Broken Mirrors

by A. F. Dery

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “My lord,” panted Elder Norin, one trembling hand grasping the door frame as if to hold himself aloft. “There is trouble.”

  Malachi closed his eyed briefly. He was in his study, finishing the last of what was rapidly becoming an epic series of letters to the High Lord. His temples throbbed in time to his pulse, and his leaden eyelids desperately wished to remained exactly where they were, but he pried them back open and regarded one of the Elders who sat on his Council with a look that he hoped resembled surprise.

  For he was surprised. He never saw any of the Council Elders except when he asked to see them. It was just the idea of one more thing going wrong, one more evil befalling him, that failed to cause much of an impression. He was fairly sure nothing could top seeing that knife jutting out of his pregnant wife’s shoulder.

  “Indeed, honored Elder?” he said politely, motioning with his quill pen for the man to continue.

  “Eladria closes her borders! There are soldiers everywhere, armed to the teeth!”

  “Everywhere?” Malachi frowned, leaning forward and dropping the pen abruptly. “On our soil?”

  “No, my lord, they remain at their own borders, but I’ve never heard of so many simply standing watch! There are hundreds, just from what we can see! They no doubt amass for an attack!” the Elder cried in a rush. Though the title was an honorific and therefore not actually contingent upon the bearer’s age, as a general rule, the Elders were not youthful citizens by any means. This man was perhaps one of the younger ones, merely graying and with all his hair, but his ashen skin and obvious agitation seemed somehow to transform him into a man of a hundred instead of roughly half that.

  Oh gods, thought Malachi, sitting back in his chair and pressing his fingertips against the throbbing. Perhaps Eladria had heard of his prior accusations to the High Lord about Maggie’s poisoning. He’d not been thinking very clearly when he’d written that letter, and when he’d realized he’d misjudged the situation, Malachi had next sent a suitably tactful retraction, but the High Lord had not acknowledged it at all in his subsequent correspondence. He’d thought it was the High Lord graciously overlooking this unfortunate lapse, but now he had to wonder. It would be just like Eladria to defend his honor first and investigate the actual offense after the fact, assuming there were any survivors about to answer questions.

  “But they are just...standing?” Malachi asked, his mind whirling.

  “Thus far, my lord,” said the Elder ominously, at last dropping his hand and straightening in the doorway as he caught his breath. “None may go in nor come out, from what I hear.”

  “Is it just at our border?” Malachi thought of the rumors of Lyntaran Raiders. Perhaps Eladria had heard of that as well. He could well imagine his former friend mustering a fearsome show in response to something like that, like a bear showing its teeth at a would-be rival.

  “We do not know, my lord. We none of us dare to go too close, as you can imagine,” Elder Norin replied nervously, casting an obvious look of longing at one of the chairs by Malachi’s desk, which he, in turn, dutifully ignored as a matter of principle.

  “He can’t stop us from moving freely on our own land, or on the land of our allies, for that matter,” Malachi said firmly. “I would know if he is gathering troops at all Eladria’s borders or ours alone. I will send a messenger to Ossian. She shares part of Eladria’s western border before the mountains overtake it.”

  Elder Norrin bowed, recognizing one of Malachi’s dismissals when he saw one, and hurried away.

  “Damned Eladrians,” Malachi muttered, pulling out a fresh sheet of parchment. His pen had barely scratched its surface when he heard another breathless “My lord!” from his doorway.

  He looked up reluctantly to see one of his new lieutenants, ashen-faced and grim. “Ossian attacks!”

  Malachi stared at him in bemusement, then slowly put the parchment and pen away. “Well, that saves me some ink,” he muttered.

  “My lord, we are defending the border, but we await your word on whether we should deploy the mechanical men,” the lieutenant said urgently. “Their forces thus far do not outnumbers ours- there were perhaps fifty men from Ossian, all infantry, when I came to you. But it is only a matter of time before they send reinforcements, if this is the start of an invasion force. They well could already be there.”

