He set it carefully on the desktop, and the memory of the first time he had placed it on this very desk overlaid itself on the present.
To this day, it was the single most daring act he had ever accomplished. He was still not entirely certain what had possessed him to even contemplate such a mad action. Although he had not known it at the time, it was Emperor Charliss' policy to assign each of the potential candidates for the Throne to a stint within the Imperial Secretariat, so that they would know what the duties of their underlings were—and where the opportunities for bribery and espionage among those underlings lay. During his tour of duty, the Imperial Seal had come into his hands for two entire days, as he followed Charliss on a Royal Progress through newly conquered lands. Charliss had been preoccupied with the machinations of a local satrap and had immersed himself in dealing with his twisted and involved plots to defraud Emperor and Empire of their rightful portions and authority. He'd sensed possible treachery, and had entrusted the Seal to Tremane while he dealt—personally and magically—with the "problem." He'd had no other thoughts on his mind, and it might have been that he had forgotten that Tremane was a mage.
But Tremane's skill, while not the equal of the Emperor's, was still sufficient to copy the Seal. By sheerest accident, he'd had the time, the materials, and the Seal itself, all at once, all readily at hand. The temptation had been too great; he'd bent to it and had made the Seal during one long, feverish night of work.
Once he had made it, however, he had almost destroyed it in panic. Only one thing had prevented him from doing just that: the existence of this desk.
He'd inherited it from an aunt with numerous lovers—many of them dangerous to know, all of them married to other women. She'd had the drawer built to conceal missives too hazardous to keep, but too precious—emotionally or with an eye to later blackmail—to burn. It was the only place remotely safe enough to hold something as risky as a copy of the Imperial Seal.
Since that time, the desk and its burdensome secret had always traveled with him. He had used it only once, just to be certain that it was identical in every way to the original, and then only to seal a document the Emperor had already approved and signed, one of an entire stack of similar documents that Charliss had signed and sealed without glancing more than once at each.
Now, however, Tremane was about to forge a document that the Emperor would definitely never approve of.
On the other hand, in order to reach him to bring him to justice, once the deception was discovered, the Emperor was going to have to come to him. Or, at least, his minions were.
That was hardly going to be an easy proposition, all things considered. There was a great deal of disturbed and hostile territory between him and the Emperor.
It was also going to be some time before Tremane was found out, and during that time conditions were only going to worsen, which would further protect him from Imperial wrath.
Besides all that, there was no telling if Charliss could manage to track Tremane down in the first place, much less put through a Portal to haul him back for justice—or send troops across the unsettled countryside of Hardorn to accomplish the same goal.
In either case, he would prove he could reach them—and there would be questions about why he had not evacuated the troops if he could pursue Tremane to bring him to book for his actions. Charliss would have no excuse not to bring back the rest of the army as well as the errant Grand Duke.
If he does come after me, I would just as soon it were an overland trek. I have a notion that I could manage to escape from custody during a mage-storm if I put my mind to it. He shook his head again; he was allowing himself to be distracted by speculations. He must keep his mind on his immediate goals.
Especially since he was going to need intense concentration and a very steady hand for the next few hours.
He wrapped a scarf around his forehead to keep sweat out of his eyes; not that he was too warm, but he knew from past experience that he was going to be sweating from nervousness. He had to be able to see clearly, and he didn't want any drops falling on his pages either; Imperial scribes did not sweat over their work. Setting aside the secret drawer and the pen drawer, he selected a new glass pen and picked out one very special bottle of ink. While this bottle was not going to land him in any trouble, it might have caused some raised eyebrows if anyone had known that Grand Duke Tremane possessed a bottle of the special ink used for official Imperial documents, ink made with tiny, glittering flecks of silver and gold in it, to mark the letters as coming unmistakably from the hand of an Imperial scribe.
First, though, he took out a piece of paper and a silver point pencil, and worked out the exact wording of the document he intended to forge.
It wasn't terribly elaborate—but it wasn't every day that someone came to an Imperial storage depot, authorized to empty it and the Imperial pay coffers of every scrap, bit of grain, and copper coin. The wording had to be such that it would cause no one to question it during the time he and his men were there.
This was the plan. He had one chance to ensure the survival of all of his men this winter—if the storage depot was fully stocked, as he expected it to be, there would be enough supplies there to see them all through, not only until spring, but possibly even well into summer. If the coffers were full, the men could be paid for long enough that he would have the time to win their personal loyalty. Even if there was no place for the soldiers to spend the money locally, their morale would be buttressed simply by having it to spend later. So now it was time.
