by Damien Lake
“Uh…” Marik glanced at the two women, who looked not in the least discomforted by this talk, the way he felt. “Yeah. That’s pretty clever, Dietrik.”
“Trask had the first one questioned this afternoon while you were entertaining the council.” Dietrik shook his head. “A chap should learn from his mistakes, I suppose. That sounds the best order for the day, all around.”
“What do you mean?” Ilona asked.
“Only that these folks take a rather serious view on one of their own spilling secrets. Or when they think one might have. We put the fellow we questioned back into the general area. A mark later we found him dead. Broken neck.”
Marik winced. “Did you get anything useful out of him, I hope?”
“Not much. You likely remember that Trask is not too chuffed about the ways a prisoner is questioned. We didn’t want to cross any lines, on the other hand. No sense alienating the whole lot of them right from the get go.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“The only useful information was that the vast majority of their forces will be tied down in Tullainia. They have to hold what they took, and they took too much at once during the last push. I’d be surprised if they can keep a firm grip on the entire lot without local rebels unseating at least a handful of their garrisons.”
“There’s always hope for that.” Marik glanced sideways. Ilona, as he expected, found this a less interesting topic than the earlier matters. He found her making eye contact with Rosa. Slight twitches signaled that they were in the midst of their own, unspoken dialog.
She stopped whatever communication they were engaged in to return his attention. “I heard you fought off another magic user in your last battle.”
He winced. Hard. How had she learned about that? Certainly not from the scant retelling he had delivered during their short reunion before leaving the Standing Spell.
“That’s…”
Ilona, knowing him well, pushed on after he trailed off. “I’d like to hear the details. And from you as well,” she added, focusing on Dietrik. “You were there, too. From the look of it, he didn’t escape unscratched.”
Worried and self-conscious, Marik reflexively raised a hand to the left side of his face while Dietrik answered, “Unscratched? No, lass. That’s plain enough. But he is still whole, still cranky, and still as energetic as an old goat!”
Marik kicked Dietrik in his shin under the table, which neatly put an end to his friend’s suggestive leer.
Later, after they paid for their meal, and a whole silver at that, Ilona said she wanted to take a post-dining stroll. Dietrik offered to escort Rosa back to the Spell. When she made no plea for or against it, they drifted away into the city’s night.
Ilona brought him to an Inner Circle square he had never been to before. Roads emptied into the vast space. Trees, gardens, fountains and open-walled structures filled the area. It was a place where harried nobles enjoyed coming for relaxation, to rest from the endless toil of maintaining their position among the other court predators. She brought them up the stairs of what looked like a miniature bell tower transplanted from a cathedral.
They entered a flat area at the top with four benches facing outward in a square. Four pillars supported the stone roof, the stairwell descending from the center of the bench formation, the walls absent to provide a view over the expanding city. Marik deduced that this vista must rest atop one of the highest points of the low hill on which the original Thoenar was situated. Despite taller buildings than the bell tower rising less than a half-mile away, the view revealed both the Starshine and Pinedock Rivers twinkling in the moonlight. Their waters flanked the sprawling cityscape. In the distance could be seen the rising hills that housed farmlands on the city’s southern outskirts.
They sat without speaking, side by side, Marik enjoying the beauty of the world in a way he rarely did. To often he took it for granted. When he felt Ilona’s fingers trace lightly over his left face, it was as if he had been waiting for it.
“A close one,” she whispered.
“That’s right.” The breeze blowing through the loft, a bit sharp with the last icy breath of a dying winter, seemed to contain the unspoken truth of his simple acknowledgement.
“What were you thinking about when it happened?”
He collected his thoughts before answering honestly. “Hard to say. It’s fuzzy. It happened so fast, but felt as if it lasted forever. I’m not sure I thought about anything specifically.”
Her fingers left his face to reach around his shoulders. He matched the gesture. “I would have been suspicious if you said you were thinking only of me. It sounds too much like the bard.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t…think of you. Every day.”
“I know that.” He heard a crinkling, and felt a rolled paper pressed into his hand. No doubt what it must be. “But anyone can be eloquent when it suits their purposes. Running the Spell has taught me never to trust a poet. Actions will always speak louder to me than any words.”
“When words are all you can use, it’s hard to find the right ones.” He kept his gaze fixed out over the distant land. “And if you do, you’re not sure if they are.”
“Women like Rosa enjoy having their heads swoon over romantic phrases.” At his snort, she cuffed his ear gently. “Don’t judge people on their appearance. I would have thought you had learned that by now.”
“That’s funny if you consider what it took for me to catch your eye.”
This time her cuff was followed by a painful pinch to his earlobe. “My point was that I’ve been hardened by the world. Words can’t be trusted if there’s no action to support them.”
“I meant every word I said in this.”
He felt her warm breath when she leaned closer to whisper. “Then you’ll have to prove it. And spend a long time proving it.”
Despite the scant moonlight, he could sense the endless expanses of crystalline brown that existed within her perfect eyes. “I hope to. For years…and longer.”