  “They’re called sentries, and fifty men is no invasion force, beginning or otherwise,” Malachi frowned. “What the hell could they want? I thought we were on good terms, Lady Ossian and I. Janice, I think her given name is. Or Jana. Something with a ‘J’, at any rate.”

  “My lord!” repeated the lieutenant, practically dancing now in his impatience.

  “Fine, yes, of course, deploy them,” Malachi said curtly. “What do you think they’re for, man? Decoration?”

  The lieutenant bowed and disappeared with speed back down the corridor. Malachi heard a strange scuffle, followed by another Council Elder at his door.

  “My lord, the Raiders have returned!” the old man said on a fit of coughing. When he caught his breath, he added, “There are reliable witnesses this time.”

  “Big surprise,” Malachi said darkly. “Are they riding on Eladrians, by any chance?”

  “My lord!” the Elder looked shocked.

  “Just wondering what else could go wrong,” Malachi said bitterly. “First the Eladrians start to swarm their side of the border, then Lady Ossian goes barking mad, and now Raiders from Lyntara have magically appeared out of nowhere impossibly far south of their own country with nary a word from anyone in between. I can’t believe this is all coincidence.”

  “But how could it be related?” the Elder wondered, his bushy white eyebrows drawing together in confusion. “Ossian is part of the Union under the High Lord, they couldn’t be allied with Lyntara. Same for Eladria. Neither should have any hostilities towards us, my Lord, unless they have been somehow provoked.”

  “Provoked, indeed,” Malachi said with a dry little laugh. But he was thinking of that one, particularly inflammatory, letter he’d written to the High Lord about Eladria.

  Could Ossian be in league with the bastard? Malachi felt a sudden, unaccountable chill at the very thought. Eladria and Ossian didn’t get along at Court, but if Ossian was looking for an opportunity...but why would she? He wasn’t the warmest of neighbors, certainly, but he could be civil when it suited him.

  “My lord,” the Elder said, with the weary mien of one who had been repeating himself many times.

  “Eh?” said Malachi, rousing himself from the maelstrom of worry in his head.

  “What ought we to do?” the old man twisted his hands together in agitation.

  Malachi considered this. He couldn’t fight three fronts at once without spreading his forces unpleasantly thin. His troops were as yet unblooded, and though they seemed to pick up the control of the sentries well enough, they had yet to prove their mastery while under fire. He’d never before in his reign had to contemplate engaging in battle with more than one country at a time, and never before a neighbor. He realized that he was in well over his head.

  “I will send a messenger to the High Lord, apprising him of these...events,” Malachi said slowly. “We will send a unit of sentries to pursue these Raiders, send forces to the border, and an envoy to Eladria to ask what the hell he’s on about.”

  “An envoy?” the Elder looked puzzled.

  “You know, diplomats. Emissaries. They form envoys like geese form gaggles,” Malachi explained.

  “My lord,” the Elder said carefully, “we have none of these...’diplomats’ you mention.”

  “Don’t we?” Malachi smiled with alarming warmth. “Congratulations! You’ve been promoted!”

  “My lord!” the Elder held up his hands in a show of helplessness, his eyes wide with fright, but Malachi waved him away and said loudly over the old man’s stammering protests, “You leave immediately. Don’t bother coming back without word from those b
arbarians.”

  “I can’t speak Eladrian!” the Elder spluttered.

  “They speak the same language we do, just with a lot more grunting. If you really can’t understand them, try speaking more loudly and utilizing simple hand gestures,” Malachi advised impatiently.

  “What if they don’t believe that I’m actually a diplomat?”

  Malachi considered that a moment, and spying a seal of his coat-of-arms sitting on his desk, he snatched it up and tossed it to the Elder, who fumbled in catching the small piece of metal. “Now if you don’t mind, I have a letter to write and sentries to deploy before anything else goes wrong.”

  The Elder stared at him stricken for another moment, clutching the seal, before disappearing down the hall. Malachi sighed, feeling every year of his life weighing on him anew as he again pulled out his pen and parchment.

