock on the perpetrator's signature, sir. Shall we apprehend?"

  "Yes, have your men move out, but emphasize that the perpetrator must wind up physically able to respond to questioning. We need to make certain that this contagion is isolated and fully contained."

  "Yes, sir."

  Dlygm snapped a curt order into his throat comm and the soldiers of the two teams vanished in pairs, dispatched to their pre-assigned locations to encircle their target.

  Beltr remained where he was. Standard procedure required that he stand by in a supervisory posture, monitoring the comm phases, and only intervene if the assistance of his sorcery proved necessary.