by Dave Dickie
But memories of the families of the Fair Elaine sailors intruded, and I tried to imagine that on a scale of hundreds, of thousands, of tens of thousands. And couldn’t.
Maybe I wasn’t the right guy to play at that level. But then, maybe the people that played at that level had left people like me behind and gone someplace that made them something less than human.
I finished feeding the last of Leppol’s clothes into the fire. I looked at the flames and said, “You were a monster, Leppol, and you deserved what you got.” And went to bed. Tomorrow I was going have another opportunity to get myself killed. No point worrying about things until I was past that hurdle.
Chapter Twenty One
The guards at the Elvish embassy were new. Maybe. Elves tended to look the same to me. I’m sure they said the same thing about humans. I said, “Gur Driktend to see Ambassador Prenanala.” Ten minutes later, I was back in the room I’d met Faeranduil in the first time.
After welcoming me, Faeranduil said, “Tea?”
I shook my head. I pulled out the Elvish dagger, which I’d retrieved from Daesal, and handed it to him. He glanced at it, took it, and said, “Did it meet your needs?”
I nodded and said, “It did. Although I have to admit it was not the purpose I told you when we met.”
Faeranduil took that calmly enough. He said, “I did wonder. But at times, you have to make decisions based on the moral character of the individual you are dealing with.”
I smiled a little grimly and replied, “I thank you for your trust. I hope you will still feel that way when we finish this conversation.”
Faeranduil frowned, but he said, “I feel confident that I will. But you clearly have something to tell me. Please be frank.”
"I borrowed the dagger because I wanted an alchemist to compare the material from its blade to small amounts of a material embedded in the wounds of some of the sailors who died on the Fair Elaine a few days ago. It was a match.” That was a bit of a stretch, as I didn’t really know how Daesal’s oddly keen sense of taste worked, but she had confirmed when she licked the dagger outside the Sambhal temple that it was the “non-iron” taste from the dead bodies at the Kydaos temple.
Faeranduil looked troubled. “I see. And what conclusions do you draw from this?”
"That the mysterious attack on the Fair Elaine, the party that took the vial of primordial chaos, were elves that teleported from the ship you have moored out in the harbor.”
Faeranduil leaned back and cocked his head. “A bit of stretch, don’t you think? Elvish weapons can be purchased in Kethem. They are prized for their durability and edge. It could have been anyone.”
I nodded and said, “True. But this was an attack by a highly trained group, teleporting aboard, using invisibility to get below decks without being spotted. Any human group that used that much sorcery would leave a trace, a money trail, a record of acquiring that much powerful sorcery. The only people that have something like that available that wouldn’t leave a trace for the Holds to find are the elves.”
Faeranduil didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Suppose, for the moment, I agree with all that. Why would we? We pride ourselves on non-interference with other races. Why would we risk compromising that?
I laughed and said, “Faeranduil, I’ve worked for you. You pride yourselves on not getting caught interfering with other races. There’s a difference. And, quite frankly, I doubt you wanted to be suddenly matched spell for spell by Kethem. You stand where you are, you are what you are, because people fear your race, and they fear it because you have power that others can’t match. If you lose that, you’re suddenly a target.”
He smiled, but there was no humor in it. “A target. Do you know why we try so hard not to be?” I just looked at him. “Because there are not many of us left. A human falls in battle, and it’s a tragedy, and family and friends mourn, and then five or six children of the human pick up his weapons and carry on. An elf falls in battle, and there is no one to replace him, no family to mourn him, no children to pick up his weapons. An elf falls in battle, and it’s not a tragedy, it's one more step on the path to the extinction of our race.”
All of which I took as confirmation that I was right.
I tried to look unimpressed. "So you try to make sure everyone has no reason to attack you while undermining their ability to do so. I get it, Faeranduil. I don’t have to like it. At the moment, I’m more interested in what you are willing to do to keep it under wraps.”
He looked at me a little sadly. “Blackmail? Really? I expected better.”
I shook my head and said, “Not in the regular sense. There are some things I want. Not for myself. You deliver, and I make this issue go away.”
“And your demands?”
"A few questions first,” I said. He just nodded. “How did you know the Fair Elaine was the ship carrying the raw chaos? The vial was protected by anti-scrying spells, and the Fair Elaine was too far out and it was too dark to recognize at that distance.”
Faeranduil said, “Because the spell is, in many ways, as much a beacon as a mask. It hides the vial and the things around it from detection, but it leaves a hole where someone with detection spells would expect to see something.”
I nodded and said, “So you know how to defeat it.”
“We know something is being hidden, but not what. And you have to be looking for a … a gap. Looking for the perfectly dark square against a dark sky. It’s harder than it sounds.”
"But you can do it if you know that there’s a gap to look for in the first place.” He nodded. “So how did you know it was there in the first place? The security on this operation was about as airtight as any I’ve ever seen.”