  The next four days had to be, in Malachi’s own estimation, the longest of his adult life. He deployed his forces as he had told the Council Elder he would, with orders to both the sentries pursuing the Raiders and the forces he was sending to Ossian’s borders to bring back live subjects for questioning. He also spared a couple of men- of the fleshly variety- to accompany his newly minted “diplomat” to Eladria. He figured it was the closest thing to the least he could do without actually doing nothing.

  Orders given, forces deployed and diplomat on the march, he then felt torn between rushing to Ossian’s border to see things for himself and doing the presumably prudent thing by awaiting word to be sent instead. So he paced his halls like a caged animal, running through all the possible scenarios and explanations in his head in a relentless litany of doom. He forced himself at random to pay brief, distracted visits to his Lady, whose condition remained unchanged, right down to the worry in her eyes. Under other circumstances, her visible, though silent, concern would have been enough to afflict him with guilt, but he was now too anxious to even register it as more than a fleeting thought.

  By the end of the fourth day, with the sun sinking below the horizon, he had barely slept apart from a fitful collapse halfway through day three and was worked into such a state that he was scarcely three breaths away from riding out to Ossian when a messenger finally arrived. Malachi saw the hapless young man from a window he was pacing past and met him at the front door, throwing it open while the messenger’s hand was still halfway to the handle. From the fretful way the youth cringed at the sight of him, Malachi supposed he must have looked like he was on the cusp of taking him up in passionate embrace, but he quickly dismissed the temptation to traumatize one of his loyal subjects and instead said, “Well, out with it! What the hell is going on? Why are there no captives?”

  “I-I do not know, my lord. Your general sent me with this letter for you,” the messenger hastily thrust a rolled up parchment into his lord’s hands and took a carefully spaced step backwards. Malachi unfurled it with uncharacteristic clumsiness, his hands shaking in a deplorable betrayal of nerves as his eyes quickly skipped over the inky scrawl. When he did not hit upon any key words like “retreat,” “massacre,” or obvious invocations to any known deity, he returned to the beginning and read it slowly.

  To my Lord Malachi,

  The troops of Ossian have been subdued. Many have fled back over the border into their homeland, but per your instruction, we did not pursue. Our casualties are few and there have been no losses on our side. Ossian has not been so fortunate and two survivors in fair condition are being taken to you per your original request and should be following this messenger within a half-day.

  My lieutenants and I have reached no understanding of our own as to why this attack occurred. Deeply troubling to us is that Ossian’s forces were clearly scattered and aimless, appearing to simply cross the border and attack the first Malachaian they saw. We saw none of them wearing signs of rank and none we could identify as officers. The ones we are sending to you would not speak to us to even name themselves. It is difficult to believe that this, on its own, could have been a true attempt at invasion.

  We will remain at the border in a defensive position until we receive further orders.

  Malachi suddenly felt all the exhaustion of the past four days catching up with him as he read the letter a second time. None of it made any sense. But at least he would soon have someone to interrogate about it. That much cheered him a little, along with the fact that invasion at least did not appear to be imminent, even though that could change at any moment.

  “Uh, sir!” Malachi glanced up from the parchment and saw the messenger staring wide-eyed past the front gate. The youth simply pointed. A line of sentries was marching towards them, their rhythmic clinking only just becoming audible.

  “Excellent,” Malachi said, folding up the letter. “They must be the ones I sent after the Raiders.”

  It is odd that they have returned so quickly, he thought, squinting at their approach. He had expected it to be some days more before their return, particularly if there was any question of battle. He saw as they came closer that there were no captives, but one of the sentries in the front of their marching formation was holding something clenched in a claw-like appendage that he couldn’t quite make out.

  Malachi walked to meet them, feeling apprehension tightening in his chest. As he grew closer, it became apparent there were gaps in their ranks. Any hope that there might not have been Raiders after all quickly evaporated.

