Highlords of Phaer (Empire of Masks Book 1)

by Brock Deskins

  Quinlan turned and focused his light on Jareen’s immobile form. “Come, Jareen, we mustn’t dawdle. I swore that nothing would happen to you, and I need you at my side if I am to keep my word.”

  Jareen forced down his rage and willed his feet to move. He refused to look at the inquisitor, knowing that seeing the smirk Quinlan was certainly wearing would drive him to recklessness. He reminded himself that this was a long game, and he would not jeopardize it by giving in to Quinlan’s deliberate attempt to provoke him.

  “We’re just about there,” Atin said after walking several minutes in uncomfortable silence.

  Their helmet lanterns illuminated three bodies near several mounds of rocks that had once entombed them. Quinlan motioned everyone to stay where they were and walked up to the nearest corpse. Kneeling next to Sah Raphael’s body, he made a cursory examination of the dead man’s grey flesh marbled with blotchy bruises. He noted the numerous fractures making his limbs curve in several places where they should be straight.

  Quinlan lightly placed his fingertips against the side of the man’s head, touched the pads of his thumbs to his eyelids, and began shaping the magic in the air around him.

  “What are you doing?” Atin asked, unable to contain his uneasy curiosity.

  “I need to see what he saw in the last moments of his life,” Quinlan replied without opening his eyes and breaking his concentration.

  Lorbash hissed, “That’s necromancy!”

  “I am afforded a slight bit of latitude in the course of my duties.”

  Necromancy was anathema to the highlords. Everyone, even the highlords themselves, was forbidden to practice it on pain of horrific death. Although Quinlan may have had permission, even something as innocuous as death viewing required a considerable amount of leniency.

  Quinlan opened his eyes and played his beam around the cavern. “There was a rope tied between support beams.”

  Atin took a step forward. “That’s right. We tie them between posts to check for plate deviation. If the rope gains slack or tightens over time, we know the plates are still moving and how fast. It helps us determine a shaft’s stability.” He pointed to one such rope strung between the vertical beams with tick marks on the wall annotated with dates scrawled in chalk. “You can see here that the rope has risen about half an inch in the past week. Before the collapse, it had moved nearly three inches in the same amount of time.”

  “I see,” Quinlan replied, his voice laced with doubt.

  He squatted next to Braden’s body and repeated the spell. Apparently not seeing anything useful, he then turned to Sahma Yvette’s corpse. Eldon shifted uneasily as the inquisitor’s hands hovered above what remained of her face after he had crushed it with a rock. He glanced over at his friends and saw that they were all gripping their pick handles a bit tighter and shifting them on their shoulders.

  Quinlan shook his head, sighed, and stood up. “You said one of your men died in the cave-in. Where is his body?”

  “Gone,” Atin answered. “He died after the collapse, away from here. We didn’t think he was pertinent to your investigation and sent his body home almost a week ago.”

  Quinlan cursed. “It was extremely pertinent!”

  “I’m sorry, Inquisitor. We were told to recover the highborn’s bodies. No one said anything about anyone else. We lose half a dozen miners a day in this pit. No one cared before and we didn’t think anyone would now. The only reason Braden’s corpse is here and preserved is that he was buried with them and we only got them uncovered a couple of days ago. The sorcerers who came and preserved them lumped Braden into the spell as well, so we left him here.”

  “Where did they take his body?”

  “Back home to Glisteran.”

  Quinlan sighed. “Where they cremate their dead and mix their ashes into the soil. I’m done here then. I’ll need to get a team to help me bring the highborn back to the surface so I can return them to Phaer.”

  Atin nodded. “Eldon can take you back up and assemble some men with handcarts to recover the bodies. The rest of us will show Jareen to the mountain’s heart, and he can tell us what he needs.”

  Quinlan’s eyebrows rose. “I would love to be a part of that as well. The highborn aren’t in any hurry to go anywhere.”

