by Dave Dickie
Grim beckoned her over to one of the dust-covered lumps that she could now easily see were bodies, or what remained of them. Grim had already brushed away some of the debris that had clearly accumulated over a long period of time, and Daesal recognized the shreds of cloth and armor as Lanotalis Empire military uniforms. They had still been in use in Tawhiem and Pranan when the two halves of the empire were squabbling over who would take the throne five centuries earlier, Tawhiem in a two-front war with Pranan and the trolls. But she frowned. There was something subtly wrong with them. The metal looked pitted, and the scraps of cloth looked burned. Grim beckoned her on again and stopped at a much larger lump, one with leather armor studded with metal that would fit a giant. A troll, or the remains of one. The scraps of leather and armor had the same pitting and scorch marks as the human amor, but not as deep. Daesal looked back. Whatever had caused the metal to corrode had been more prevalent at the base of the cliff.
“The troll armor looks like it’s passed the time better than the human armor,” noted Grim. “I thought they barely knew how to rub sticks together to make fire.”
Daesal turned back to him and frowned. “These days, true. Back before the fall, there were the great trolls. The brutes that inhabit Kom today are not indicative of the skill of their masters.”
Grim grunted. “Huh. Great trolls. I thought that was just a myth.”
Daesal shook her head. “No, they were real. Small in numbers, and isolationists. But they were part of the Gathering of Friends, the yearly meeting between human, elf, and troll when the empire was in its ascendancy, when the three races were working together.” She looked around sadly. “It did not end that way.”
The battle had been centered around the cliff face near the bottom. She moved back to the cliff. Close up, she could see there were pinions and tackle she had missed on the way down, now corroded to uselessness. Their placement seemed haphazard and the pinions were too far apart for it to have been safe. They were stuck in natural crevices in the rock. Daesal thought it was opportunistic placement, sticking a pinion in where they could do it without much hammering. They were spread enough far enough apart along the base of the cliff that there must have been more than one climber; perhaps half a dozen. She glanced up. Only one line of pinions reached all the way to the top of the cliff. Around her there were decaying leather straps that looked like a harness for something large. Something the human climbers intended to haul up the cliff, perhaps.
On the ground were three metal disks, a foot or two wide, with jagged edges pointing up like spikes at the edges. The bottom of small barrels, perhaps. But what then had happened to the top of the barrels? She looked around more carefully. Shards of melted, pitted metal spread out in a radius from the spot, looking nothing like armor or weapons. She nodded to herself. These were containers, and what they had contained had been released catastrophically, almost undoubtedly killing everyone nearby. And the pitting… something corrosive, perhaps. Perhaps a method of mutual annihilation for humans that were losing a pitched battle to trolls in this confined space.
One human skeleton off to the side caught her eye, one right at the base of the cliff. She walked over and kneeled down next to it. The bones were broken in many places, but there was no sign of damage from a weapon. One of the climbers had fallen to his death here. She couldn’t smell anything that helped her understand this scene. She didn’t bother to taste anything. Whatever traces her keen senses could have picked up must have been washed away by the constant rain of water from the waterfall after all this time.
Grimalkin and the Ibisi had been sifting through the debris while she examined the wall. As they approached, she asked, “Did you find anything?”
Grimalkin said slowly, “We did find a coin.”
With a flourish, Grimalkin drew a small, tarnished gold coin from a hidden pocket and showed it to her. Daesal took it from Grim and said, “An old empire coin. They were supposed to be almost pure gold.” The coin might have been protected by whatever pocket it had been in. She licked it. Grim and Nyjha glanced at each other but remained quiet.
Daesal was disappointed. Nothing except the taste of gold, and not even pure gold at that. She supposed it was too much to ask that a telltale remnant of blood or sweat remained on the coin after so many years. She sighed and flipped the coin back into the thief’s still-outstretched hand. “It is indeed gold,” she said.