Faeranduil hesitated a second. There was something he didn’t want to say. Finally, he sighed. “You know, if we don’t find a solution to this, you will have knowledge that I can’t allow to be shared.”
I looked at him a little harder. “A threat, Faeranduil? I walked in here knowing you probably have spells queued up to kill an intruder. I’ve made preparations. You kill me, it still gets out.”
Faeranduil laughed but without much mirth. “Yes, I had assumed as much. And, no, I don’t mean offensive spells. I mean there’s no way out of this room without using the teleport disks.” Which I suddenly realized was true, given I’d used my one shot emergency teleport earlier. “But I meant that you are asking questions that go beyond this little escapade. But very well. We have fairly extensive monitoring of all Ohulhug activities. There are other kinds of sorcery, things that bypass the limitations of mana, things that can pull power directly from the underlying chaos. It allows for much more powerful spells than any mana based or religion based casting. It allows opening gates to other universes. Those vary, from places where the rules are so rigid, where mana leakage is so small, that the inhabitants are only subliminally aware that there is anything outside the physical laws of their universe, to places with gaps in the structure of reality where you can actually harness raw chaos. We have such artifacts, the remains from a dead civilization that was ancient before we could harness fire. We call them world gates. It’s the source of our power. We suspected that the Ohulhug have one as well.”
I held up a hand to stop him at that point and said, “Then why didn’t they win the Orc-Human wars? Ohulhug have some pretty impressive battle-sorcery, but it wasn’t much stronger than the humans, they were just better at throwing it around in the middle of a fight.”
Faeranduil nodded and replied, “We think they are not as familiar with the artifacts as we are, and have only learned a few of their capabilities. But they are also willing to take more chances than we are. Opening these gates can have catastrophic results. So we were watching them when the Fair Elaine arrived. We watched enough to know something arrived on board from the Ohulhug. When our scrying failed, we surmised they had a masking spell. But we have eyes and ears in place as well as spells, and a description of the vial was enough for us to guess wh
at had transpired.”
I frowned and said, “So then why didn’t you sink the Fair Elaine at sea? Your ships are more than a match for a Kethem warship. A merchant wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
Faeranduil said, “We didn’t want to kill so many people unnecessarily. If we did it on the open water, people would have seen an elvish ship. We would have had no choice if we wanted to keep our involvement a secret. Instead, we went with stealth as they were pulling in. It was the only time the ship would be within line of sight, but an elvish ship, mixed in with the others in the harbor, would not look like the source of the attack.”
I tucked that away, but it made me feel a little more forgiving. Then I remembered the families at the Kydaos temple and went cold again. “Seems like a lot of people died anyway.”
He nodded sorrowfully. “Yes. We had to kill the Holders. Our combat team lost invisibility when they attacked. The Holders would be witnesses. But the intent was for the team to recast invisibility before they went topside. We didn’t take into account the anti-scrying spell on the container.” I flashed back to the Nitheia temple. The spell didn’t just affect scrying; it affected illusions. And, it seemed, invisibility spells. “Once the team was seen, we had to make sure no one was left alive to describe them.”
It actually did hang together, and I could see it. But that didn’t bring back the people, didn’t make the families who had a gap where a parent had been standing whole. "Why did you take Maizon?”
Faeranduil said, “He spoke Ohulhug. We wanted to know what he’d heard, whether he knew something about where the world gate might be. If we had a location, we might be able to destroy it. But he died before we could question him. We found residue of a geas afterwards, one that prevented him from giving away information on the vial. It must have been a very strong one.” I didn’t enlighten Faeranduil that it had been triggerfish toxin, and not only because of my own geas from the Sambhal temple. He hadn’t put me in much of a sharing mood.
My voice hardened. “So you take out the Ohulhug world gate, and suddenly you’re the only ones with that kind of power.”
Faeranduil shook his head. “No. Well, yes, but the main reason is because the Ohulhug use it foolishly. They put every living thing on the planet at risk with these sorties to other universes. It’s the same reason we had to recover the primordial chaos. It’s possible it could be used in the same way. We are an old race. We’ve learned from our mistakes.” His voice had become bitter. “We lost our original home doing the same kind of reckless experimentation. Now, we try to keep others from finding too much power too quickly, to grow into it over time, to have a chance to make smaller mistakes and thus avoid the larger ones.”
I thought about that for a few minutes. It sounded altruistic and noble. Too altruistic. People get accustomed to being top dog. If they are saints, they look for ways to let others share it with them. If they are good people, they make up excuses why they need to be the top dog. If they were Leppol, they didn’t give a damn about anything other than being top dog.
Finally, I nodded. “Ok. To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about all this, but there’s nothing I can do to change things, so I’m going to try to believe you. This is the way this will work. I want two things from you. And then you are going to want to give me a few other things. You do what I ask, I go and defuse my insurance policy. Then I come back here…” I stopped. I didn’t want to say it, I didn’t want to do it. But I didn’t think there was any other way to close the deal. “I come back here and you get to use a memory alteration spell to wipe me clean of anything to do with this.”
