The Fair Elaine: A Kethem Novel

by Dave Dickie

  The guy was definitely scoring big on points, as it was a rather pithy and eloquent thing to say when his knee had to be screaming in agony even if he himself was not. “I am listening,” I said mildly.

  “I and my friend will be happy to assume you had innocent business on the Fair Elaine. So innocent we did not even notice your visit. However, it would be difficult to make that assumption if we are dead. I therefore suggest you be on your way, leaving us alive.”

  “Roll over,” I said. He did. I looked in his eyes. He looked back steadily, or as steadily as you could when you were going into shock from a serious injury. I finally nodded. “I appreciate your willingness to deal fairly with a simple commoner, Holder, and I think I will accept your offer. In fact, I will go further. I will dispatch a physicker if you know one who is discreet and will ask him to arrive within the hour to deal with your injuries. That way there is no need for you to explain away a shattered kneecap and what, if I am not mistaken, is a broken jaw and nose on the part of your friend. I would ask that you keep in mind that it would be much more prudent for me to kill you both, and that by accepting your offer, I am doing you a favor.”

  And I could see that he didn’t like it but he did recognize it. I straightened up. I added “I will say that I was merely asking questions about the attack on the Fair Elaine because there are so many rumors about it that I wanted to hear the truth from the source, and thought there might be some value in knowing the details.” Which was honest and might make him feel better about keeping quiet. “Would you do me the favor of telling my why you were going to kill me? It seems a bit extreme under the circumstances.”

  He had beads of sweat on his forehead. He said, “I will honestly tell you that we have orders to apprehend by any means necessary anyone asking questions aboard the Fair Elaine, dead or alive. We are to do it as quietly as possible and avoid attention by anyone outside the Hold. You have the appearance of someone who could be dangerous.” He glanced at his leg, then at his unconscious friend. “Who is dangerous. You were a commoner. It seemed safest to subdue you in the most expedient fashion. As to why, I do not know. I do not think our commander knows. It came from the Lord Holder.” By which me meant the Lord Holder of Parch Hold, not Leppol. I believed him.

  The warden gave me the name of a physicker I knew by reputation and who was, indeed, quite discrete. "Please keep yourself warm as a preventative measure against shock.” He nodded, and I helped him sit up against a wall after kicking his sword away from him. I covered him with his cloak, did the same for the tall warden, and walked out the door.

  Outside I wandered a bit until I found a messenger, one of the artisan enchanters who specialized in communication spells, and sent a short message to the warden’s physicker with the location of the warehouse and the information that there were two injured men and guaranteed payment. I circled back and took a position up higher on the seawall where I could see the warehouse. The physicker arrived and went in. In a half hour, he left again. There was no other activity. About three hours later, when the sun was getting low on the horizon, I saw two other Holders from Colander Hold showed up. They walked in, my two acquaintances walked out. The stocky one had a slight limp. Physickers could do wonders but there was always some residual damage you just had to let nature take care of. But he hid it well and you had to be looking to notice it. There was no alarm, just a changing of the guard. I waited a bit longer just to be sure, but it looked like the stocky warden was as good as his word.

  What I still didn’t understand was why they had orders to kill with no real provocation, and why they didn’t want a Magistrate involved. And why the people following the orders had no information on why they’d been given them in the first place. It seemed like the Lord Holders were playing things so tight to the chest they weren’t sharing anything, just asking to be obeyed blindly. I’d never seen security in place like they had on this, and I didn’t understand why, and it made me nervous.

  I was walking along the docks while I was thinking, and I moved out of the way of a woman headed in the opposite direction in a full length robe with a hood covering her face. She had already passed me when her furtive attempt to pull the hood a little lower over her face and the scent of floral perfume registered. I turned around and hurried back, recognizing that swaying walk despite the heavy cloak. “Why Sariel,” I said, “Imagine meeting you here.”

  Sariel turned and I saw the grin in the shadow of the hood, those white teeth glimmering even in the rapidly fading light. “Why, Gur, what a surprise. A pleasant one, to be sure.”

  I nodded. “And what brings a priestess of Sambhal to the docks this evening, I wonder?”

  The grin remained and seemed genuine. Sariel said, “I like the docks. I like to walk. It seemed a reasonable conclusion to take an evening stroll along the waterfront.”

  I nodded. “I see, and it does seem to make sense,” I said. “And, just because I would like nothing more than to have your walk be a pleasant one, I wanted to share something with you.”

  She nodded and said, “I’m all ears.”

  "There’s a light merchant that was attacked a few days ago, the Fair Elaine. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors. It seems that there are wardens watching it very closely. They seem to be rather obsessive about interrogating anyone who boards her.”

  Sariel seemed to think for a minute. Finally she said, “Well, Gur, that’s good to know, and I thank you for sharing that with me. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular, but with that knowledge, I will make sure nowhere in particular isn’t near the Fair Elaine.”

  I bowed and said, “I think that is a wise decision. Plenty of nowhere to go around. Please do enjoy your walk.”

