Dark Practices: Book Four of the Phantom Badgers

by RW Krpoun

  For months she had watched Maxmillian’s foolish puppy love with cool detachment, unaware of the terrible force of good-natured perseverance; she had gotten used to him adoring her from afar, then comfortable with it, and finally, without realizing it, she had come to expect it as her due. When she had first seduced him last year it had been with the idea of a final goodbye, giving him what he wanted before they both fell in battle, a nice gesture. Looking back, she saw that such a reckless act, so unlike the Avenger, was a major step in the new Elonia, and she saw more clearly that it was also motivated in no small part by the look she had seen on the scholar’s face when they had captured Kustar, the lovely Pargaie officer; Kustar had been captured in the nude, and Maxmillian’s obvious admiration had, for lack of a better word, shaken her, yes, shaken and angered. After all, his admiration and longings were hers, no one else’s. It didn’t matter if she wanted him or not, he should remain just where it pleased her to keep him. The seduction was just to put him back on the straight and narrow.

  Too late the veteran spy and assassin learned a simple lesson: that things within the realm of emotion are not so easily resolved, that planned seductions, unlike a physical ambush, seldom go as one plans, and that once one introduces the physical into an emotional issue, things are never the same. She had never taken into account that Maxmillian had courted and married a woman of no mean strength of will, a marriage which had lasted for decades, ending only with his his wife’s death. Maxmillian knew of the pitfalls and dangers of emotional contact, whereas she did not.

  Foolishly she had thought that a simple seduction would keep Maxmillian where she wanted him, but learned as so many others had that once a relationship progresses to the physical level it was nearly impossible to restore back to a purely emotional state. Her own emotions had changed, an intimacy had been established that she could not explain and that she was helpless against; worse, advice from others was unavailable: her coolness and easy elegance had alienated every woman in the Badgers save Janna and Starr, and the former was unapproachable and the latter was even more inexperienced than herself.

  She was no novice to setbacks: steeling her will, she resolved to cut her losses and to accept the new condition of Maxmillian the occasional lover as opposed to Maxmillian the lap-dog; she would simply control this new development as she had controlled everything else in her life.

  Except that she didn’t.

  It infuriated her whenever she dwelled on it, but the simple fact was that she wasn’t in control of the situation, Maxmillian, or even her own impulses. Maxmillian was as he always seemed to be, a bit more presumptuous in private, of course, that was inevitable given the nature of the new relationship, but where he used to be as predicable as an arrow in flight, now he refused to conform to the bumbling puppy-eyed fumbling he had exhibited before, instead being cunning and deft in his dealings with her. And she had betrayed herself: over the last six months she had found herself resenting when he spent too much time away from her, or expressed a complimentary observation about another woman. She found herself becoming fretful when he seemed cool, and was completely disgusted with her own tenancy to react with physical affection whenever her grip on him seemed threatened. It wasn’t as if the scholar was in control of things - she could still cause him to break out into red-faced stammering with a single smoldering look, but neither was she in control. No one seemed to be in control, and this was driving her mad.

  This slip was a perfect example of how things were completely out of control: naturally, he had been the first Badger she had chosen for her squad, she needed a Human who was well-versed in Imperial mores, educated, and clever. They had held their planning session in her quarters for security, and naturally it was reasonable to invite him to spend the night, as it would be a useful cover. She had changed into the slip twenty minutes before he had arrived, disgusted with herself, but his reaction had been gratifying, as it had been when, during the discussions she had found in necessary to go here and there for some note or another, leaning casually against the wardrobe, bending to recover a dropped stylus, watching him with heavy-lidded eyes. The Avenger sneered and made retching sounds, but the new Elonia was gratified to see his reactions, pleased that her grip upon him was as strong as ever.

  Lacking a confidant save the very source of her confusion, the Seeress was had no one to turn to for help, and no experience in her past with which to aid her in drawing logical conclusions. In her past her burning drive for revenge and the desperate risks she had lived with had kept her personal focus extremely narrow; love had come to her late in life like an arrow fired from ambush, and for the first time in decades, perhaps ever, Elonia found herself at a loss.

  “Do you really think we can track them down?” Maxmillian shook his head as he organized his notes. “They seem pretty clever.”

  It was gratifying to remember that in terms of professionalism she was still far ahead of anyone else in the Company. “Yes, it should be very possible. They hide behind the lack of presumption, and the allure of easy logic. Their actions are hidden as best they can, and what few glimpses others catch of them are passed off as something else. If you find a murdered whore, you wouldn’t say ‘aha, a cult’; rather, you would look for a madman. Likewise, missing street children are presumed to have the usual accidents or taken by slavers or lone deranged individuals. Even trained eyes such as Arian’s require detailed information to perceive the pattern, information such as Dame Vinke provided. Now we have several clues to work with even though we lack Arian’s training.”

  “And we’ve you in charge, with a greater range of skills than any other cult-hunter has had, I would wager,” Maxmillian grinned.