“And you know that how?” the thief called after her. But she was thinking about other things, like what had happened here five centuries earlier.
Interlude – Kethem, current date
Teinhaj Kaysareeth was in a dour mood. He was bucking for a promotion and that meant you needed two things: know the right people and don’t pet the mudrake, don’t foul something up. He was working rather successfully on the first part and had thus far been either lucky or talented… he went back and forth sometimes on which… for the second. That was, until now. In twenty years of service, he’d never had anything turn on him like this. His latest op was so far south of the border he was expecting glacier sightings. And it was all because of the two people--using the term ‘people’ a bit loosely--in front of him.
He leaned back in his rather utilitarian wooden chair and threw his feet up on his equally utilitarian desk with his hands crossed behind the back of his balding head, looking relaxed, something that told anyone that knew him that he was angry and trying to keep his temper under control. The coat of arms with crossed oar and spyglass was framed behind him, a subtle reminder of the organization they worked for. Kethem Naval Intelligence, or KNI, was the newest branch of Kethem’s military. While it had started as a branch of the Kethem Navy, it was independent now, independent and, in many ways, more powerful than the service that had spawned it. From its early days as an organization dedicated to using precog and detection spells to assist in naval battles, it had changed over time to be a central point for gathering, synthesizing, and reporting on any activity that might affect the security of Kethem. While the director theoretically reported into Kethem’s Naval Strategic Command, they were appointed by the HIgh Council, and much of the information that flowed from the KNI to the High Council was classified at a level that the heads of the Kethem Navy did not have access too.
Delia and Corel were on the other side of Teinhaj’s utilitarian desk, sitting on even more utilitarian chairs with square, straight backs, chairs Teinhaj had picked out personally because they were uncomfortable. If he was meeting people he wanted to impress, he used the conference room, with its dark polished wood table and padded armchairs. When he meet with his staff, he wanted them squirming. Not that Delia cared, being who and what she was, and Corel… Corel was a master of projecting an image. Nothing broke through that. She looked almost grandmotherly, certainly old enough to be Delia’s mother, but looks were more deceiving than usual in this case. Delia was older than Corel by a wide margin. Centuries. Neither of the two would lose their composure from simple tricks like uncomfortable chairs.
Delia was dressed in a tight-fitting black leather dress, looking about as different as possible from the quiet acolyte who had worn ornamental robes in the Hasamelis temple. The subservient, blue-eyed innocence was gone as well. Now, she looked casually lethal and her blue eyes sparkled with faint amusement the source of which was not clear to Teinhaj, given current circumstances. He needed to change that. The straight backed chair might not intimidate her, but there were other ways to fluster people. He looked her up and down slowly. “Nice outfit. Sexy. So, out of curiosity, you think you were made for …” and he paused and raised his eyebrows suggestively. Something he could never have done with any of the other staff, but then, they were human.
Delia’s grin froze for a second, then she smiled a bit wider, leaned over his desk, and said huskily “I wouldn’t know, Commander, but if you want we can find a room with a bed and experiment. It could be the happiest minute of your entire life. Possibly the last minute, too, but I’ll try not to damage you tha
t much if I can help it.”
Teinhaj’s frown hardened. Delia was always hard to intimidate, mostly because she rarely reacted the way you’d expect. Also because, for reasons he didn’t fully comprehend, she could get under his skin in a way no one else in the organization could. But she should know better than to toy with him. Time for a different, more direct approach. “You want to tell me again why you attacked a sixth dan Hasamelis priest when we spent half a year placing you in that temple?” They had already had that conversation but it was still baffling to him. Delia was a valuable asset to the organization, being immune to most detection spells, telepathy, empathy, and other tricks used to screen people. A total chameleon. Not to mention her physical capabilities. Six months of her time was a precious commodity.
Delia sat back and shrugged. “The goal was to find out who --- if anyone --- is trying to infiltrate the Hasamelis religious order and why.”
