The World Awakening

by Dan Koboldt

  Holt stared at him. “Well, at least they didn’t exaggerate. You are a handsome devil.”

  Quinn laughed in spite of himself. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  The tension that had settled on the village green eased a little. “Do you mind if I search you?” Holt asked.

  “Why not?” It beats dying in a hail of crossbow bolts.

  Holt stepped close and looked into Quinn’s right ear, then moved around to check out his left. “Where’s your comm unit?”

  “Smashed into pieces, and scattered in the ocean.” Sure, it had been Relling who’d done the first part, but he elected not to offer that little detail.

  “Well, that’s a point in your favor.”

  Quinn shrugged. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  Holt continued his up-close inspection. He poked Quinn’s chest and didn’t seem surprised at the flexsteel armor beneath his shirt. Then his eyes fell to the hilt of Quinn’s sword.

  “A short sword?” He chuckled. “Well, Logan’s consistent as ever.”

  Hearing the big man’s name spoken here so casually was surreal. “For the record, I asked for a rapier,” Quinn said.

  “You any good with this thing?”

  “I’m trying not to find that out.”

  “Smart man.” Holt pushed up Quinn’s sleeves next and checked his wrists. He found nothing there but the sleeve of the flexsteel armor. His bushy eyebrows knitted together.

  “Something wrong?” Quinn asked.

  “Not wrong, but mysterious.” Holt patted him down around the waist, still looking for something. Which put him in nice and close for a light-fingered move Quinn had just been dying to practice. A minuscule slice of air to part the leather cord, a three-fingered catch, and the tuck up his sleeve.

  “When your ship appeared out on the harbor, I thought I’d seen a ghost,” Holt said, low enough that only Quinn could hear. “And up there behind that crossbow, I could swear I see another.”

  He hadn’t so much as blinked when Relling took out his crossbowman. Quinn would have to be careful in telling him anything.

  Damn, what a cool customer. “No one else knows.”

  “Not even our former colleagues?”

  “Especially not them.”

  Holt paused to regard him with a hawk-like stare. “More and more curious.” He stepped back, finished with his inspection.

  But still worried about me. “Satisfied?” Quinn asked.

  “Not in the least.”

  “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “Answers,” Holt said.

  “Are you going to tell me the questions, or do I have to guess?”

  “You’ve been working against me for some time. Why the sudden change of heart?”

  “Because I don’t want anything to happen to the Enclave.”

  “And yet you put them at risk.”

  Touché. “Well, in my defense, so did you.”

  “You’re not ex-military, and almost certainly not a spook.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re too chatty.”

  Whoops. Quinn smiled. “You’ve got me there.”

  “That leaves few rational possibilities. My best guess is that you’re of a stripe with Penn and Teller.”

  Damn, he’s good. “Two for two.”

  Holt nodded, as if this were only confirmation of something he already knew. “You must be very good, to have carried on the act this long.”

  “Oh, it’s no act.”

  Holt chuckled. “Come now, Quinn. You can’t expect me to sell me on this ruse, given what I know.”

  “Then can I ask you a question?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Where’s your purse?”

  Holt’s hand went to his belt. His eyebrows shot up. They climbed even higher when Quinn produced his purse and offered it back to him.

  He accepted it with a nod. “That’s pretty good. But it proves nothing.”

  I’d like to see you pull that off. A jaded witness was always the hardest to convince.

  The magic inside pulsed willingly, so Quinn sighed and let it flow outward. He shaped it in a familiar way, so that a grapefruit-sized orb of golden fire bloomed in the air between him and Holt. It shimmered and danced there, more of an ornament than a threat. Still, the Prime’s fierce bodyguards shrank back from it like they would a leper.

  “Extraordinary,” Holt breathed. He leaned closer to inspect the orb, curious where the others were afraid.

  “Maybe don’t get too close,” Quinn said. “I’m still new at this.”