This was the Portal he had targeted for reopening, the one leading to the storage depot lying nearest them. Fortunately, it was in his duchy, and he'd had to fight the temptation to use it to flee homeward, leaving his men to loot the depot and then fend for themselves. But his duty lay here; his duchy was in good hands, and there was no one there he had any real emotional ties to. And frankly, when his raid was complete, he would be much safer here than there. Here was a known quantity. The mage-storms may have left his home duchy a chaotic wreck, and holding a Portal open long enough to move more than just a raiding party through could be impossible.
This was a small Portal, able to a take only a few men at a time, and the mages doubted that they would be able to hold it open for more than a few hours. He would not be able to use it to bring more than a scant fraction of the troops home—but he could use it to bring everything they needed back here.
He had a select group of experienced and trusted men from his personal guard ready to move the moment he alerted them. They were all huge; as his bodyguards, they towered over him. Before joining his guard, they had all worked as stevedores or in similar occupations. The Portal wasn't even large enough to admit anything bigger than a donkey; what they brought out would have to be moved with the help of those tiny beasts of burden and their own muscles.
Once he had the wording worked out, he dipped his pen carefully in the special ink, and began tracing the glittering letters on the snow-white vellum.
The very act of writing with such ink on such a surface brought back more memories—of overseeing the Imperial scribes, of writing such documents himself during a brief stint as an Imperial scribe, when he had been brought to court by his father at the age of sixteen.
All the discipline drilled into him at that time came back, steadying his hand, and sending his breathing into the calming patterns that enabled the scribes to work, bent over their desks, in a state of meditative concentration for hours at a time. This did not, however, keep him from making mistakes.
An Imperial document would be flawless. There would be no mistakes, no blots, no misspelled words. He could not permit the tiniest discrepancy between this document and the genuine ones that would have been presented ever since the depot opened.
He made and destroyed half a dozen copies before he had a perfect one. As he waited for the ink to dry, he threw the rest, and his faint original of the wording, into the fire. He watched them burn, making sure that they were all
reduced to ashes before turning back to the next and most difficult part of his forgeries.
Ordinary red sealing wax would become something extraordinary before he was through with it.
He lit the tip of the brittle, gold-dust impregnated wax at his candle and dripped it carefully onto the vellum, at the very base of the document. While it was still hot and viscous, he pressed the Seal into it, and mentally twisted the energies about the Seal and the wax together, activating it. The metal of the Seal grew warm in his hand, and the wax beneath it glowed, first white, then yellow, then the red of iron in a fire.
Carefully, he raised the Seal from the vellum as the glow faded.
Impressed into the wax was something that deceived the eyes, but not the touch. His fingers told him that the wax impression was a sketchy bas-relief, but his eyes told him quite a different story.
What he saw was the Wolf Crown, rising out of the wax of the seal as if made from that wax, scintillating with gold dust and a hint of rainbow. Was it an illusion? Not exactly. Nor was it exactly reality. It lay somewhere in between the two.
He laid the Seal back in the drawer and sat where he was, catching himself with both hands on the desk as he went momentarily giddy with exhaustion.
He had not expected that, and it took him completely by surprise. Was it the effect of the mage-storms, or only that he was much older, and under much more strain, than he had been the last time he'd used the Seal? There was no way to tell.
And it didn't matter. If he was lucky, he would never have to use it again.
If I am wise, I will never use it again!
Nevertheless, luck and wisdom had very little to do with the traps Fate might hold for him. He put the Seal back into its hiding place, and put his forgery in with several other, perfectly genuine "contingency" documents that the Emperor had supplied him with when he traveled out here. No one knew exactly what documents he had, nor how many of them there were. When he took this one out of the stack, there would be no way that anyone could say that this one had not been among them originally.
He rested a while after that; no point in unlocking the door directly; someone might sense that magic had been at work here, and he wanted to wait for those energies to fade. Besides, it gave him a badly-needed chance to rest.
Only when the last of those energies had dissipated past his ability to detect them did he rise, unlock the door, and tell his bodyguards to summon his escort.
While there was still daylight left, it was time to make one of his periodic rounds of inspection, and survey his small and desperate kingdom.
Tremane never walked out of his personal stronghold without an escort of half a dozen strong, superbly-trained bodyguards. Of course, at least one of these men was in the pay of the Emperor. He didn't let it bother him, but rather set himself to winning, if not their complete loyalty, then at least a moment's hesitation when the time came for them to raise the assassination knives. That was his best defense against Imperial agents among those he was required to trust.