Teinhaj said, “Someone, or something, is. You know that came from an indisputable source.” A source Teinhaj only knew about as a codename, GOLDEN GATE. A source that was infuriatingly specific and too pointed at times, which made interpreting its information like trying to see a beach based on a single grain of sand. But it had also always been accurate.
Delia waved her hand to mollify him. “Yes, yes. The point is that after six months I had nothing. Even this mission to retrieve the Staff of Hasamelis that you said was related, somehow, appeared to be just what it was; a mission to Tawhiem. So after six months, the first clue about anything was Jedia knowing the mission was a hoax. We didn’t tell him, so someone else must have, someone that may know more than we do. So I wanted to find out who.”
“And to do that you had to splinter his shoulder bones?”
Delia sighed. “You know how sneaky those priest are. I had to keep him from casting spells or he would have popped someplace else. So I had to inflict a little pain. He isn’t a Holder, so there are no legal issues with using force to extract information. And really, a few healing spells and a few weeks of pain blocking spells and he’ll be fine. It wasn’t like he was going to die or something.”
Teinhaj wasn’t so sure about that. Jedia was pretty old, and the shock of having your bones crushed wasn’t trivial, but he let that go. “And you got nothing out of it.” Delia nodded. The old codger had been tougher than she had given him credit for and he had teleported out before she could get him to talk. “So, you blew your cover for nothing,” continued Teinhaj.
Delia said in sudden exasperation “I made a judgment call, well within mission parameters.”
Teinhaj stood and looked at her coldly. “Well, then, time to change those, I think. Pop it.”
Delia’s eyes widened and the amusement went away, replaced by doubt and concern. She laughed in disbelief and said, “You’re kidding. I’ll lose everything.”
Teinhaj shrugged. “Which, like you said, is nothing valuable. Pop it,” he said again.
The doubt in Delia’s eyes morphed to fear; her jaw muscles tensed and her teeth ground together audibly. Corel spoke up for the first time. “Teinhaj, dear, I don’t think that’s called for.” Corel didn’t like Delia; too much of a loose cannon in her book. But they were both on the same team, and that meant watching each other’s backs.
“That’s Commander, Lieutenant,” said Teinhaj to Corel harshly. He turned back to Delia. “Pop it,” he said for the third time. There was a grinding noise, the noise of machinery that had not been properly oiled creaking into motion, and Delia’s mouth started to open. Her eyes held panic now.
“Please,” she said, words slightly garbled through frozen teeth, as her mouth continued to open slowly. “Please.”
Teinhaj waited a moment, then said “order rescinded.”
Delia’s mouth closed with a snap. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. “Thank you,” she said, but there was more hate in her eyes that gratitude. It didn’t matter. She was bound by the three laws. She could hate all she wanted but it would never result in any action against him or the organization.
Except he suddenly realized it did matter; he felt like he’d stepped over a line he hadn’t meant to cross, and had done it out of anger. Teinhaj almost apologized before he could get himself under control, but the awkward pause was probably more telling than an apology would have been.
Trying to regain control of the situation --- he was supposed to be chastising these two --- he turned to Corel. “And you. You abandoned the mission in Tawhiem. Want to tell me again exactly why?” Corel had already given a shortened version of the events just before Padan had teleported her to the Hasamelis temple; they were together because Corel had shown up unexpectedly an hour ago. She was still in the travel-stained clothes she had been wearing in Tawhiem.
Corel shrugged and said, “To avoid certain death?” Before Teinhaj could rain verbal blows down on her, she added, “And I did bring back that elvish crystal ball, the evowna. Oh, and please, don’t forget, when the artifact boys are done with it, I need to deliver it to the elvish ambassador to Bythe.” She said it with total conviction, clearly meaning it, and Teinhaj almost laughed for the first time since the start of the conversation. An elvish evowna alone was something the analysis team would work on for a year. This one was encrypted with some secret an elf was willing to die for. It was going to be more like a decade. Or it would be, as long as the elves didn’t realize it was missing. They had some method of remotely destroying the things. But thinking that it would end up back in the elves’ hands, that was Corel; she could fool the most sophisticated detect truth spell by fooling herself.