  She smiled with him. “Unfortunately, being a Seeress is no advantage against them; their ceremonies are designed to mask their affiliations except to the very best.”

  “No, I meant that you were trained by the Direthrell.”

  Training had kept it from her face with Durek, but he had been acting out of character, and she had had some seconds to prepare; this came out of the blue. For a mere instant her jaw dropped an inch and her eyes widened in shock before instincts took over and her face closed; she was in control again, cat-calm, but feeling much more naked than she had before. “That is a very poor joke.”

  He shrugged, laying his notes on the bed beside him, but his eyes didn’t flinch. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way, Elonia, I just meant that...well, you’re equipped for this by your training. So is Arian.”

  She reclined a bit more on the padded chest at the foot of her bed. “I was referring to the crack about Alantarn and the Direthrell.”

  “Elonia, I believe that you are an escaped Nepas who was raised in Alantarn, possibly trained by Pargaie. I figured they used you as a Seeress before you escaped. You’re mixed blood, a Nepas as Direthrell call servants who have some Dark Threll blood.”

  “And I participated in a raid on a Direthrell fortress for Badger pay, is that it? Do you have any idea what the Dark Threll d to defectors? If I was what you say, I would live as far from the Direthrell as possible.”

  “There isn’t anywhere where the Dark Threll can’t reach,” the historian shrugged. “I believe you went into Alantarn for revenge, and found it. You manipulated the Badgers into the mission through their need for the Torc of Siuan, which was in Alantarn and misidentified so it was in a lesser treasure vault and thus more accessible to a raid of our abilities.”

  “You are a complete fool.”

  He flinched, but persevered. “No, I was feeling guilty for knowing and not saying it. I care about you, and didn’t want to hide things from you. I haven't told anyone, and never would.”

  “If I am what you say, you wouldn’t make it out of this room alive.”

  “No, I said you fled the Dark Threll; I know you’ve never followed the Void.”

  “Get out.”

  When the door closed she laid back, her bare legs hanging over the side of the trunk, and stared at the ceiling.r />
  Few of the Badgers who lived in the tower locked their doors when they were in their rooms, or even when they weren’t; slipping open the latch on Maxmillian’s door, she eased through the narrowest space possible and crept across the dark room to the side of his bed, her keen Threll eyes somewhat dazzled by the transition from low light to darkness, but she knew this room. He was asleep, which offended her deeply: he ought to be upset and pining, not sleeping as if nothing had happened. For a moment she considered leaving, but thought better of it. Tucking the wooly robe she wore over her slip under her legs, she sat on the floor by the side of the bed and jabbed him in the ribs. “We need to talk.”

  “Well, just hop on in and we’ll get the conversation started,” Henri invited, voice thick with sleep.

  “Henri! What are you doing in Maxmillian’s bed?”

  “What are you doing sneaking into his room when he’s supposed to be spending the night with you?” the wizard countered. “Having a bit of a lover’s quarrel, are we? Well, you can tell Uncle Henri all about it...”

  She stood and walked out with as much dignity as she could muster, remembering someone saying something about Henri having accidently set his bed on fire earlier in the day. Apparently Maxmillian had given him the use of his bed as he hadn’t been planning on using it.

  She found him next door, in Arian’s old room, lying on a couple blankets in the otherwise empty chamber, wide awake. “I thought they were going to fix this up as a guest room,” she commented, feeling like a fool.

  “They haven't got around to it,” the scholar observed, sitting up. “Need a blanket to sit on?”

  “Not really.” She slipped off her robe and sat next to him. “I just woke up Henri.”

  Maxmillian sighed. “We’ll be hearing about that for a while.”

  “Yes.”

  The silence stretched on for a while. Finally she patted his hand. “I’ve a perfectly good bed downstairs.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea.” She put on her robe while he gathered his things and they made their way to her quarters.

  Neither said anything as she blew out the light and they climbed into bed, each on their own side; after a moment, Elonia sighed and slid over next to him. “What have you done to me?” she whispered.

  “Perhaps you’re becoming domesticated.”

  “Well, stop it.” She couldn’t help the smile. He chuckled.

  Snuggling deeper into his arms, she rested her head on his chest. “When did you start to suspect?”

  He was silent for a moment. “On the way to Alantarn, after I joined the Badgers, I noticed how things seemed to happen around you; others got the credit, but you were always there. You found the notes on the defenses and the book of secrets, you were the best translator of the Direthrell language, and so on. That always made me wonder, but I thought you were just modest, or something along those lines. Then we went into Alantarn in disguise and what struck me was the way you walked around as if you had been there before, like it was just another city. Seeing the Direthrell helped, too, although I was too scared at the time to put it together; I figured it out completely a couple months after we got back.”

  “You think I look like a Direthrell?” That was absurd: Direthrell and Harthrell, the sea-faring Threll were physically identical, while the Lanthrell, or forest-dwelling Threll were only very slightly different in appearance. Even a full-blooded Threll would have difficulty saying what the other half of her blood was.