As he had told his generals, the preliminary defensive wall, a wood-and-daub palisade, had just been completed a few days ago. This palisade contained not only the Imperial camp, but the entire town within its protection. The local populace was quite happy to have them here now, although they had not been too pleased to see them at first. A few attempted incursions by what creatures the mage-storms had left behind had shown them that they could not possibly defend themselves against these weirdling beasts, so bizarre and unpredictable.
The palisade had been easy enough to construct; dead trees had provided the framework, which was filled in with wickerwork and then covered with a particular mix of mud that hardened to a rocklike state when dried. The wall was about a hand's breadth thick, and able to withstand a certain amount of punishment in the way of direct mass impact. It was enough to keep out "dumb" beasts, but Tremane was not about to take the chance that it would have to stand up to more than that. If conditions in the area outside the palisade worsened, there could be mobs of people roaming the countryside, looking for loot, food, or shelter. Tremane was not about to risk the lives of his men against a mob when a well-made wall would take all the risk out of the situation.
Nor were unruly mobs the only possible danger. The war monsters of ancient legend had been able to take down simple palisades—or go over them—and those war-monsters had been created by magic. With more magic loosed in the land, it was possible that chance could recreate something like them. While it was still possible to build before real winter struck, his men were building; building a real wall, one that was constructed of sturdier, and less flammable, materials.
Normally they would have erected a second palisade of wooden tree trunks behind the wicker-and-daub construction, but the sheer size of the camp and the fact that the town was part of the camp made that notion prohibitive. He did not want to denude the countryside of trees, which was what such a palisade would require.
However, there was an abundance of limestone and other materials for making cement, so that was precisely what his walls were being made with. In one huge shelter the men cast molded bricks of cement and put them aside to dry and cure. When they were ready, they were taken to the perimeter for the next step.
Two brick walls were under construction there, behind the "protection" of the wickerwork wall. Construction proceeded in stages, with a team of men devoted to each section of the new wall. When the two brick walls were much taller than the tallest man in the ranks, rubble and earth were packed down between them, and a brick "cap" built over the rubble filling.
It would take an organized force to get over that, but Tremane wasn't done with his project even then. He planned for a curtain wall to be built on top of that, giving his men a protected walkway to use to patrol the perimeter, a protection only real siege engines could breech. Emotionally, he would have liked for the walls to be taller, but practicality told him that there was no real need for them to be that tall. No mere beast, however twisted by magic, could possibly come over the single-story wall—and if anything else came at them, it would be the men and their weapons that kept it back, not a wall.
Still, he found the three-story wall around his confiscated manor very comforting, and he would have liked for that same comfort to be shared by his troops.
Four out of every five of the men were working on the walls, and even with the wretched weather they had been enduring, they were making good progress. There was certainly no shortage of hands for what would ordinarily have been a very labor-intensive job. He'd broken up the long stretch into a hundred sections so that each team of men could see real progress being made. It gave them heart, gave them a reasonable goal to reach.
He took a tour of the brickworks, then went out to where the men were laying a course of bricks. Those who were real masons supervised the trickier bits; the rest laid bricks and spread mortar, bending to the work as if they, too, realized they might be grateful for such protection before long.
But even if Tremane had not personally felt a need for this wall, he would have had the men out doing something constructive. The best way to keep them from getting into trouble was to keep them busy—too busy to make up rumors and spread them, too busy to think of anything other than the good, hot meal waiting for them at the end of the day, and the warm bed to follow that.
The duties varied, and the men were rotated out through all of them unless their skills were particularly needed on one specific job. Those not actually laying bricks or making them were cutting stone, building molds, crushing stone, carrying bricks, or mixing cement and mortar.
And when the wall was complete—which looked to be sooner than he had hoped, for the men worked with a will and a speed he had not expected—he would put them to building winter quarters as soon as the design was determined. That could not come soon enough, and he hoped that somewhere among all of the books he had dragged with him on this journey there would be a design. Something that could concentrate and hold heat, somet
hing to take a winter a hundred times worse than any he had endured. He had to plan for the worst, then assume that his imagination was not up to the reality and add to his plans.
Perhaps—I wonder if I can't build the kitchens onto the barracks, and use the waste heat from the ovens and stoves to heat the barracks....
The thin, gray light filtering through the clouds made everything look faded and washed out, as if all the life had been leeched out of the world. Although there was no wind, the air was chilly and damp, and he was glad of his uniform cape.
There was a certain nervousness in the way the men moved, nervousness that had nothing to do with the inspection. Perhaps rumors were spreading about the newest monstrous creatures showing up in the countryside. If that happened to be the case—the men could be even more eager to see the wall completed than their commander was! I would not be unhappy if they acquired a sense of urgency on their own. Fear is a powerful motivator, and the more motivation they have, the faster the walls will go up.
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