by Damien Lake
Several pins were already marking various elements. A handful of blue-headed pins were scattered across the east. From their position, he felt they were leftovers from the last time the map had been in use during the Nolier battles. Only one small cluster of yellow pins marked the western border with Tullainia so far.
Green pins were scattered across Galemar, representing the scattered men in service to their homeland. Most were in the east, or on their way there. The only force of consequence in the west hovered forty miles away from the stolen lands at the Stoneseams’ foot, awaiting reinforcements. Reinforcements that were heading the other way.
A dozen yellow Tullainian pins were stuck into the area around Armonsfield. Marik quickly plucked them off. Both he and Minna held papers in their left hands, shifting their attentions from the pages long enough to locate the correct point into which they needed to jab a yellow marker. He would have preferred black pins, except he saw no colors other than Galemar, Nolier and Tullainia.
“Why wasn’t this done as the reports came in?” Marik wanted to know.
Minna kept her eyes fixed unerringly on the words she held. “The reports came in to the knight-marshal’s analysts. They delivered them to us in stacks with no sorting at all, pages from different reports mixed together. I’ve spent all my time organizing them back into proper order.” She sniffed loudly to emphasize, “Their entire focus is on Nolier.”
Marik, with effort, refrained from shaking his head in disbelief.
When they stuck the last pin in, Tru came to stand at his side. “Pretty ugly.”
“Yes,” Marik agreed, gazing at the display. Without question, the current positions were off. Armies constantly moved, reorganized and altered their patterns unless they were digging in to create a fortified position, which looked to be the case only at three occupied towns. “The numbers don’t look good. Supposing, if the scryers are right, no heavy reinforcements have crossed through the pass in the last two eightdays. Roughly guessing, we have twelve-thousand enemy soldiers across a land area twenty miles out from the mountains’ base, and anywhere from forty to sixty miles long.”
“Ugly. That’s what I said.”
“The monsters are too strange. None of the reports are valuable since the men who saw them have nothing to judge against…so no credibility when their claims are at odds with each other’s. What do you know about them?”
“They aren’t Devils.”
“I already know that,” Marik snapped. “And I know how tough they are to kill, and how strong they are!”
“I didn’t want you to get confused. The people in the white robes are using sorcery, so some would think that means the beasts are Devils.”
“Sorcery? But they weren’t summoned?”
“Yes. They can’t be summoned with sorcery since they aren’t Devils. Or Spirits.”
“How can a sorcerer control ordinary beasts?”
Tru shrugged. “Not the same way they control Devils or Spirits. We don’t know.”
Marik wanted to thank him for providing an answer that answered nothing…except that would serve no purpose. Comprehension in this case helped only in that it made the enemy less mysterious. An irritated reply would serve no purpose.
“I suppose the beasts live wherever these invaders come from, then. They’ve tamed…no. Not that. I know better than that. They’ve somehow…harnessed these creatures the way you might force a wild horse into tack and bridle.”
“Could be,” the magician agreed. “Kara and Covell think they might have been made with magic. But no one else thinks that possible.”
“Who are they?”
“Covell? He came down from Rubia nine or ten years—”
“No!” Marik interrupted. “Are they enclave mages, or cityguard mages?”
“Oh. Both are enclave.”
Which left several other enclave mages in disagreement. The odds were heavily against it.
Yet who knew with magic?
“We need better information.”
“Well, that’s not all. Our sorcerers have been studying them through the scryes, watching it all. They say one white robe can control three of the beasts, usually. A stronger one can do four.”
Marik reviewed the battle in the Stoneseams Pass, followed by the one at the Eighteenth Outpost. “That tallies.”
“Whatever they do, they must have learned it wherever they came from.”
“They look like Galemarans,” Minna stated. “Not tan like the Tullainians or brown like the northern kingdoms.”
“I’d be suspicious that they were Noliers pulling a surprise march,” Marik added, “if it weren’t obviously impossible to pull off without anyone knowing.” He glanced sidelong at Tru’s black skin, making up his mind to ask once and for all. “Where are you from, anyway?”
“The archipelagos off the south coast. My island is about ten day’s sail off Nolier.”
The reply surprised Marik. He had never heard of the place, never seen it on any of the maps he’d looked over. Of course, the only large map he’d ever studied before this one had been the similar version in the records office at Kingshome.
It would be easy to sway from the issues before them. He ignored his curiosity. “Did we get any estimate on the number of beast controllers? The white robes?”
Minna shuffled through the piles they had made on the floor under the map. “Not a good one. Could be around fifty, unless the sightings were of the same groups. All these numbers come from the mages.”
“And only half the groups might have been spotted through the mirrors in any case. So that means a hundred-fifty to three-hundred possible beasts under their control.” After a beat, he commented, “I don’t like it.”
“They won’t all be in one place,” Minna opined. “The commanders would scatter them over the area they held.”