  “The fact that you can do it at all is simply astonishing.” Holt shook his head, almost in disbelief. “This world continues to surprise me.”

  “That’s saying something, considering that you know it better than anyone.” Here was the world expert on Alissia, and acted like a kid in a candy store at the merest hint of Alissian magic. That innocent zeal carried no small weight in Quinn’s estimation. This guy gets it. He was beginning to understand how such a man accomplished all that he had.

  Holt looked at him carefully, as if sizing him up in the context of new information. “You raise questions more quickly than you answer them, but for the moment I’m satisfied.” He made an open-handed gesture to his guards, who took a step back and came down from the balls of their feet. The crossbowmen, too, lowered their weapons.

  Quinn took what felt like his first full breath in a long while. In the direction of Moric and Anton, a faint but notable tingling of magic that he’d hardly noticed dissipated into the void. The feeling was so subtle, he almost missed it.

  They were ready for anything. The thought disturbed him more than a little. They’d both acted like reconciling with Holt was a given. The fact that they’d been unsure told Quinn how close a thing this was.

  “Come and sit.” Holt gestured grandly toward the pavilion. “I believe we have a great deal to discuss.”

  Quinn’s top two goals were to avoid a violent death at the hands of Holt’s exotic guardswomen, and to make sure he was present when the Valteroni Prime reunited with the former head of Alissian operations. Richard Holt and Captain Relling, oddly enough, had been among the first CASE Global employees to enter Alissia. Now, the company listed one of them as “Missing, presumed dead” and hoped to put the other into that category as well.

  Once Holt invited them into the pavilion, it signaled to most of the weapon-carrying folks in the stone village that bloodshed would be avoided, at least initially. The guardswomen congregated in a distant corner of the village green. One of them produced a palm-sized leather ball, and they began a vigorous juggling game to prevent it from touching the ground. Feet, shoulders, knees, and the building could touch the ball, but hands could not. There was a song that went with the game, apparently, and if there actual words to it, they didn’t translate. Quinn couldn’t decide which was more distracting: the astonishing dexterity that these lithe women seemed to take for granted, or the massive pile of weapons they’d tossed aside before they started to play.

  Relling eventually appeared at ground level, the crossbow still in her hand. She carried this over to the shady section where the man she’d thrown out the window had been propped against a wall. He appeared shaken but conscious, accepting his weapon back and exchanging some quiet words with Relling. At one point, they even shared a laugh about something. Quinn couldn’t imagine what.

  Then Relling approached the pavilion at the green’s center. Her normal purposeful stride faltered into an uncertain kind of tiptoe. Her gloved hands twitched, already missing the comforting handle of the crossbow. Quinn watched her coming out of the corner of his eye. He flashed her a hand signal drilled into him by Logan, the one that meant five by five. In other words, everything’s good here. She saw it, got the message, gave him a strange look, and then lurched into the pavilion.

  Holt stood and smiled at her, a friendly expression that made no assumptions. Moric stood as well. “This is our harbormaster. She
goes by Relling, and we still haven’t gotten her to tell us her first name.”

  “In that case, I’ll offer mine.” Holt extended a hand. “Richard Holt.”

  Relling hesitated a heartbeat before she shook it. “Good to meet you.”

  Their handshake lasted a moment longer than usual, and something passed between their faces, but Quinn would have missed these things if he weren’t watching for them. He was almost disappointed. Holt had reason to be the most surprised—Relling had certainly gotten word of his defection, for lack of a better word—but he seemed to take the information in stride. That either made him about the coolest customer Quinn had ever met, or suggested that he knew more than he let on. After all, he’d certainly withheld information about the Enclave from his reports to CASE Global. Moric claimed that Holt never set foot on the island himself, but he still might have gotten wind of a certain ship anchored in its harbor.

  Curiouser and curiouser indeed.