  Jareen scowled. “I would like to speak to the foreman alone regarding this matter. Sah Auberon insisted I keep the details of the demonstration secret as much as possible.”

  Quinlan stared at Jareen for several long seconds. “Very well, I will go back up with Atin’s man while you all go have your secret meeting. I must say, Jareen, if your goal is to spike my curiosity to greater levels, you are doing an admirable job.”

  “I am doing nothing but what is required.”

  “I believe that, but for whom, you or your master?” The inquisitor turned to Eldon. “Lead me out. These corpses aren’t getting any fresher.”

  Atin pointed his light down the passageway. “What you seek is farther this way.”

  Jareen kept his light centered on Quinlan’s back even after he walked beyond its reach before turning about. “Lead on.”

  The massive chamber in which the heart lay was only a few hundred yards from the collapse. It too had been cleared of rubble and reinforced by a network of pilings and braces. A ramp made of the rocks cleared from the passageway allowed easy access to the chamber floor and to the heart itself.

  “Here she is,” Atin declared as he played his light across its black surface.

  Jareen studied the enormous boulder and found that there had been a bit of an exaggeration as to its mass. It was about half the size of a typical airship, perhaps a third that of the Voulge, but it was still awe-inspiring nonetheless.

  “The entire thing is pure void stone?” Jareen asked.

  “Near as we can tell, at least eighty-five percent. It has a few veins of basalt running through it instead of being the other way around as is usual. So what have you brought to show us that has to do with this big rock?”

  “How long do you think it would take your men to break it apart for transport to the smelters?”

  “We’ll be banging on this bitch for months at least, maybe a year before we get it reduced into chunks small enough to move. It takes void-steel tools to break apart pure void stone, and we don’t have that many to begin with. Of course, we’ll be making more as we harvest her. Even then, it’s damn slow going. One man might chip away fifty pounds or so in a twelve-hour shift, and we’re talking about several thousand tons here.”

  “What if I told you I have a way to break it apart in a month, possibly in as little as a week?”

  “I’d say you didn’t know shit about mining void stone.”

  Jareen unshouldered his heavy rucksack and pulled out one of a dozen stout bags packed with blasting powder, each the size of a man’s head. “This bag is filled with a powder that explodes when ignited. The blast is powerful enough to shatter rock. I believe it can reduce a wall of stone to rubble in an instant, that would take a team of miners weeks to dig by hand.”

  Atin scratched his chin while Lorbash and Merle exchanged hushed, excited words. “If that’s true, it’s mighty impressive, but void stone…”

  “I don’t know if it is powerful enough to shatter void stone. Like you said, I don’t know much about the stuff and nothing about mining it, but I have seen the power of this powder. The only thing to do now is test it.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Is there a crack or fissure in the heart I can pack this into?”

  Atin moved around to the opposite side of the boulder. “There’s a crack here where some basalt likely melted out and never refilled when this was still an active volcano. You can jam it into there if that’ll work for you.”

  Jareen followed him and packed as many powder bags into the crevice as he could and left several feet of fuse cord dangling down the side. “That should work. Keep all flame away from this cord. You do not want to be anywhere near it if it
goes off.”

  Atin nodded. “All right, I’ll take your word for it. What now?”

  “Now, we wait and hope Sah Auberon can convince Overlord Caelen to view a demonstration.”

  “If this stuff works at all like you say, I can see why you wanted to keep your mission a secret.”

  “This is Sah Auberon’s mission. I am here for something very different.”

  “The inquisitor is right, you are good at piquing a man’s curiosity.”

  “I need to speak with you alone,” Jareen said, glancing at the other two men.

  “Anything you have to say to me you can say in front of my friends.”

  “You are certain they are of like mind to yours?”

  “I trust them with my life and more.”

  “Then that begs the question, are you and I of like mind?”

  Atin shrugged. “I can’t know your mind, so I can’t say.”

