by Damien Lake
The bear hauled the children around and dropped them to their feet, eliciting twin explosions from their landing. “And you’re damned lucky it didn’t! If you’d gotten the mix wrong, or put it on too thick, you could have blown somebody’s foot off, or,” he continued in a purple fury, clearly indicating which he considered the greater sin, “you could have damaged the floor!”
“If it had been on that thick,” the girl countered, “it never would have gone off.”
“That floor is worth more than both your lives! Do you have any idea how much black marble costs? It was imported all the way from Vyajion! And donated to the academy by the seventh king!”
To judge by their expressions, the knowledge did little to impress the children. “There’s nothing to do!” the girl said in defense. “Everyone’s gone out today.”
“Then I’ll give you something to do! Go get a water bucket and mop every bit of this off the marble! If it’s not gone within the mark, you’ll be in deeper trouble than you are already!” He reached into the plants to withdraw a steel bucket and cloth-strip mop. “As soon as Rellanda gets back tonight, she and I will be discussing this. And I’ll keep the rest of this in my office. Now get moving!”
The bear directed his full glare at the twins until, grumbling, they strode away amidst a cacophony of bangs. Only then did he face Dietrik. He took in the mercenary’s battle-ready posture and drawn weapon and asked, no less forcefully, “And what do you want?”
Dietrik abandoned his edge. After struggling to re-sheath his blade one-handed, he said, in an effort to be civil, “I came in hopes of finding Head Gereist.”
“You found him. What do you want?”
“I need your help with a matter,” Dietrik replied. He would have approached Gereist, but he hesitated to move. “A lady directed me to you.”
Gereist scowled, clearly irritated. Probably that was residual from the children and whatever they had done. “Come into my office, then.” The bear-like alchemy head returned to the door from whence he had emerged, noticing his exploding steps not a single whit more than the first time.
Dietrik gingerly took one step. Despite knowing what would come, his skin still flinched. He could feel the explosion’s shock through his boot. With so many steps taken in the last few minutes, the lobby reeked strongly of bitter smoke.
Gereist waited in his doorway. Impatience wafted from him. Dietrik ignored the bangs as best he could but achieving the nonchalance of Gereist was beyond him. He sighed with relief when he finally left the danger zone.
The alchemy head’s office was simple. A desk occupied one end, the rest of the room filled with shelves holding books by the hundreds. Gereist was obviously a scholar. Dietrik never would have guessed if he had seen the man on the street.
Head Gereist dropped the bucket and mop beside his desk. A quick glance inside told Dietrik that a small amount of liquid sloshed in the bottom.
“Well, what do you need help with?” Gereist asked as he dropped into his chair. Though the room held no windows, his head found light to glint in from the roaring fire and the desktop oil lamps.
“Ah, before I get to that, may I ask what exactly just happened out there?”
Annoyance replaced the dominant impatience. Still, he decided Dietrik had the right to know. “That idiot Perkin thought it would be amusing to play that trick on those brats. The man has no brains, most days! After that, they pestered him to show them how to make the toluene derivative until he gave in.”
“Tolu-what? I’m afraid I couldn’t follow that.”
A bear-like sigh escaped Gereist. “It’s not very difficult to make, which is why I should hang Perkin from the rooftop flagpole! You only need to take coal-tar and petroleum and derive enough toluene from the two. After that, you can mix it with few different acids into a liquid.” He gestured at the bucket. “Once it dries, it’s not very stable and explodes under mild pressure. A footstep is enough to set it off. If you slop it across a solid surface, then let it dry, the result is what you saw. As you can see, it’s easy enough to produce, but dangerous in the hands of such reckless children!”
None of it seemed simple at all to Dietrik, but he said, “And they have access to such…items?”
“They’re not supposed to! But they’ve lived in the academy their whole lives, and know secrets about the place I can’t so much as guess at. If Rellanda doesn’t take her kids into hand, then they’ll go too far one day. It’s bad enough the apprentices spend half their lives destroying the workrooms without those rats helping!”
The head scholar fumed, which Dietrik headed off by leaving the topic of the children behind. “My reasons for searching you out are, to say the least, pressing. A street gang tried to assassinate a visiting noble who came to the city for the tournament. One assassin was slain during the effort, and this was found on his clothing.”
Gereist, unimpressed with the tale, accepted the cloth Dietrik handed to him. “You with the guards, then?”
“Not the cityguard. I am employed to bodyguard the intended victim. This might or might not be part of a larger plan, or it might simply be a random case of persistent blighters. In the interests of safety, we’d like to know about whatever those flecks are.”
“Why bother me with it? You could have taken this to any good alchemy shop in the city.”
“I am not from the city. How would I know which shops were good, and which less savory? If the assassin had dealings with these shops, I would rather not wander into it unprepared after having killed their mate.”
“You wouldn’t want to wander into most of them, period. I can think of seven right off the top of my head that the academy refuses to deal with.”
“Is that so? Why might that be?”