  “No, not look as in your body,” he ran his hand across her as if to emphasis his point. “But in the way you carry yourself, the fire in your eyes sometimes, the intensity. That all matched. But that was only a clue, something that set me to thinking; I am a trained archivist, you know, a digger of details, I spent my whole career rooting in the University’s written works uncovering points of reference. What really opened all the doors was your handwriting.”

  “How?”

  “We captured all those Direthrell documents, all written by Dark Threll or Nepas officers, nearly all of whom were trained in Alantarn, and then you ‘translated’ the documents, writing them out in your own hand. You claimed to be learned Nuadh, the Direthrell language as you went, as did all of us; now, I’ve worked on translations for years, yet you outstripped any efforts to translate I’ve ever seen. Of course, you’re far older than most of us, but you had never claimed any such skill in that area, and Nuadh is not a simple language. That was another clue, but as I said, what really pushed me to my deduction was studying not just your translations, but the original documents as well. They say that no one can truly change their handwriting; I knew men who had made a career out of identifying handwriting back at the University, and had picked up a few things from them. At first, I thought you were just copying the style as you translated the words, but I got ahold of some notes you had written on other subjects and it was still there: you write like the Direthrell do, in style rather than form. The only way you could do that is if the first time you learned to write was in a Dark Threll academy; tie that in with all the other tid-bits, and there you are. I was already thinking along those lines when we captured Kustar; I watched you write out translations and notes from the documents she had been carrying, and then I watched her write out those letters we forced her to make incriminating herself; both of you wrote the same way. Plus she looked at you differently than the rest of us, a sort of quiet watching as if she knew something about you. I think she spotted you as Direthrell-trained, too.”

  She cocked an eyebrow in the darkness: he was always a clever man, and a Human might see something that any Threll would miss, simply because of the newness. A Threll would write off anything different about her as part and parcel of her mixed blood, and most Humans couldn’t tell one type of Threll from another anyway; she had been mistaken as full-blooded by Humans in the past. But Maxmillian had looked past the exotic race and her physical form and seen her, not anything else. All this time she had thought he was watching the swell of her breasts and the curve of her hips, and she had been wrong, or at least partially wrong. He had fooled the Avenger she realized, the old, cold Elonia, and respected him for it.

  “My mother was a Lanthrell captive held in Alantarn” she began, speaking without any conscious decision. “She did not want be to follow the Void, so after she knew she was pregnant but before I was born...”

  Each room had an ‘x’-shaped arrow slit, as the tower was the final defense works of the small fort; hers faced east. Curled up in a big chair before it, wrapped in a blanket against the chill that drifted with the morning breeze, she sipped a cup of tea and watched the sun rise. She had talked for the better part of four hours last night, talked, and wept some, too; that surprised her, the tears had just come from somewhere deep inside, like bits of old metal from a long-healed wound working themselves to the surface. She had told him the truth of her life (just the basics, of course, the full story would take days without adding much beyond details), and he had listened carefully, asked a few questions, and openly admired her. That had been a surprise, too: after decades, her entire life in fact, of holding her truth in secret, she had somehow gotten the idea that her past was shameful without consciously realizing it. Maxmillian had held her for a long time afterwards, and she had wept a bit more.

  Now she was awake and feeling better than she could remember in a long time, not since she had dug a grave and thrown the rank insignia of those she had taken revenge upon in Alantarn, burying her vengeful past with the symbols of her retribution and proclaiming the Avenger to be the Elonia of the past. A tight knot inside her that she had carried for so long that she had forgotten it existed was gone, leaving her feeling warm and languid and...happy. She had done more than share her secrets with the man she (a blush crept across her face) loved , she had let go of something she couldn’t describe and didn’t care to dwell on. The dead hand of Arbmante and the Direthrell had fallen away from her life.

  When the sun was clear of the horizon, she decided co
mfortably, she was going to get back into her bed and give Maxmillian a morning he would never forget.

  The charter the Imperial government had granted to the Badgers had, amongst other things, deeded them the fortress Oramere and seventy square miles of land surrounding it. Tenant farming being prohibited by law, the Badgers had quickly moved to sell off as much as possible to farmers who were willing to come out into the wilderness. Even at pennies an acre there was money to be made, but the real hope for economic success lay in the charter clause that gave the Badgers the right to establish a township within their holdings and to select its Mayor for the first ten years. The Badgers controlled Badgerhof, as they named the village, selling township lots at solid prices and owning outright the stone piers that served the town on the Burgen River, as well as three-quarter interests in the first tavern established (the Badger’s Den), and quarter shares in the grain and lumber mills. They owned the quarry outright as well, and directed the establishment of roads and town defenses, commanded the Militia, and held Oramere, the stone fist that kept the Purple Spider at bay. Starr Brightgift served as the area Landmaster, controlling all forestry on their holdings, and Badger appointees manned the tiny Town Watch; in short, nothing happened in the small colony without Durek’s approval.