“Not too widely,” Marik countered. “So far they have always sent the beasts in first, hitting the defenders hard and softening them for the black soldiers behind. There would be no reason to change that. The beasts are scattered, you’re right, but only into a handful of groups near their front lines. They would want the beasts ready in case we make another surprise attack against them.”
Marik continued speculating for the next two candlemarks with Tru and Minna. At times, the magician would call other magic users over from their efforts to speak on the points they were individually studying. They were invariably annoyed at the interruption, each sounding harassed. Marik ignored their ire and offered no apologies.
By the time servants carried away the crumb-coated plates from lunch, he believed he had gained a solid feel for these strange invaders. Many questions remained unresolved, but the scattered details meshed with what he had experienced and witnessed.
The most important mystery he wanted solved was where the enemy mages were, and what they might be doing. So far the only magic users the scryers had uncovered wore white, controlling the beasts. That covered those enemy mages possessing sorcery since any person gifted with that talent would certainly be recruited as a controller.
There still remained the other three major talents. Where lurked the magic users with the talents for magecraft, magician’s spells and geomancy?
Marik kept asking; Marik kept receiving no satisfactory answer. The enclave laborers had no facts to give. Continued harping on the issue would not be the means of attaining a change in that status.
Celerity never returned. Marik was about to leave. He had received what he could from the enclave by way of current information. Before he enacted his escape, Tru asked if he were ready to look at the mountain through the scrying window.
“No, I doubt I’ll see anything new. The scryers gave us the best details they were able to locate, and I just returned from the Stoneseams. I already know the lay of the land there.”
Confusion marred the solid features of the dark magician. “Who said scrying the Stoneseams?”
“You asked…wait. What did you ask?”
&nbs
p; “No one told you about the mountain? I wondered why you didn’t want to see it right away.”
“Which mountain? In the Stoneseams range?”
“No. Come look at it.”
Tru brought him to the window rather than the mirrors. Minna trailed behind in silence. Upon catching the window scryer’s attention, he asked, “Have you done the mountain yet?”
“Nah. We did it only ten or so marks ago after the midnight bell. Won’t have changed much, will it?”
“Pull it up so we can have a look.”
“Eh. You know Celerity said we needed to be careful how much we use. It’ll all be gone in a month if we keep sinting it.”
“Sint some more. It’s for special.”
The man glanced around Tru at the shabby mercenary. He pursed his lips with a shrug, passing responsibility for the matter to Tru, who must be superior in the enclave.
A measure of light-colored earth was pulled from a cask the fellow rolled out from under a different desk. Many such casks were present, each with different labels. Marik read Tullainia, 0031.
“Does the Tullainian king know we have a cask of his kingdom’s dirt?”
Tru filibustered. “All the kingdoms get samples of their lands from everywhere, so the mages can look in on any place they need to.”
“That’s their lands. Collecting earth samples from across the border seems like outright spying.”
“You need to know what things your neighbors are doing if they get to doing things. And everybody does it. It’s not like I went over and stole anything and…well, it happens, you know?”
Marik left it alone. The intricacies of intelligence games played by one kingdom against the next were of no concern to him. He had only made the comment in passing.
The number referred to whichever part of Tullainia this mountain lay in. Marik watched the man, who possessed magician talent same as Tru, set the scrye in motion. He could discern nothing of the alien magic, only see the dirt disintegrate, or sint as magicians referred to their components’ destruction, when the spell tore free the earth’s astral form.
Cottages around a village water-well from the previously scryed image shimmered in the glass panes, as if rain sheeted down the exterior, blurring the outer world. Rather than the colors merely becoming indistinct forms, new hues bled through to invade the scene. Diseased splotches grew in several places. The colors succumbed to a disfiguring plague.
It made Marik close his eyes to ward off the disorientation. He counted to ten before abandoning his inner darkness, finding a new view through the window. The sliding window’s central frame added to the disturbing sensation of peering through a second floor window in the palace at dusty, Tullainia lands.
Tru spoke short phrases to the man, getting him to adjust the view from where the scrying had begun to wherever it needed to be. Marik drummed his fingers along his tunic sleeve, arms folded, waiting with what he considered great patience.
When at last the view found what the magicians wished it to, they had no need to inform the mercenary of the fact. He felt his jaw lowering, his exposed tongue drying against the air. His arms slowly unfolded.
“That…” A suffocating fish had replaced his tongue, defiantly flopping in his mouth. He forced himself to regain control. “That…can’t be right. The scrye…it’s confusing the image.”
“No,” Tru said steadfastly, contradicting basic logic with that one word. “I scryed it first, then Celerity, then Elata, then Verge, then Shanahan.” The man sitting at Tru’s thigh tipped a finger in salute. “I still don’t know how they did it, but they must have kept doing it until they finally did it.”
“This… Why didn’t you mention this when I asked where their mages were? It’s pretty damned obvious to look at it!”
“No, it’s impossible. We looked it up in every old book we had. Ten-thousand mages couldn’t do that.” Tru scratched at the corner of one eye. “I don’t know how they did it, but it wasn’t with a group of mages. Even a big one.”