  “I’m never that lucky,” he mumbled as the sentry holding something made his offering: a jaggedly torn piece of purple and red cloth that had clearly once been a Lyntaran banner. He could still make out the distinctive coat of arms of their lord, embroidered into the cloth: a scythe over what was supposed to be a map. In the banner’s present condition, the map part looked more like a blob, but there was still no mistaking the curved blade, even through the rust-colored stains that were undoubtedly dried blood.

  He only hoped it was dried Lyntaran blood, but the hope was a weak and faltering thing as he took in the appearance of his sentries up close for the first time. There had clearly been some battle, but judging by their speedy return, it had not lasted long. Nor had they lost, for none would have returned to him if there were still enemies living that they could track.

  The sentries stared at him mutely, awaiting orders, and more than ever, Malachi longed to have the knowledge to give the metallic creatures speech. He wanted to demand answers from them, descriptions and numbers of foes, but there were no such answers to be obtained. There was no doubt now that there were Raiders and that they were quelled for the moment, but this was terrible news. He felt himself growing sick at the implications and he abruptly turned from them, pressing a fist against his mouth. Even with the “reliable witnesses” the Elder had mentioned, somewhere deep inside, he had hoped they were wrong.

  All that was left, he thought, was to interrogate the Ossian captives when they arrived and await the High Lord’s response to his last letter mentioning the Raiders- and of course, to await the return of his new Diplomat from Eladria. I never thought I would see the day that I regretted cutting ties with Thane, Malachi thought wearily, dismissing the messenger and quickly issuing orders to the lead sentry for he and his fellows to return to Malachi’s workshop for repairs. If that ugly bastard isn’t in on this, I could use an ally right beyond my border who knows what the hell is going on.

  And he had a feeling Eladria must know something, if his own troops were gathering at his borders. He sighed and knuckled his aching eyes, trudging back inside to retire to his bed. He would sleep on it and see what the morning brought.

  As it turned out, with the first rays of sunlight came a small contingent of his men surrounding a pair of bloodied and bewildered prisoners. For reasons Malachi would never comprehend, his men had escorted them directly to the audience chamber rather than the dungeon.

  “What, you think they are our honored guests?” Malachi spat at them impatiently the moment he strode into the room. Far from improving them, a few hours of sleep s
eemed to have degraded his raw nerves further still. He felt as though he were walking a knife’s edge, but a knife’s edge when it came to what, he wasn’t entirely certain.

  “N-no, milord,” said their officer meekly. “But they are still technically allies...” His voice trailed off as Malachi stared at him incredulously.

  “Really?” he managed to get out finally. His head continued to throb, unrelieved by rest, and he felt his face heat as he struggled not to shout. “Were they actually serving tea and cake at our borders, then? I appear to have been woefully misinformed! Please, good sir, set me straight! Have we abused our honorable allies for no cause? Were they actually bringing picnic baskets instead of battle to our fair land? Ought I prostrate myself now in apology before the Lady Ossian for this dreadful misunderstanding, or should I debase myself in writing first in hopes of softening her up? I await your counsel, sir!”

  The officer stared back at him, red faced now but silent. Malachi drew a deep, ragged breath, unnerved by his own lapse in self control. The stress is getting to me. I need to be stronger than this. It isn’t the end of the world until the High Lord asks it very nicely. Unwillingly, he felt the corners of his mouth rise into a smirk at the old Court joke, and the officer’s eyes narrowed warily.

  “Never mind,” Malachi muttered, and he nodded his head towards the prisoners. “Welcome to my audience chamber, prisoners of war. You will be becoming acquainted with the dungeon shortly. I regret to say that my staff has not been keeping it up to my usual standards, if in fact I had any standards when it comes to the maintenance of traitorous sons of dogs who break treaties. Did you have anything you wanted to say before you make yourselves at home? Any protests of innocence, perhaps, or claims of merely following orders but deep down, always adoring your Malachaian neighbors and wishing you could be one of them and thinking our tax policies so very fair and our leader- that being me- so very wise? And so on?”