  She leaned in close. Her perfume was intoxicating. Which made me think the glamour was on. “I will, Gur. And I just want to say there are other things I’d enjoy just as much, and I think you would too. If you let me thank you properly, I think you might find it a life changing experience.” And she turned and walked away, leaving me wondering if that was an invitation or a threat.

  Chapter Nine

  Any reasonably intelligent person could, if they had the time, learn a spell and, under ideal conditions, had a pretty good chance of running through the cantrips without a misstep making the spell fizzle. If they practiced it for a long, long time, they could get it off four times out of five. Someone smart could do it nine times out of ten, and with a reasonably diverse grab bag of spells, not a one shot wonder. Someone like that could focus on a single simple spell, memorize it well enough to burn the memory into rock or wood or sometimes metal, and carve out a small metaphysical space inside to hold enough mana to turn that memory into an active spell. Those people could set themselves up as an artisan enchanter, someone who does cheap, simple sorcerous items like glow disks, rain shields, that sort of thing.

  Someone really smart and with balls of Cidan steel could do spells under less than ideal conditions, like when someone was charging them with a weapon. People like that became battle mages and were invariably recruited by a Lord Holder or by the Kethem Military, either the Guard, the Navy, or the inappropriately named Kethem Naval Intelligence, spooks that really had nothing to do with either of the other branches.

  Finally, there were the brilliant ones like Yimmy, ones who could slowly, layer after layer, burn complicated spells and larger mana pools into objects. It took weeks or months, depending on the difficulty of the spell, and one mistake would ruin the process and revert the enchanted object back to ground zero. Worse, actually, because you couldn’t layer anything on top of the ruined memory; it was nothing but a hunk of something that would glow in a detect sorcery spell but would never be useful. People like that are called artificers. It made artificers very rare and very valuable. But along with the brilliance came an almost inevitable antisocial, reclusive, withdrawn, and general irritating personality that made them difficult for most to work with.

  It was the next day. I was at Yimmy’s studio, on the sou
thern end of the city, a few streets west of Aron’s Way, but the opposite side of the city from the Sambhal temple. Yimmy rented a large, one story building with thick grey stone walls and industrial strength timber beams holding up an equally industrial strength wooden roof, the roof a good twelve feet high. Most of the building was one giant room that had clearly been intended to be a warehouse, and had large sliding doors that wagons could have used to enter and exit. Those doors had all been locked shut, with nails driven in for good measure. Yimmy’s current project was normally sitting in the center of the room on a simple wooden pedestal, with an equally simple wooden chair facing it. The tools of the artificer’s trade are primarily mental. Since he was usually working on something like my lightning stone, small enough to fit in a pocket, the amount of space was ludicrously out of proportion to what he needed. I’d asked him about it once, and he told me it was in case something went wrong during the construction process. I didn’t really know what that meant, but afterwards I tried to make sure I only visited when he wasn’t actually working on something.

  Yimmy was young and gawky in the way that many adolescents were, worried about looking foolish and overcompensating so much that they looked foolish. He was old enough to have grown out of it, but somewhere in his family makeup his impressive mental capabilities had been balanced by sucking every ounce of emotional intelligence out of him. He was blond, five and a half feet tall, dressed in robes that he thought made him look like a powerful wizard but really just tended to show off his thin, scrawny legs and the flip flops that passed for his shoes. I liked him.

  He was sitting out on a small stoop that lead into a smaller office space in the building, looking a little beat. He squinted at me, which was another habit that he thought made him look mysterious and knowledgeable, but really made it look like he had the sun in his eyes. “Gur, man, how’s it going?”

  I nodded a welcome. “Fine, Yimmy. How’s things with you?”

  “Eh,” he said, shrugging. “The old lady, you know, major league pain in the buttocks.” He was talking about his mother. As far as I knew, Yimmy didn’t date.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Anything I can do?” I asked.

  “No, no, just the standard go-make-something-of-yourself stuff. Like I don’t keep her rolling in money,” he said. Which was reasonably true, although Yimmy could have wrangled his artificer skills into a Silver Ring position at a Hold, setting himself and his extended family up for life. In this case, extended family meant his mom, Yimmy’s father having vanished before Yimmy was old enough to remember him.

  I sat down next to him. "Mind if I pick your brain a bit?”

  Yimmy laughed and said, “Time is money, but time sitting on a stoop is worthless. So, sure. I was taking a break anyway.”

  I smiled. “Question one. You want to keep someone from talking about something. A lot of people. How do you do it?”

  He frowned. “Like, with sorcery? Well, either compulsion, memory alteration, or both.” I’d gone to the bars near the docks and found a few other crew members of the Fair Elaine that were out enjoying themselves. I’d asked about the trip, feeding them a few beers. They had all had that same strange reaction as Mackner, panic, shakes, inability to speak. One of them had gotten ill. It reeked of sorcery. It didn’t seem like memory alteration. I’ve seen that before, and that you spot it by asking about little details and getting contradictory answers.

  I said, “Compulsion. So, what would it take to do that to maybe fifty people?” I asked.