  “Let us agree on a few common principles,” Holt said, once everyone had taken a seat around the table. “First, that we are united in one penultimate goal: defending Alissia from a powerful enemy. Second, that we are almost certainly outmatched in technology and resources. And third, that this is war. It will demand sacrifices of all of us.”

  War. Right up until Holt said the word, Quinn hadn’t thought of it that way. A conflict, perhaps. An invasion, certainly. But war took it to a whole new level. War meant death, destruction, and heartbreak. Maybe I made a mistake to bring the Enclave into this. But CASE Global knew where it was. And it was probably his fault.

  “The Enclave has usually avoided conflicts on the mainland,” Moric said, as if reading his mind. “For as long as I’ve been on the council, I’ve believed our greatest safety lies in obscurity. Others have had different opinions.” He looked from Anton to Quinn.

  Quinn winced, but Anton made no reaction.

  “Even so, that is a luxury of the past,” Moric continued. “The council feels that the threat is too grave for us to ignore. If you can use our help, you will have it.”

  “And mine,” Relling said suddenly.

  Quinn felt like his eyes would bulge out of his head. Relling stepping up on her own? He really should look into this person she’d met who’d swung her so firmly over to the Alissian side.

  Even Holt looked stunned. “Really?”

  “I may remember a thing or two from a past life that could be useful.”

  “She’s got a pretty nice ship, too,” Quinn said.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to decline such generous offers, because we can use all of you,” Holt said. “We have also secured an alliance with our easterly neighbor.”

  Anton choked on his wine and had a coughing fit. “When did this happen?”

  “Less than a fortnight ago.”

  “Gods.” Anton sat back with a stunned look on his face.

  Holt smiled. “Their militia will nearly double our numbers.”

  “And give you control of the largest army on the continent,” Moric said. “Will that be enough?”

  “I believe it will.” Holt unrolled a large map of the Alissian mainland. “Here’s what I have in mind.”

  Chapter 17

  Playing with Fire

  “Successful magicians are always learning, always practicing. Hidden skills are how we stack the deck.”

  —Art of Illusion, October 30

  They talked for almost two hours, while the shadows grew long across the village green. Holt did most of the talking, laying out his position with surprising frankness. He had been building an army as Kiara suspected, though Quinn doubted she had any idea of the scale of his ambitious operations. In the few months since taking over as Prime, Holt had rebuilt Valteron’s economy into a machine of war.

  There was no sign of the stone settlement’s inhabitants until later in the evening. Right around when Quinn’s attention span had begun to wane, and his belly grumbled in complaint at having not seen food in hours, the wonderful aroma of baking bread touched his nose. He thought it a mirage at first, a trick played on him by his exhausted senses. Then the guardswomen flooded the pavilion with no warning, forming a loose ring of weapon-bristling female badasses around the meeting table.

  Their concern, it seemed, was the appearance of three men and four women in the corner of the green. Each one carried a tall wicker basket lined with cloth, and approached them with timid smiles. The men wore colorful vests over loose-fitting linens. The women wore long flowing skirts, and had tied up their hair in bright scarves that neatly complemented the vests. Two of Holt’s guards loped over to inspect the baskets, eventually deeming them safe to approach.

  “Our hosts were good enough to prepare an evening meal. I hope you’ll join me for it,” Holt said.

  His offer was met with a murmur of enthusiastic agreement. Even Anton looked pleased at the prospect of a hearty meal. No doubt the wine won’t be up to his liking, though.

  The villagers said nothing, but set down their baskets, smiled, and disappeared back in the direction they’d come from. Quinn started to untie his purse—the least he could do was throw some coins their way—but they just laughed and waved him off.

  “We may not be Pirean, but we know the importance of hospitality,” Holt said.

  Moric offered a nod of thanks at the words.

  Quinn felt a little warm comfort himself. Holt always knew the perfect thing to say.

  The baskets held a wealth of delicious-smelling pastries in the shape of half-moons. Quinn grabbed one and noted the heft, the density. Meat filled. Oh, yeah.