  Jareen took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Seeing as how I can go no farther without you, I have no choice but to pray that we are. There is little doubt in my mind that Quinlan has reservations about the cave-in being an accident, and so do I. I think you orchestrated the entire thing. You knew days or even weeks in advance about Phaer sending representatives and you made sure that they visited the shaft that you deliberately undermined and rigged to collapse.”

  “That’s a mighty serious accusation,” Atin said, his voice as hard and cold as the stone surrounding them.

  “A short time ago, my idiot brother-in-law, Aiden, tried to assassinate Highlord Nahuza. Of course, Quinlan caught him and several of his conspirators. As punishment, the highlord ordered a purging of every man’s bloodline, down to first cousins. That purge included my wife…” Jareen choked on his words. “…and my son, who had recently been stricken blind by dust fever.”

  The three miners eased their stance and Atin said, “The highlords are cruel bastards.”

  “After several days of interrogation, Sah Auberon was able to release me. I went back to work, and while I had a highborn’s throat bared beneath a razor, I thought about opening him up right there and ending him like the highlord ended my family.”

  “You should have,” Merle said.

  Jareen nodded. “I was going to, but I realized I would have been as stupid as Aiden and accomplished nothing. Then I thought about Auberon’s powder and what I could do with it. He thinks only to make it a tool to impress the emperor. I mean to turn it into a weapon to destroy him, destroy them all.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Atin asked. “Drop it down from airships, plant it under Arikhan’s throne?”

  “That’s one use, but not the primary method, not the one that will bring the highborn to their knees.” Jareen pulled his homemade arquebus from the bag. “This is what will even our odds. This is how we make an army capable of standing against the sorcerers and their soldiers.”

  “What is it?”

  “The barrel is packed with a less volatile mix of the powder that when ignited propels a lead ball at great velocity. Watch.”

  Jareen lit the slow match with his lantern’s flame, aimed the arquebus at a wooden support piling, and fired. The musket discharged with a loud bang and a cloud of smoke. He led the miners to the beam and stuck his finger into the hole in the wood.

  “That will pierce any breastplate and possibly a sorcerer’s ward,” Jareen declared.

  Atin stared at the hole but looked skeptical. “It is impressive, but I don’t see that thing taking down the highlords. For one thing, they have armies numbering in the thousands, and that doesn’t even take into account the gendarmes.”

  “That is why I need you to make thousands of these,” Jareen countered.

  “Merle, what do you think of Jareen’s weapon?”

  The Thuumian held out his hand and Jareen gave him the arquebus.

  Merle studied it a moment. “It is interesting, but I would make many modifications. How long does it take to prepare the weapon to fire?”

  “A little under a minute, but I have not had a great deal of time to practice.”

  “Hmm, slower than a crossbow. The smoldering cord is a serious point of failure. If it goes out, the weapon is useless. I would equip it with a spring-loaded flint striker. Can sparks from a striker ignite your powder?”

  Jareen nodded. “If I ground the powder finer and made it a bit more combustible, it could work as a primer.”

  “The bore hole should be moved from the top to the side,” the Thuumian said. “Otherwise, the flash will blind the operator. As it is, the weapon is too slow to load. Your men might only get one shot off before being engaged in melee. They will require significant training, not just in using the weapon properly, but learning entirely new formations and drill movements.”

  Atin asked, “So you think this is a good weapon?”

  Jareen looked at Merle expectantly. Anytime you wanted an opinion when it came to killing, you asked a Thuumian. Their natural affinity for devising ways to kill and engage in combat were legendary, which is why leaders like Jareen’s brother gathered as many of them within his ranks as they could get.

  “Scores of men in formation could do a great deal of damage in a very short amount of time with such weapons, but it will require practice. It is strange and new, two things even experienced warriors do not care for. Give me a little time with it and I will bring out its potential.”

  Lorbash interjected, “This may prove valid against the common soldier, but I do not think it is sufficient to pierce a battle sorcerer’s wards, particularly if they are prepared. It certainly won’t break through the highlords’ tower defenses.”