Gereist snorted. “Alchemy shops sell to two types. Alchemists, which means at least a third of their business is conducted with the academy, and magicians. Magicians don’t grow on trees, but there’s enough of them around to keep a handful of shops in the uppers. We like chemicals, magicians like components. As alchemists, we don’t have much use for bird feathers and frog dung. Those magic types can use them, as well as most of the chemicals we need. Most shops stock a mix of the two, but a few focus on the magic component business.”
“And those are the seven?”
“No, well…some of them are. Magicians can do damned strange things, but they need damned strange things to do them. Several components are illegal under the king’s law, except there’s always those few willing to take a risk for gold. You don’t want to walk alone into a shop selling human tongues under the counter. Not unless you’re a fool or confident in your own strength.”
“These shops, do you suppose they are likely to have dealings with the dark guilds of the city?”
“I’m sure most do. Most are probably pipes for the black markets.”
Dietrik nodded. “This sounds like the right trail for me, then, whether I like it or not. I guess I need to find a chap who knows which shops are bad for my health.”
Gereist snorted again. “Didn’t I tell you the academy knows all the shops in the city? I can tell you which shops the guards keep a closer eye on.”
“That is very generous of you,” Dietrik replied, congratulating his cunning mind at the same time. As he had hoped, the scholarly side in this bruiser of a man had taken an interest in the situation.
Gereist spent a moment fingering the fabric, then drew it to his nose. With a thoughtful expression he told Dietrik, “Wait here.”
The man left, leaving the door cracked open. From outside, Dietrik heard him suddenly shout, “Did I say you could waste more of the academy’s stock? Give me that alcohol!”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” the boy’s voice cried back. “It takes forever to dissolve this stuff with plain water!”
“That’s your problem! Get back to work!”
Intermingled with all this were bangs as the head scholar crossed the lobby. Soon after, a fresh volley announced his return. He carrie
d a small glass bottle filled with white powder, revealed when he opened his massive hand to deposit it on the desktop. Gereist took a pinch and compared it to the fabric, and went so far as to taste small samples from both.
“I thought so,” he concluded. “Phosphorus.”
“Is that a chemical?”
“Yes. Phosphorus is used in any number of things, and unfortunately for you, I can’t think of a single shop which doesn’t carry it.”
“Hmm. I hoped it would be a bit rarer than that.”
“You’re out of luck, then. All the shops have a healthy supply. Even a few non-alchemy shops might carry it for various reasons.”
“Still, the shops with connections to the dark guilds strikes me as a promising lead. I’ll take that information back to my fellows and we can decide our next move.”
Gereist shrugged. It was all the same to him. “You came on the right day. The rest of the eightday I don’t have any spare time. I’ll make you a list.”
It took longer than Head Gereist originally anticipated, requiring he dig through papers he stored in a desk drawer, but within a quarter-mark, Dietrik departed with his list. When he left the lobby of the Alchemy Wing, he hugged the walls to avoid the floor’s center. He heard the twins gracing Gereist’s door with several unflattering comments while they scrubbed hard with mops. They did not sound in the least repentant. At the entrance he looked back in time to catch the boy wiping a booger onto the head’s doorknob.
Bloody little toerags, he mused as he wrestled the heavy door open. They would make good mercenaries.
* * * * *
Dietrik’s news was not welcomed with banners and fanfares when he returned to the Swan’s Down.
“Well that’s no help,” Marik growled. “There’s too many maybes and possibilities in this whole mess.”
“So we have to hunker down,” Kerwin stated. “We’ve gone as far as we can with the info we’ve got. Next roll of the dice is theirs.”
Marik hated that, and made it plain. In response, Landon asked, “Do you see any other options? No? Until we know further, even if we found the right shop, supposing they are operating out of an alchemy shop, we might never realize it. For the moment, the best plan is Kerwin’s. We still have seven days until the tournament begins.”
Before anyone could respond, Hilliard asserted his thoughts on the matter. “I object to this! I have training to attend to before the events, and I will not have my schedule dictated to me by terrorizing killers!”
The young noble stood, surrounded by a bubble of righteous steadfastness. Marik decided to burst it. “Yes, you better believe you will!” He stepped forward nose-to-nose with Hilliard, and the youth back-stepped hesitantly against his will. Ever since Marik’s revelation of mage talent, Hilliard never looked him fully in the eye. Hating himself as he did it, Marik used that uneasiness to bully the younger man. “You aren’t a baron yet. You have no duties or matters to attend to. You are free of obligation to your fellow peers. You have no reasons at all to draw you outside.”
“I need to prepare for the first event!”
“Riding.” Marik advanced another step. Hilliard shied away. “The only mount you have access to is stabled across the city. You couldn’t practice in the city anyway, and we are not entering and leaving Thoenar every day. The risk is too great. We have the final say in anything you do as long as we’re contracted to your father. Since that’s the case, we say we’re holing up in these rooms until we know what’s going on.”
Hilliard realized what he was doing and straightened, facing Marik with dignity. “It is a matter of principle,” he declared. “Once you give in to threat the first time, it is that much easier to give in to it the next. Galemar was not built by cowards kowtowing to brigands and thieves. It was built by men who stood up for justice and all that is right. To preserver, new men of strong will must continue to hold back those chaotic forces.”