  Everyone broke off into somewhat random little groups to enjoy the meal with quiet conversation. Anton and Moric moved off for a private discussion at one side of the green. Holt invited a reluctant Relling to join him at his table to catch up on old times. It would have been awkward for Quinn to play third wheel with either of those pairings. He felt an odd spike of nostalgia for those meals in the Pirean tower where you were squeezed in so tight you could eat off your neighbor’s plate.

  He could have taken the meat pastry on his own somewhere, but eating alone was neither fun nor challenging. When in doubt, do the least expected thing. He walked over to where Holt’s exotic guardswomen had seated themselves in a loose circle, their weapons still within reach. “May I join you?”

  Several of them cast a glance at the woman opposite him in the circle, whose oil-black hair hung in an intricate array of beaded braids. They click-clacked together when she moved her head. “If you wish it. Quinn.” She said his name slowly, as if it had an unfamiliar sound. “I am Alethea.”

  “Good to know you.” He sat down cross-legged in their circle, with his back to the pavilion, to the bemusement of the warrioresses to either side. He made his voice conversational. “So, where you from?”

  “We are of Tukalu.” Alethea must have seen the blank look on his face. “It’s an archipelago southeast of Valteron.”

  “I’ve not heard of it, but I hope you’ll forgive me.” He offered his best smile. “I’m not from around here.” Whether he won any of them over with that was hard to tell. He tried a bite of the pastry. The crust was light and flaky, the filling a delightful meld of cheese, meat, and savory sauce. After a week of basic ship’s fare, it tasted like heaven. God bless those villagers, whoever they are. The fact that Holt’s presence won them meals like this spoke volumes to his reputation, even in the distant reaches of Valteron. These warrior women remained a mystery, however. They’d lapsed into silence since he joined them, but occasionally made little gestures and expressions at one another. So they were still talking, but not in a way that he could hope to hear or understand. Well, he might as well try again. “So, how is it that you know Rich—the Valteroni Prime?”

  “You ask a third question, but have answered none,” Alethea said.

  “That’s a fair point. Then again, you haven’t asked me any.” He tried the smile again, but might as well have been using it on a stone. Alethe
a’s control of her face was masterful.

  “How do you know the Prime?”

  A complicated question, but he felt like it was also a test. “I met him for the first time today. But we come from the same place, so we know many of the same people.”

  She nodded, accepting this answer despite its vagueness. She bought herself time by taking another bite. Then she asked, “Why did you choose to eat with us? Are you not liked by your companions?”

  “They like me well enough. Most of them, anyway.” At least they haven’t killed me yet. “But I came here because I wanted to get to know you.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Fun, mostly. You do know what fun is, don’t you?”

  “Another question,” she said.

  “In my defense, I answered three.”

  She offered a feral smile. “Our idea of it is different from yours.”

  He should probably have let it go, but she’d opened the door for him and he couldn’t resist. “You don’t know that. You just met me.”

  “You’re a mainlander, aren’t you?”

  “Not really.” An idea came to him. “I live on an island, too.”

  This statement caused a few second glances from the women to either side of Alethea, who’d been thus far ignoring him.

  “A volcanic island?” she asked.

  “No, a regular one.”

  “That hardly counts.”

  “Come on, an island is an island,” Quinn said.

  Alethea unfolded her legs and stretched them toward him. “Do you have feet like this?” She was barefoot, but the soles of her feet looked like old leather.

  It caught him off guard, and he laughed. No wonder they never wear shoes. “Gods, no.”

  “So you have soft feet. That leaves out the coal walking.” She looked him up and down. “Perhaps you have other redeeming qualities.”

  He winked at her. “I like to think so.”

  The woman beside Alethea leaned over and whispered something to her. They looked very similar, though this one appeared a few years younger. Quinn caught himself, because he couldn’t go around assuming people who looked similar to his inexperienced eye were related.