  “What if we made some that were bigger?” Jareen asked.

  Atin arched his eyebrows. “How big?”

  “How big can you make it?”

  “Merle?”

  The Thuumian turned the crude arquebus over in his hands. “I do not know how much stress your powder will put on the barrel. Assuming we can contain the power of the explosion and keep the design simple, much like this, I see no reason we could not make one with a bore of a few inches. Of course, you would have to mount it on a cart or wagon.”

  Jareen smiled. “Or a score of them on an airship?”

  Atin’s face went slack. “Twin gods have mercy.”

  “Perhaps,” Jareen said, “but the highlords will get none from me.”

  Atin ran his fingers through his tangled, filthy hair. “This is all conjecture without the manufacturing and logistics to carry it out. There is no way we can build these weapons in secret much less get them into the hands of thousands of rebels.”

  “But can you build them?” Jareen asked.

  “Sure, we can build the weapons, even the big ones, but—”

  “I can get you all the powder we need, for both mining and to equip an army. I can also provide you with the secrecy we’ll require to do it and the logistics to get them into the hands of people willing to fight.”

  “How?”

  “The solution requires another question.”

  “Which is?”

  “Can you build an airship out of void steel?”

  “Twin gods above, you don’t think small, do you?” Atin exclaimed. “Short answer, no, we cannot build an airship out of void steel.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we don’t damn well know how to build an airship! If anyone did they would be in a shipyard, not banging on rocks.”

  Jareen chewed his lip and thought. “If I got you someone who knows how to build airships, could it be done? Is it a feasible concept?”

  “Lorbash?” Atin asked.

  The tall man sighed and wracked his brain. “It’s possible, in theory. It wouldn’t be easy though. You would need a large heart stone and twice as many innervators and pilots to keep the thing airborne, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t. The hardest thing would be the rune-scribing. In order for airships to fly, you have to have a network of interconnected sigils directing a lot
of arcane power. It’s not difficult to get the gold required to fill them, but carving them into void steel is going to be a real chore. That and the weight factor is the reason why we make them out of wood instead of iron or steel.”

  “We can work on figuring out how to inscribe the rune tracings, but you are certain you could make a void-steel airship fly if we had a shipwright?”

  Atin said, “Lorbash was a pilot before he got high on aether weed and crashed his airship, killing a highborn’s wife and crippling his son. That’s what got him sent here. If he says a void-steel airship can fly, it can fly. That still doesn’t answer the logistics problem.”

  “It does,” Jareen said. “At this moment, Sah Auberon is making a deal with Overlord Caelen to supply him with as much blasting powder as we can manufacture. That deal hinges on a single key factor, allowing us, by which I mean you, to make Arikhan an airship constructed out of void steel. That is going to require an enormous amount of on-site smelting, forging, and casting.”

  Atin nodded in unison with his men. “That will give us the ability to forge the barrels of your weapons, and with your blasting powder doing most of the labor-intensive work, it frees up a lot of men to assign to the airship detail.”

  “Exactly. That is why the airship is so important. It gives us not just the means to make the weapons but the secrecy Auberon and Caelen will demand. The airship is to be part of the next tribute, and I mean to make it the last one the highlords ever receive. If you can make the weapons, all we need to do next is create an army to wield them. How many men here do you think you can rally to our cause?”

  Atin smiled. “There are nearly three thousand men scurrying around this giant anthill, ninety percent of whom are either indentured or slaves. Every one of them would like nothing better than to plant his pick in a highlord’s head.”

  “Then they are the ones we’ll train to take with us as Phaer’s invading force, but that isn’t enough to destroy all of the highborn. We will need armies in every major city as well. I have already begun organizing the resistance cells in Velaroth, but we’ll need to have people staged in Vulcrad, Thuum, Nibbenar, and Glisteran as well if we are going to pull off a successful coup. It would be helpful if the shipwrights I enlist can be trusted to support us as well.”