* * * * *
Marik pounded on the tabletop. “If you don’t know, then how is anyone else supposed to?”
Inora kept her cool. “Are you expecting a definite answer when all we can do is guess? This is utterly unlike anything we’ve ever dreamed of! How can we figure out in a day something we never expected would be possible at all?”
“You’ve had more than a day,” he nearly snarled. “In fact, you’ve had time since before I ever learned of it! If we can’t come up with anything by tonight…” He trailed off, at a loss for any suitable threat he could make good on. Too much responsibility, no power to reinforce it. Lovely.
The lady geomancer returned to the large tome she had been perusing. It sat on a horseshoe of tables the mages had formed around the scrying window that displayed the floating mountain. Each table was buried beneath countless books and documents gathered from every corner of Thoenar, from the palace library to private collections to the sprawling city library that kept house in the Second Ring.
King Raymond Cerella’s royal enclave only had two pure geomancers. Six others possessed the talent in conjunction with others, such as Caresse did, the mercenary band’s own wizardess. Of the six, one was a wizard. The other five were two mystics who were twins, two witches and a warlock…which were in fact the same blend. Tollaf had never explained why the males were called warlocks while the females were witches.
These eight people were the ones tasked with discovering everything the council needed to know regarding the impossibly airborne peak. So far, none of their ideas had sounded satisfactory, not to their own ears let alone anyone else’s.
Marik left them to stalk up the stairs to reach Celerity’s workroom. Entering, he bitterly pondered why it was hers at all. Tru used it every day. Most of the room’s contents were his, or there to aid his magician’s spells. The enclave’s chief had yet to make personal use of it once within Marik’s sight.
He bypassed the newest reports stacked on the t
able by the door. At the room’s far end he flung himself into the comfortable stuffed chair Celerity used as an unofficial throne when she deigned to be present. “Any luck?” he barked.
Tru glanced away from staring into the large mirror only inches off his nose. He looked fish-eyed. “What say who?”
With great effort of will, Marik prevented a sigh. “Any luck with scrying my father or the Red Man?”
“Does this,” Tru replied with a wave of one hand, “look empty or does it look full? It would have been better if you’d brought back the glass Rail had been drinking out of, or strands of his hair. Then I could force through the block around them, probably, then block the block so we couldn’t get blocked.”
“I wasn’t counting on them vanishing into thin air!” Marik stopped his teeth from clenching any worse. The last several mornings he had awakened with aching jaw muscles.
Minna strode purposefully toward him. He accepted that with equal parts relief and jaundice. She had been annoyed at him entering into their routine at first, especially as a new analyst. Once she realized he would be taking every scrap of heat from the council in place of them all, she had changed her attitude.
“These just came over, tagged for you specifically. Your friend made sure they were routed directly to us before going through army intelligence.”
Marik took the papers. He recognized Dietrik’s tidy scrawl though the routing note bore no flavor of him. Trask could not have cared less, and so Dietrik had taken an active role in the duty of reporting what progress was made with the Arronathian prisoners.
And what a sack of worms that simple word had opened up. Using the information Rail had bequeathed him in the Queen’s Head, Wyman had attacked the few prisoners who understood Traders with the title. Simply the word “Arronath’ had instantly cracked many of their steadfast foundations. They were no longer certain they were held captive by ignorant serfs who would eventually receive the wrath of whichever god they worshiped.
Too bad it had yet to crack them enough to form a spring head. Wyman continued to work on it, carefully mining them, hoping to tap that information well. By all accounts, the man could be skilled at such delicate work. Marik never would have expected it of the silent lone wolf.
Then again, he might only be a silent loner when Marik was close at hand. The wedge his mage talent drove between him and his unit mates frustrated him to no end. If it weren’t for Dietrik acting as a bridge, he would hardly know what half of them looked like.
He flipped off the first page which never held anything worth reading. It was filled with hundreds of minor notations scribed by Trask’s report drafter, each completely useless as far as practical knowledge went. A conviction had gradually grown within Marik that army intelligence was not half so complicated as they wanted everyone to believe. They only made the job as confusing to outsiders as possible to justify their outrageous pay, then to cover up any blatant errors on their part that had cost soldiers their lives.
Dietrik had gone a long way toward simplifying the camp’s reports, much to Marik’s delight. Naturally, this had irked the knight-marshal, who employed it as one of the pry bars in his arsenal to have Marik sent back to his band where he belonged. Security against potential enemy spies or similar nonsense. As if a skulking Arronathian operative could understand Galemaran script in the first place. The council meeting had mostly been spent defending himself, especially after requesting further time.
Overall numbers look to be approximately one-hundred-thousand Arronaths detailed with Tullainian campaign. Holding garrisons in kingdom and border stations along Perrisan border require estimated eighty percent of total personnel. Arronathian beasts, classified through interrogation as ‘Taurs’, are of primary use as frontline breakers. As such, the majority of available Taur forces suffered major damage in Galemaran assault. Believed of original five-hundred Taurs claimed, potentially half might remain after Tullainian/Galemaran battles.
