by Garon Whited
“No. I’m absolutely fine right here,” she said. “But I thank you for the offer,” she added.
“Somehow, I didn’t think you’d want to move. But you’re welcome.”
“What do you intend to do now?”
“Fix Bob as quickly as is elvishly possible. Pay a call on the princes of Tolcaren, Formia, and whatever that other place was called. Depending on how that goes, I may also have to talk to the sea-people and see if my technique for punishing one or more of those cities is going to cause them problems.”
“Sea-people?”
“The merfolk. The fish-bodied people that live in the ocean?”
“I thought they didn’t come near the shore?”
“They don’t, as far as I know. They generally live in the deeps. But I need to make sure.”
I could see her thinking-frown. She couldn’t see how that had anything to do with punishing a city or three.
“All right,” she agreed. “Now, on the subject of that civic center. I’ve talked to everyone in the area you wanted; there are a lot of empty places, so moving the ones who are still there wasn’t hard. Anytime you want, you can start on it.”
“That’s quick,” I said, nodding. “Okay. Get the stonemasons and quarrymen to bring in loads of rock. Just have them pile it in heaps along the edges of the area. I’ll take care of it from there. And hire some people to tear down anything in the area that isn’t made of stone.”
“Certainly. Anything else?”
“Yes. How’s Tianna?”
“She’s fine,” Amber said, smiling. “She wants to know when you’ll be by again.”
“Soon. And I may bring Bob, just so you know.”
“Oh?” Amber asked, eyes narrowing. “Why?”
“Because he needs to know who you are and recognize you. He’s a vassal, not a member of the Royal Family. And he needs to know that if he allows anything under his control to upset either of you, I will be three times as upset with him.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “That makes sense.”
“It does? I must be getting better at this.”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Dad.”
“If I do, you’ll let me know, Daughter.”
“See you soon?”
“Of course.”
We signed off; I turned the mirror back over to the wizard on watch, and went to breakfast.
“So, we’re expecting refugees from Vathula, as well as some unknown number of gata?” T’yl asked.
“Yep,” I told him. “I already sent a couple of guys with a canal boat to meet the mercenaries escorting them.”
“Are we keeping the mercenaries, too?” Kelvin asked.
“Only the ones who want to quit the mercenary business. Anyone else we’ll pay off and send on their way.”
“Do you intend to make any of them knights?”
“No. I suppose it’s possible a few of them may eventually prove themselves worthy.” I shrugged. “I don’t have a magical hammer for them to lift as a test. Really, I had more in mind just gaining them as soldiers. If they want to join the City Guard on their way to being part of the military, I’m all for it.”
“They can’t be trusted,” Rendal said, flatly. “Men who will kill for gold are not men who value loyalty.”
“In principle, I agree. However, I think that a year of service in the City Guard will weed out anybody who doesn’t measure up to our standards. Under your keen and watchful eye, Rendal, I have no doubt they’ll reveal their true colors.”
He bowed his head in acknowledgement of the compliment and the order.
After breakfast, I helped sort out some power problems with a waterwheel-powered sawmill, marked off the areas where new undercity gates were forming, and heard a complaint from what I can only call a groundskeeper. He was lying down with a bandage on his arm.
“So, you’re tending the gardens of the upper slopes, is that it?” I asked.
“Aye, Majesty, me and half a dozen more. Lady Tort put us on it, as its growin’ wild, Majesty.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Got a lot of thashrak nests up there, Majesty.” He tapped the bandage around his arm. “Got bit, see?”
Thashrak are small, reptilian, and venomous. They resemble snakes with leathery wings and can grow to be up to eighteen inches long. Their mouths have lots of teeth, however, in addition to a pair of fangs. They normally feed on fruits and berries, sucking the juices out of them, or on small animals, usually rodents. Generally, they avoid larger animals and people. The bite of a thashrak is poisonous, but it isn’t usually fatal to something the size of a man. It usually causes temporary paralysis and sometimes causes permanent blindness. They prefer high places, like mountains.
They aren’t usually a problem in the Eastrange; their normal habitat is farther south, across the Circle Sea. However, the mountain’s heat keeps the upper slopes warmer than one might expect, especially near the exhaust vents, and the vegetation is almost exclusively fruit trees and berry bushes. An ideal habitat, really.
“Did you do anything to antagonize it?” I asked.
“Not so’s I noticed, Majesty. I was just trimmin’ stuff to make pathways clear.”
“Okay. You rest. I’ll see what needs to be done.”
“As you say, Majesty.”
So I trudged up the inner wall of the courtyard, wandered around for a bit, and finally found a thashrak nest by the southeastern chimney stack. I approached it carefully. They lay eggs, so the mother reared up, flapped her wings, and hissed at me.
I’ve used translation spells before. Some of them work by simply trading vocabulary; others are more idea-based. I went for the second type, hoping to find enough brains in the reptile skull to reason with it.
“Hello.”
Go away.
Not in so many words, of course, but the meaning was pretty clear. Surprisingly so. The things might be more intelligent than a typical lizard. I backed off a step.
“Is that better?”
Better. But go away.