The evowna would be a silver lining to the dark cloud of this op, but he didn’t need to acknowledge that. “Yes, you brought back something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the mission. Brilliant. And this certain death… you saw black things and a floating guy, and that’s certain death? Not sounding so certain to me, outfitted the way you were.”
“The elf thought so,” said Corel, lips pursed.
That stopped Teinhaj for a moment. You couldn’t argue with it, given the elves’ gear was substantially better than anything they could field. He conceded the point and continued, “But you’re sure that it wasn’t whatever was trying to lure a Hasamelis priest out there? That whatever was trying to do that was in the cave? And everyone was heading there?” Corel nodded. “Well, I received word that Padan teleported into the Temple just after you did, so I doubt he knows much more than you. Which means we have to focus on this group you were with; if they went in, they may have seen something, heard something. Tell me about them.”
Corel went down the list. She had a good memory for detail. When she hit the Stangri’s name Delia broke in. “His name was Gyeong?”
Corel nodded.
“You know him?” asked Teinhaj. Delia nodded this time. “How?” asked Teinhaj.
Delia looked almost embarrassed. “Sometimes I join the Mautua fights on the harbor front.”
Teinhaj blinked. “Mautua?” Amazement was written across his face. “You?” Delia nodded again. Once in awhile, she just wanted to … well, she wasn’t sure what she wanted out of it. She just did it, the mix of punching, kicking, and wrestling without much in the way of formal rules appealing to her. She didn’t do it often, and only floating competitions. In her line of work, you didn’t want to attract undue notice. She always won. With her strength and durability there wasn’t anyone that could best her. But this Stangri, Gyeong… he’d been a tough opponent, and unlike most Stangri he did not seem to find it odd that a woman wanted to be in the ring. He’d somehow sensed she was not what she seemed, had let go and danced away when his holds failed, and he had incredible dexterity, dodging her attacks. It had been a long time before she finally landed a solid blow, and even then she’d had to use a lot of force. And at the end he had grinned, blood pouring from spots where things had gotten a little rough, and said she was a worthy opponent and that they should meet again.
And they had met a
gain, twice, in private sparring matches she’d also won, and the Stangri had wanted to come back for more each time, and not for her looks or for revenge; just to have a worthy opponent. She’d kind of liked him for that.
Delia went on. “Just simple matches. We didn’t talk much at all, and I don’t really know anything about him; it’s just unusual to have a Stangri that far west in Kethem, so I remember him.”
Teinhaj was still staring at her in amazement. “You. Mautua matches on the waterfront.”
“Me. Mautua. Hell, Tei… Commander, I don’t even sleep. What do you think I do with my time off, stand in a corner gathering dust?”
Teinhaj had never thought about it before. He shook his head to clear it. “A topic for another time." He turned back to the other woman. "Corel, continue.”
Corel went through the remaining list of everyone that had been on the expedition. Teinhaj listened carefully. When she was through, he nodded. “Ok, then. Padan can’t teleport back to Tawhiem, or at least not anywhere near where they ended up. There’s no teleportal pad or any other way to lock in his destination, so they are on their own for the moment. But we should assume they will make it back. For some of them it should be pretty easy to dig up their history. The high born lady, Daesal, the drunk, Stegar, and the priest Hantlin. Daesal may not have said much about herself, but there aren’t that many holder’s daughters out adventuring. We can have a few discreet inquiries made on the waterfront for the Stangri, Gyeong. If he was fighting there, he must have lived there. The thief may be a bit tougher--he sounds like someone living off the grid--but let’s put out feelers. I want to know who these people are. And, more important, I want to know when they get back.”