Marik read it twice, trying to come to terms with the threat facing him. After tapping the papers against his lips, he noticed the last page was an extra, outside the report’s usual parameters. It bore a simple note from Dietrik, thoughts meant for him alone.
There are several points in conflict, so don’t be rattled by the flap. This is only a general estimate until we can make the different stories tally with one another. If you ask me, Trask’s man is ‘worst-casing’ it.
The page was unsigned. Marik jotted the salient details he needed on Dietrik’s sheet before handing the stack back to Minna, keeping the last page. That drew a frown. She disliked anyone tampering with her documents.
Tru had resumed his attempts to locate the Red Man. Celerity still wanted him found, the information Marik had passed her notwithstanding. She would only trust the story once she had questioned the man personally. Secretly, he hoped the chief mage did find the Red Man. No doubt she would receive a rude awakening.
Except he remembered the man’s painfully bright and bizarre aura. If Tru scryed the man, it would only be because he wanted to be found, and not a heartbeat sooner.
With Tru busy and Minna fuming at him, Marik stepped to the darkest corner to be alone with his thoughts. Twenty-thousand possible black soldiers. Two-hundred-fifty possible…what were they? Taurs, he reread.
It could easily be the worst case, as Dietrik believed. The problem was that worst case scenarios existed because they were the worst eventuality that really could happen. If there weren’t twenty-thousand hostile soldiers in Galemar at the moment, there might be by this time tomorrow. And the monsters…
Most of the reports bowing a table downstairs dealt with wild Taurs on the loose. Massive meat-eating predators that had escaped during the Rovasii battle. Beasts that prowled the surrounding lands on their own. The Arronaths were attempting to recapture them with limited success. How many of the potential two-fifty were lurking in woods and forests, waiting to attack a mobile army detachment long before they expected to reach contested areas?
One or two on their own would not pose much trouble…if the men were expecting to face the beasts. He knew well…very well, exactly how much damage the beasts could lay on the best fighting forces when they descended without warning.
“Minna,” he called. The woman looked up from her private desk. He had arranged for her to have it outside the chaos of the main scrying room. “Did we ever get word back on available crossbows we can use?”
“Two days ago,” she answered in a tone that conveyed what she thought of him being unaware of the fact. “It is in the stack along with the other equipment reports from the Thoenar Division quartermasters.”
He followed her wave to the piles he had charged past. After twice collecting sheaves his fumbling hands scattered across the floor, he located the report he wanted. Marik flipped the cover page away without looking at it, cursing Dietrik’s absence among the men running the equipment stores for all army forces and training programs near Thoenar.
At last he found the one piece of information he had requested sandwiched between a hundred other details he had no interest in. Only two-hundred crossbows were in store that were reliable. A further hundred were questionable, possibly still in condition to be repaired. The best ones had already been taken by army divisions heading east to the Nolier border.
That was only marginally helpful. If they knew exactly where the Taurs would attack, they might be able to position their few crossbows to best effect. What were the odds on being that lucky? Not even Kerwin would bet on them. The safest way to take on the Taurs would be with, at minimum, five heavy crossbows dedicated to each furry body.
And where did this damned mountain come into the bigger strategy? Wyman and the others had yet to peel anything loose from the prisoners there. Until they knew what it was, what it did and how it did it, it could be the dark horse that shattered all their careful plans. Marik returned downstairs to lurk by the scrying room’s rear wall, watching the geomancers work the puzzle, a dark glare on his face.
Disjointed facts swirled in his head. The last eightday since returning to Thoenar…the diorama, the ambush by the king’s seneschal, Knight-Marshal Tybalt’s insulted irritation, trying his best to act like he knew what in the lowest hell he was doing, finding Rail when he least expected it, the last two nights with Ilona…his head contained a whirlpool where colors from each pulled away from their original events in liquid paint lines to form a dizzying spiral where up was left, green was red and myth reality.
He waited for a full quarter-mark, watching them. They each stayed where they were, noses pressed to their individual research materials. How, by the gods, did they expect to solve any mystery before winter when they never talked to each other? Without communication, they would end up duplicating each other’s work.
Marik finally had enough. He marched to the horseshoe’s bend and slapped a palm flat on the topmost book since he could only find enough room for a fingertip if he wanted to pound the tabletop.
“Tell me what you know about it so far.”
They exchanged eye contact across the tables. Inora spoke for the group. “We haven’t had time to work out any further problems. I hope you aren’t expecting quick resolutions.”
“That’s not what I meant. I want you to start at the beginning with the basics. Why are we so certain geomancy is the force behind the mountain’s power to fly? Why not magecraft, or sorcery, or magician’s spells?”
The silent eye contact started anew. Marik, having enough of it, lifted the book in order to slam it down harder. He pointed at the man sitting to the window frame’s left side. “You seem to know a lot,” he barked. “Why don’t you begin by explaining it to me.”