“Look, I just want to talk to you. I’m not going to hurt you or your eggs.”
I don’t believe you.
“All right,” I said. “You don’t have to believe me. I just want you to not hurt any people.”
Stay away, it—she—advised.
“Okay. I’ll make you a deal.”
Deal?
“I give you, you give me.”
Stay away.
“I will. We all will. But you have to warn us away, like now. If you hide your nest, we don’t know we’re too close.”
She drew her wings in a bit, her head wobbling from side to side. This was something new to her experience, obviously, and she was having trouble processing it.
Rear up? Hiss? Flap?
“Exactly. That’s how you warn us. Do that and we’ll leave your nest alone. We’ll go around it, maybe near it, but we won’t touch it.”
I defend the nest.
“I get that. But we don’t want your nest. We don’t care.”
No?
“Not at all.”
This seemed to confuse her.
“You just think about it. Give it a try. You’ll see that you can ignore us; we’re safe.”
Defend the nest.
“Fine, fine.”
I went back down, muttering about one-track minds. The gardeners weren’t too happy about the infestation, as they thought of it, but I told them to leave the things alone. We’ll try being neighborly, first. If we can have a couple of generations of the things thinking that we’re not a problem, we should be fine. If not, I’ll have to treat them like vermin and exterminate them.
It would be nice if we could work out a deal. There are going to be other vermin in the mountain, someday—I don’t like rats and mice; they get into things. If we can teach the local lizards to handle that for us, I’ll get behind the idea.
That afternoon, I finished my preliminary work on the Crystal of the Warrior Sp
irit. He was a smallish-looking fellow with broad shoulders, a chiseled jaw, and a bald head. He wore black umanori pants and an expression of utter serenity. The thighs of the umanori had the impaled dragon of my banner on them, which I had not envisioned. This raised questions about my personality fragment I was unable to answer.
There was a fight to get him out of the basement without letting a lot of unpleasantness out with him. Fortunately, fighting is something he’s very good at; he held the head of the stairs while I jumped up and down on the trapdoor to close it.
The remains of subconscious Things sank through the floor and vanished, leaving behind only stains.
I don’t like that basement. It may have been a mistake.
Eventually, I’ll get around to having a training session with my combat aspect, possibly bringing along some other people, just to see how it goes. For now, though, busy, busy, busy.
Bob woke up while I was inside the crystal. I set it aside and went to see him. He was eating again—well, being fed—which was a very good sign. He already looked a little heavier and his color was excellent.
“Good afternoon,” I offered. He started to get out of bed to kneel; I pushed him back. “Stay. You need to recover your strength and grow new hands. Do nothing to exert yourself that doesn’t involve either of those.”
“Yes, Na’irethed zarad’na,” he agreed. The lady feeding him glanced at me. I shrugged.
The phrase he used started with na’irethed, which meant, roughly, “master of the darkness.” It was more complicated than that, since irethed was, more literally, “without light.” Maybe a better translation would be “Lord of the shadows.” They have another word for darkness, vahaa, which is treated as an object or substance, rather than just a lack of illumination. Zarad’na, on the other hand, had the na as a suffix, making it a possessive form of zarad, or, literally, “owner,” in the sense that someone who has mastered a skill can “own” it. So the whole thing was, roughly, “Master of the Lords of Shadow.”
I hate translating. It never comes across quite right.
“So,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed, “I understand things didn’t go so well for you when I woke up.”
“When Keria the Usurper discovered you were abroad again, she confined me immediately, knowing that my loyalty is entirely yours, Dread Lord.”
“Tell me everything you know about Keria’s takeover and her involvement with Byrne.”
And he did.
Keria’s mortal life ended sometime before she came to Vathula. This annoyed her greatly, since she was once a magician. Her conclusion was that you need to be at least partly mortal to be a magic-worker. That fact was not something I mentioned to her during the creation process; it seemed to offend her that she wasn’t given full information.
If I’d known, I’d have told her. I didn’t see why she was so upset; she wanted to be immortal and she got it.
Still, it annoyed her enough that she quietly found a few magicians who were interested in researching the potential for immortality. The power of her oath prevented her from just making them into nightlords, but it didn’t say anything about examining her blood. In return, the magicians she found were willing to help her, sort of being on her staff, as she worked with Bob to nail down the Empire of the Eastrange.
As for Byrne, it wasn’t even noticed until after Rethven went to pieces. Twenty years or so later, the new Prince of Byrne sent messengers to Vathula and they were eaten. He sent more, and the process repeated itself until Keria—apparently a rather short-tempered ruler—finally decided to hear what they wanted.
Short-tempered, maybe, but not stupid. Byrne was now just a city-state, but it had extensive farmlands due to the various streams and other runoff from the Eastrange. With lots of land and lots of water, it could grow more food than it knew what to do with. The initial deal was to trade food for copper, tin, and some other metals; Byrne wasn’t known for its metals industry.