Marik glared at him before returning to the window. No mountain range could be seen in the foreground or dotting the distant horizon. The ground rolled gently, never quite enough to form a hill. It would be open pastureland in Galemar. In Tullainia, it was mostly thick weeds, dust and sporadic vegetation patches starting to catch green from the spring days. Of matters amiss, there were none to be found.
As long as one discounted the massive mountain hovering a thousand feet above the deserted landscape.
Chapter 05
It took Marik several moments to realize he had stopped dead in the road’s center, staring at nothing while his ruminations bent inward. The brush from a passing horse’s flank brought him back to awareness in time to catch the colorful invective hurled at him by the mount’s rider.
He checked the sun to reassure himself of the time. Since rising from his meager bed for the second time, his sense of the world around him had been gyrating as wildly as a festival showman juggling apples whilst standing tiptoe on an oversized ball.
Three marks past the dawn. Exactly as he knew it was, except fully half of him remained in the day previous, staring in amazement through the window at Tullainian fields. It seriously disrupted his feel for the proper order of the day.
To top it all, Tru had farmed an entire new collection of scrying components from Marik. In addition to the blood dripped into a stopper-jar, enough to leave him worried at the amount, the hair clippings, nail shavings and dirt from under his fingers, Tru had refused to let him escape without filling the bottle this time. When he emerged from a cramped closet with the unpleasantly warm wine bottle in hand, he found the magician already attempting a fresh scrye using his blood.
Marik waited out of interest for half a mark, mildly hopeful that Tru would uncovered something with this attempt. He’d grown accustomed to failure and disappointment following every attempt to locate his father. If any image had formed in the mirror, it would have shocked his heart into abruptly stopping.
Needless to say, his heart still continued its ceaseless labor.
When, many years ago, he’d set out from Tattersfield, finding Rail had been his driving motivation. He had wanted resolutions to unanswered questions, mysteries unraveled, puzzles solved. Every action he’d taken had been in hopes of discovering his father’s fate, or meant to strengthen his self-sufficiency until he grew into a man Rail would accept proudly.
But every path he took in search of answers ran straight into a wall, or off a cliff. In the end, what little knowledge he’d garnered had come from sources he never would have expected. His original plan of questioning the mercenary band his father had last contracted with to discover Rail’s back-trail had been naively optimistic from the start.
He viewed Celerity’s interest in the red-eyed man as a mixed blessing. Mages taking a keen interest in his personal affairs, especially when that interest could be as hostile as not, disturbed him greatly. While it did mean the powers of the royal enclave’s best scryers were dedicated to finding the man, the potential consequences…
Suppose this red-eyed stranger proved to be working against Galemar after all. Would they leave him be? Would his father be swept away in a mage battle he had no business with in the first place?
If the crown’s mages had been unable to locate them after multiple attempts spanning months, then the chances that they ever would were slim. That comforted him to a degree. Only to a degree, because it also meant there was nothing Marik could do either.
Since joining the Crimson Kings, Marik had felt at home in the place that suited him best in the entire world. His friends, his lifestyle…even his few enemies. His sense of belonging threw a damper over his raging need for answers. The daily routines had gradually inured him to the impatience.
Rail still lived. Somewhere. Marik believed that sooner or later they would find each other.
All he need do is pursue leads when they presented themselves and maintain the steady plodding without allowing discou
ragement to gain a hold over him.
Tru could scrye all he wanted. With a turn of luck, he might actually discover a new lead. With a bit more luck, he might even tell Marik about it.
Until then, there were no other available options. Marik had learned that changes could occur when least expected. He let things be, waiting for the shift. What could he do otherwise?
Nothing.
There was no point in brooding. Instead he concentrated on the business at hand. Yesterday he’d gathered a picture of the enemy forces in the southwestern corner. Today he would conduct two separate interviews, if he could manage it.
Tybalt’s clerks had coldly informed him that every minute of the knight-marshal’s day was previously scheduled for other matters than meeting with a scruffy hire-sword, no matter what his favor with the court might be. They were ‘too busy with their own tasks’ to help him learn what he needed about the potential forces Galemar could field for the Tullainian border defense.
He had pestered them about it until one snarled in annoyance. Marik held his ground. Only in the face of his stubborn persistence did a clerk finally inform him that any soldiers heading west rather than east would be the newest recruits fresh from training. Further questions met with increasing hostility until Marik decided it would be enough for going on with.
Which, in fact, tied in nicely with his second objective for the day. The black soldier prisoners were still being held at Trask’s camp since the army was at a loss for where else to put them. Marik had interrogated prisoners before, though he hardly considered himself an expert at it. Depending on how he played it, they would either confirm what he and Minna had pieced together yesterday, revel any flaws in their assumptions, or unwittingly pass on new information regarding their forces.
At the same time he could talk to Trask and see what raw recruits the western campaign would have to make do with.