“I won’t argue that,” Marik replied in a quieter tone. “But men aren’t born strong, Hilliard. They earn their strength over the years of their life. If you want to take a place among them, you have to stay alive through your own weaker years.”
Hilliard considered that. Whatever conclusions he reached, he tucked them under his belt. “I’m going to bed,” he announced. He left through the connecting door from Marik’s room, leaving the other four alone.
“That was interesting,” Kerwin chirped while Marik sagged into a chair. “We’d better see about nailing his window shut.”
“He won’t do that,” Dietrik countered. “Our young lad is the sort who will spend all his time working to convert us to his views, but would rather die than sneak around behind our backs.”
“I hope so,” Marik sighed. This turn in his relationship with the young noble since the attack dismayed him. “Why don’t you go find those guards Walsh reported to tomorrow, Landon? They might have new information.”
Landon agreed. With Dietrik’s list in hand, he added, “I’ll also ask them about this. Likely they can tell me which of these shops are closely connected to the dark guilds as well.”
Marik shrugged. Landon and Kerwin left.
Whatever Landon wanted to do, Marik would go along with. He knew what he was doing, which was a confidence Marik lacked. What he most felt like was a man groping in the dark, reaching out in a random direction he hoped might yield an object to his touch. For all he knew, they were running in the wrong direction entirely. That phosphorous stuck to the assassin’s breeches could as easily have come from one of the two magic services shops Marik had seen on Thoenar’s streets. Promising foretellings of the future or charms to bring good fortune, who could say if the magic users within also catered to darker needs. The easy bodyguard duty had turned into a hunt, with them the prey.
Edwin would be much better suited to turning a hunt around on the pursuers, or Sloan would know what to do next. Unfortunately, he had no idea where in Thoenar either were. Or, he thought, Colbey would be able to track these bastards down in moments, probably. Too bad he wasn’t the one Torrance assigned to this. I wonder how he’s doing?
He firmly told himself that he was not making a royal mess of this, but the conviction found no roots. Marik set into waiting for the next seven days to pass.
* * * * *
The town of Durrac was larger than the town where Colbey had encountered the merchant. Home to nearly four-thousand individuals, at least before the invasion, it had always been one of the larger settlements south of Kallied. Arriving in Durrac after nine days of intense travel, making quick time while running from patrols he failed to dodge, Colbey’s first act was to knock down a drunk.
He spied the man leaving a tavern after spending the early evening drinking his consciousness into temporary amnesia regarding his life. The man nearly walked in his sleep. With quick glances, the scout ascertained that no others watched. A light tap to the drunk’s temples finished the job his ale had begun. Colbey dragged the pungent wretch into an alley.
The first order of business was the drunk’s left hand. Quick examination revealed what Colbey had feared. Though two bars and five dots were present, they were arranged differently. He’d hoped the tattoo merely symbolized their subjugation. Apparently they also told which town an individual resided in. His writing implements quickly sketched the new design. Later, in privacy, he would alter his own forged mark.
The second order of business was the drunk’s coin pouch. Light in weight, it contained only a handful of coppers yet unconverted to drink. Disgusted, Colbey took the few Tullainian coins, leaving an equivalent amount in Galemaran copper. If the foreign currency would draw notice, then let this fool distract the invaders from Colbey’s presence.
Durrac served as a major operational base for the invaders. In the previous town, they were content to keep an eye on the residents while patrolling the surrounding lands. They used this larger town as a hub for military interactions between sectors. Whereas the bull-creatures had been absent from the street
s before, in this town they could be found. Them, and other interesting elements that promised new information.
An excellent place to begin his work.
He climbed to a roof overlooking the town’s central square. With a view of the buildings taken over by the invaders, Colbey slept lightly. His energy had been drained during the exhausting run from the Stoneseams. Despite that, he could ill-afford the luxury of deep sleep.
Morning arrived. Activity resumed. He began his study.
Soldiers entered and departed constantly from a wide building, large for Durrac at three stories. Colbey watched dozens of small patrols come to the front and wait outside while their leader entered. Within a quarter-mark the single individual would return to lead the patrol away.
No exiting soldier stream appeared. The men forming the invaders’ army must be barracked throughout the town. Over the morning Colbey began constructing their activity patterns. No bull-creatures came to the square. That meant the various elements in the invaders’ forces were bivouacked separately.
The uniform dress was different from the other soldiers Colbey had ever seen, at least in their specifics if not their generality. Greaves, as worn by the Nolier knights, were present on all. Two aspects made them different. First, they covered the entire lower leg, ending at the knee. Second, they seemed to have been constructed from overlapping steel scales, making it resemble a tiled roof. Also, though the greeves’ rim gripped the knee, the front extended up for several inches away from the thigh, forming a midair shield.
The arms were similar. Bracers covered both upper and lower arms. An extension jutting from the elbow would have formed a spike had it not been both flat and rounded. When the arm remained straight, the flat extension was flush with the upper arm, nearly vanishing. Only when the elbow bent did the extension separate.
Other peculiarities were present. Like every other army, swords were the predominant weapon for the common soldier. The odd bow was thrown in here and there, but that covered diversity.