  Yimmy’s eyebrows went up. “Fifty? Well, no enchanter could do that. At least, not without a serious mana sink. Generally, that means religious based spells. The temple stuff is more constrained in what it can do, but it’s much more powerful and can affect a lot more people.”

  "You know any god that does that kind of thing?” I asked.

  Yimmy shook his head. “Compulsion? Not like that. Only for people joining the order.” He shrugged and added “But you know the religious orders like to keep that kind of stuff to themselves. One of them could, I suppose.” Like the Sambhal geas, I thought. It was a possibility, but I didn’t have enough information to feel confident in calling it. I tucked that away for later.

  “Next question,” I said. “Have you ever heard of anything in the artificer’s world like a vial full of a green, faintly glowing liquid?”

  His face scrunched up while he thought about it, but he said, “No. Although you could get that effect with some green dye and a light spell.” I didn’t think anyone would mount an expedition to Ohulhug territory for a light spell. Strike two.

  “Moving on,” I said. “You want to attack a ship when it’s near the docks, board her and grab something. How do you get a ship close without alerting the crew?”

  Yimmy cocked his head. “Is this the Fair Elaine we’re talking about?” he said. I nodded. “I’ve heard a little bit about it. But the answer is, you don’t, at least not the way things went down with the Fair Elaine. You could get some powerful Storm Bull priests to raise a fog or something like that, but you’d be as blind as the Fair Elaine and there were no weather effects when the Fair Elaine was pulling in.”

  “Could someone have made an entire ship invisible?” I asked.

  Yimmy shook his head no. “No. Invisibility is light bending, and it gets exponentially harder the larger the area you are trying to bend light around. A person is tough. A wagon is very tough. A ship is impossible.”

  I was still working on the assumption members of the crew were not in league with the attackers, and that there had been more than one of them. A small group of highly trained warriors sneak on board... from where? The attackers themselves had to be invisible or the men topside would have raised the alarm. I decided to focus on that first. “But you could do a group of people?” I said.

  Yimmy shook his head negatively again. “No, a single spell would still have to cover too much area. You’d have to do each person individually. But then you are back to having to have a major mana sink, and realistically an artifact. It’s complicated enough that even a very good enchanter wouldn’t be able to deal with casting it again and again.”

  “And what would something like an invisibility artifact that could cover, say, a half dozen people cost?” A half dozen seemed like the smallest number that could have accomplished what had been done on the Fair Elaine.

  “Don’t know,” said Yimmy. “It’s more complicated that a teleportal, that’s for sure, and that’s a couple of years of an artificer’s time. And it’s never been done before. Maybe a half million?” He said doubtfully.

  “How do you know it’s never been done before?” I asked.

  “Because any artificer that did it would be crowing about their achievement from the rooftops,” said Yimmy. “And even if they didn’t, no one creates something like that in a vacuum. Someone would know about it.”

  “So it’s impossible?” I said.

  “Very, very difficult,” said Yimmy. “Maybe with a few artificer level enchanters and a big mana sink. Maybe.”

  Very difficult, but possible. If you went there, then you had to assume the attackers had a level of sorcery that was off the charts powerful. But I couldn’t see any other way that it could have worked. So assume they did. There was still the question of how they’d gotten on board if it wasn’t from a ship. “So,” I said, “if you had someone, or some group, that could do that, could they have teleported the attackers on board the Fair Elaine from a distance?”

  Yimmy nodded yes. “That would be a little easier, actually. A lot easier. Teleportation needs one of three things to work, line of site to the target location, a teleport lock that a wizard has memorized for local hops, or a teleport pad for really long distance hops. There’s no chance of the last two; a teleport pad requires a huge amount of mass for an artificer to work with and it has to be something dense, like stone. If something like that was on the Fair Elaine it would have been spotted. And teleport locks have to be stationary. A line of s
ight teleport isn’t too difficult to cast.”

  I said, “Line of sight… well, it had happened as they approached the docks. That could work.” I was thinking furiously. The Fair Elaine had been near enough to harbor that someone waiting for them could have teleported a team on board. They go below decks, lock people in, slip into the Holder’s common room still invisible. There’s enough to hit everyone at once, so four… or five, one for Maizon… of them. Or maybe it was a smaller group with an area paralysis spell, given the assumption they were magicked up to the teeth. Either way, it would have to be a crack unit, coordinating the attacks perfectly without the ability to see each other. Which meant they had to have practiced this kind of thing many times.

  I shook my head. For this to work, someone would have to have a ridiculous amount of sorcery, millions of rimii worth of spells, or a cadre of enchanters that were as advanced as any in Kethem. A Great Hold could do it and possibly hide it. A Major Hold, maybe, but it was a stretch. A Minor Hold could do it, but the drain on Hold resources would be too large to hide. I had to assume Grafton wasn’t behind it, because they were crossing a line hiring me in the first place. The three Major Holds that were part of the Bythe consortium were part of the mission, and I doubted they would kill their own people. And if a Minor Hold did it, people would find out sooner or later.