Naturally, Bob made it a point to look into their new trading partner’s affairs. Byrne seemed mostly willing to viciously defend its borders and be left alone. After several years, however, it became apparent—at least, to Bob and his spies—that Byrne was building up its military. It was a slow process that spanned three generations. The Prince accepted sons into his army in lieu of taxes, for example. Soldiers’ sons were automatically enrolled in the army, daughters married other soldiers. The care and farming of the Prince’s personal lands was gradually taken over by soldiers, to feed themselves.
Meanwhile, all the excess food was shipped to Vathula, trading it for more metal.
Within the last six years or so, Byrne finally decided that it had enough metal. It stopped trading for metal and just accepted cash. With that money, it hired quite a few wizards and went cheerfully to war.
The new weapons, big, bronze rams of some sort, were obviously magical. The wizards were in charge of the men who moved and pointed the rams. The rams themselves, when activated, hurled dozens of marble-sized metal balls, or single balls of iron larger than doubled fists. The first mowed down men and horses, no matter how thick their armor, and the second destroyed walls and gates.
(While Bob talked, I wondered if these “bronze rams”—let’s go ahead and call them “cannons”—were using gunpowder, or if someone had come up with a spell, or a new application for an old spell to duplicate the propellant effect. Offhand, I could think of at least four ways a wizard might produce a gunpowder-like effect in a heavy, bronze tube. The fact they also had a wizard captaining every gun crew lent weight to the idea.)
Byrne rolled outward from its territory and conquered every principality with which it shared a border. After a year of that, it did it again, vastly expanding its territory. Now, after nearly a year of consolidating its gains, he expected it to expand again.
“And how does this relate to Vathula?” I asked. “Good stuff about Byrne, and I thank you for it, but…?”
“In that regard, I am not entirely certain,” Bob admitted. “There were a number of private meetings between Keria and the Prince’s chief advisor. I cannot say what went on, nor what bargains were struck. I can tell you that, after the very first meeting, she was much more agreeable to every proposal of the Prince. I felt that, somehow, she had become some sort of vassal to Byrne, for her willingness to heed their requests transcended Prince after Prince.” He frowned, thinking.
“More than once, I asked her magicians about her state of mind. They assured me that, for a quasi-demonic entity, she seemed relatively normal. I cannot say if they spoke the truth, for I cannot look beyond the flesh and see the spirit that moves a person, but I had my doubts. I would have asked the Dragonsword, but it was on the northern frontier, helping with the expansion of the Empire.”
“And when did this start?” I asked.
“The meetings between Keria and Byrne? The first meeting was… sixty-two? Perhaps sixty-three, or sixty-four years ago. I began to doubt her within a year, Dread Lord, but she was the only Lady of Night available, and she chose to claim the throne based on her descent from you.” He shrugged. “What was I to do?”
“I think you did well,” I told him. “So, she was acting suspiciously by knuckling under to Byrne’s princes. Anything else?”
“Perhaps. She also seemed,” he hesitated, then added, “brutal.”
I felt my eyebrows climb. Such a description from a creature that regarded other life forms as a temporary annoyance was chilling.
“She acted as though she hated everyone and everything,” he continued. “Her casual use of torture—no, let me say that another way. Her delight in torture, and the gleeful way she played with her victims… it did more, I think, to foment rebellion than anything else. And, of course, when word of some rebellion reached the capitol, her delight at sending her forces to collect new playthings was… concerning. Perhaps even dismaying.”
“I think I see.”
“I am sure you do, Dread Lord.”
“All right.
So, Keria and Byrne have some sort of relationship, but we don’t know exactly what. What can you tell me about her magicians?”
“There were three. I believe she knew them from her mortal days. They sought to extend their lives, of course; Keria provided them with prisoners upon whom they could inflict their ancient years. She also allowed them to study her, on occasion. In return, they used their skills and powers to serve her interests.”
“Makes sense, from her perspective.”
“Indeed, Dread Lord. The magicians were Hagus, Tyrecan, and Rakal. Hagus was an expert in sending dreams and spying on them. Tyrecan’s main purpose was to scry upon things other than in the realms of dreams. Rakal was the one who conjured demons for her, with occasional assistance from the other two.” He smiled. “I understand that Hagus had his soul ripped from his body during one sojourn into the realm of dreams, and that Tyrecan died in a blast of fire while spying on someone who did not care for it.”
“You understand correctly.”
“As for Rakal,” he continued, “he was what I considered the leader of the magicians, insofar as magicians can be led. They listened to him, as did Keria. I wondered, on occasion, if Rakal had some sort of hold over Keria. I presume she needed all three of them, but perhaps Rakal held some special significance for her from her mortal days?”
“I don’t know. If I ever met him, it was briefly, while I was inside a containment circle. It wasn’t really a social occasion. And, if I ever meet him again, I don’t anticipate being very social then, either.”
“I understand, Dread Lord, and look forward to your meeting with pleasure.”
“Now, let me get some string; I need to measure you for some new hands.”
Bob glanced at his freshly-bandaged wrists. I could clearly see from his expression that he wanted to ask “You can do that?” but all he said was, “Thank you, Dread Lord.”
Sunset. I stood in a waterfall and waited it out. As I was dressing, Tort came in with a belt and baldric, as well as a heavy leather sheath, complete with sword.
Hi, Boss!