Faeranduil looked at me. He seemed… impressed, perhaps. “And what are these things you want in return?”
"I have to tell you something first. What the consortium were trading to the Ohulhug for the primordial chaos.” I told him about the massive anti-scrying device and what I had surmised about its purpose. He had the decency to look horrified. “As to what I want,” I said. “One. The families of the sailors that died. I want them taken care of. It doesn’t have to be ostentatious. Enough to get by, enough for the kids to become merchants or artisan enchanters or whatever they can be. Two. I know you have an embassy in Nyquet. I want you to warn them about the Ohulhug’s sneak attack. I want you to help them find the orc army, find the empty space like you did with the Fair Elaine.”
Faeranduil smiled, and it seemed genuine. “The first is easily done. We will find a way to get them help. The second; well, quite frankly, we would be heroes to the entire city. It would generate incredible amounts of goodwill. I swear to you, we will do everything in our power to help blunt the Ohulhug’s army, help destroy it if we can. But before we go further, I have to say that I am not convinced that memory alteration is going to work.”
I frowned. I hadn’t expected that. “Why?”
Faeranduil said, “Because, my friend, you are too curious, too intelligent. It is almost impossible to weave together a story that has no gaps, no holes. And a gap or a hole would be like a loose tooth to you. You’d poke and poke and poke and eventually it would give way, and you’d know they were false memories. And then I feel very strongly we would be back in this room, having this same conversation.”
My face was grim. “So, in other words, the only option I have is death?” Not that I could prevent that if that was the way the cards fell. Faeranduil was right. I couldn’t even leave the room without his help.
But Faeranduil laughed. “No, not at all. What you’re doing here is treason against Kethem. You know that. No matter how it turned out, your head would be, quite literally, on a pike at the city gate. I was going to say that a geas spell and what I hope is a strong sense of self-preservation on your part will be sufficient.”
I blinked. That I could live with. What was another geas? It was, without question, better than having someone feeding my memories through an eggbeater. “That works for me,” I said. “So, the things you are going to want to give me. It’s a long list. But without it, someone other than me is going to figure this out. We need a plausible story about what happened to the chaos that puts it out of arm's reach and casts no suspicion on the elves. Casts no suspicion on anyone who could be proven innocent, because that will just open the can of worms again if and when they are. Do you still have Maizon’s body? His effects?” I didn’t absolutely need them for what I was planning, but they would help. Faeranduil nodded yes. “So, this is what we’re going to do.” I started talking. Faeranduil listened carefully, and before I was too far into it, he started to smile.
Chapter Twenty Two
I waited on the Fair Elaine. It was a cool morning, fog still hanging over the water. I was leaning over the rail looking out to sea when I heard footsteps crossing the deck. Valont joined me at the rail. I turned to look at him. The Grafton glyph on his cloak was phosphorescing. “You’ve gotten a promotion,” I said.
He nodded. “I’m sure you’ve heard the news that the Lord Holder… the prior Lord Holder has disappeared. I’m acting for the moment, until we can have a funeral ceremony and schedule debates for a formal declaration of his successor.”
I looked back out over the water. “I suspect I know who it might be, but I won’t congratulate you yet. Bad luck to make assumptions ahead of the vote like that,” I said.
“Bad luck,” he agreed. He glanced down at a package I had sitting on the ground near my feet but didn’t ask about it. He was going to let me play this the way I wanted to. For a Holder, Valont was not a bad guy.
“I’ve gotten close enough to give you what I promised,” I said. “There’s someone who needs to show you something that he probably should have said something about a long time ago. I don’t want him punished.”
Valont frowned. “Depends on what it is,” he said. “But as long as he didn’t obtain it illegally, I don’t think it will be a problem.”
I turned back to watch his face. “Good,” I said. “I’ll call him over in a minute. So the one thing the ex-Lord Holder to
ld me about the mission was that it was up north of Pranan, in Ohulhug territory. Have you been filled in since you’ve taken over?”
His eyes looked haunted. “Yes. But I can’t tell you anything about the mission.”
"You don’t have too. Like I said, I’ve got enough to say how, but you may have to fill in a few of the blanks as to the whys.” He nodded. I looked back over the water, satisfied. “The reason that no one’s found anything yet is because they’re all looking for a ship. There was no ship. The attack on the Fair Elaine was a small group of highly trained warriors that teleported on board with invisibility spells. They went below decks, locked most of the crew in, killed the Holders and took the vial.”
I could feel Valont shaking his head. “No. That much sorcery would leave some kind of record. Word would have gotten out if a Hold purchased that many high level spells.”
I nodded. “True. If it was someone from Kethem that did it. Someone human.”
I felt him stiffen. “What do you mean?”