by John Daulton
For a time, he simply contemplated the sky and the pleasant cooling off of the hillside in the absence of the brutal sun, and with the help of the breeze, but after a while he got to wondering about the man who’d been in such a hurry to run off that he’d leave a horse behind. That was an oddity beyond reason. The man was gone to town for two weeks, finally came back, and then left a third of what he brought behind. That didn’t fit with anything like sense. And it stacked up with lots of other things that didn’t make sense. The whole mission didn’t make sense.
They sent him and his men out to find bandits who hadn’t committed a robbery in well over a month, if not longer, yet long after the bandits had started in on the people there—and long after the people had sent to the army for help. And when help finally did come, in the form of Ilbei and company, Ilbei barely got two days to ask around before he and his men were sent home again—well before they’d caught the least whiff of the bandits, much less a trail leading to them. And if that wasn’t odd enough, the officer who sent them home was a South Mark major that nobody at the garrison in Hast had mentioned would be there, and he was the sort of man who came onshore and sent his rowers back without so much as a half hour to eat or even rest a spell. And that was the same major who had an obsession for gambling well beneath his station, much less his presumable wealth as a nobleman, and who had elected to stay in the hills after the platoon’s departure with only a civilian hunter for protection—a hunter who claimed to hunt for the camps yet dressed like a well-trimmed city man. Together they were going to wait for the boat to return from Twee, which would take at least three days, if not four, from the time the rowers got word they were supposed to come back, word they would receive only a day at most after having returned to Twee from having dropped the major off to begin. Those men, assuming it was the same boat crew, would have spent at least three days rowing upstream, two days going back down, and now three or four more returning again.
Who would do that? None of that made sense.
Ilbei knew well enough that sometimes orders came that didn’t make sense. It was true that some of those orders came from petty-minded men for personal reasons he couldn’t fathom, and others from poorly designed plans. But the truth was, the largest number of nonsensical orders he’d been given over his career usually made sense eventually. His initial confusion often turned out to be a matter of his not knowing what the bigger pattern was at the time—he couldn’t see the tapestry for being part of the weave, so to speak. All of that he accepted as army reality. But in all his years, he’d never come across something that set as sideways in his mind as this whole episode around the Three Tents robberies.
As he contemplated the crooked stack of facts around Major Cavendis, he found that the actual stack of goods piled into the pannier upon which he sat was jabbing him painfully in his backside. He shifted back and forth, hoping to wiggle whatever it was out of the way, but it wouldn’t budge, digging into him as firm and hard as steel. Then curiosity took hold.
He knew it wasn’t right to go sorting through another man’s things, but as he shifted his weight trying to get comfortable, he kept thinking of all the heaped-up mysteries, including the man that had run off and left the panniers behind. Ilbei figured a man like that, running off without so much as doing his duty to Mercy and to the dead—much less to Mags out of simple courtesy—didn’t deserve any courtesy himself. The more Ilbei thought about it, the more he was sure a man like that didn’t deserve any respect at all, including the type that would have kept Ilbei from sifting through his packs. Or at least taking a quick peek inside. The gods wouldn’t mind.
So he did. Partly for the right of it, but mainly to see what it was poking his behind, as he told himself.
What was poking him so sorely turned out to be the handle of a castiron skillet. It stuck up between several packets of fine flour and cornmeal. Ilbei tried to push it down deeper into the pannier so as to make sitting comfortable, with just the soft stuffs on top, but no matter how hard he pushed, the pan wouldn’t budge a finger’s width further into the pack despite its obviously not being far enough in to have hit the bottom. It was as if there were bricks at the bottom of the pack, or something hard as stone.
Now, there wasn’t any reason why a man would bring bricks or stone back out into the countryside, at least not by the pannier as this was. Ilbei wondered what was so dense as to be worth carrying back all that way. So he set himself to unloading it.
He pulled out the baking supplies, slowly exhuming the castiron skillet layer by layer until at last he could pull it out and set it atop the pile that he’d made on the ground. At the bottom of the pannier was a flat bundle of something wrapped in homespun, and a rap of the knuckles proved that it was indeed as hard as the skillet was, hard like a brick.
He tried to lift it out with a handful of the homespun, but the cloth tore, the burden within too heavy to be lifted so. Ilbei tore the rent open more and took a rectangular object out, pulling it off the top of what appeared to be a stack of others like it. The one he held was as long as his hand and not quite as wide, and only a few finger-widths thick. It didn’t look like any brick he’d seen, as it was too thin and far too smooth, like ceramic tile or a plate of glass. Rolling it over, and holding it at an angle so he could see across its surface better in the moonlight, he saw that there were four circular depressions on the underside.
He pulled out a few more of the objects, and saw that they were all the same. There were ten of them, each with the same four depressions, all lined in a row, and all perfectly circular. He wondered what sort of oddity they might be. He would have put them back and resigned himself to not knowing, feeling a little guilty for snooping as he was, but then it struck him what they might be.
He took the first brick and two others and went round to the front of the tavern. He stepped inside, and saw Meggins and Kaige throwing dice against a wall. Jasper was reading in the lamplight near the bar. Seeing the mage, Ilbei headed straight for him, or more specifically, for his light.
He held one of the bricks beneath the lamp, ignoring Jasper’s protests about shadows on his pages. Looking down into the bottom of each of the round depressions revealed four perfect likenesses of Her Majesty, the royal profile clear and obvious, her name spelled out around the curve beneath her image and easily recognizable despite the letters being in reverse. There was more writing above her image, but he couldn’t make it out, in part for the letters being smaller and still backwards, but mainly because the language itself was unfamiliar. But he didn’t have to read it to know what he was holding. His hunch had been right: these were coin molds.
He switched out that one for another to confirm it. It took only moments to see that the second was the same as the first: the War Queen in perfect profile. He put the third brick under the light and saw that it too was identical.
He turned and handed Jasper the plate, then took the lamp and brought it down close enough so there were no shadows in the bottom of the mold. “What’s it say there along the top? That some kind of elf or dwarf speak?”
Jasper looked for a moment as if he might continue to protest over Ilbei’s usurpation of his reading light, but Ilbei’s having called upon him for his expertise stopped him from further sniveling. He took the proffered bit of ceramic in both hands and shifted it in the light until he could see into it clearly. He read the inscriptions impressed there carefully—though it only took him the span of a half second at most—then he sat back, almost slumping. “It’s just a gold crown mold from Her Majesty’s mint,” he said, sounding disappointed and looking bored. “Everyone knows what it says.”
“Well I don’t,” Ilbei replied. “Ain’t never had one. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have known how to read the foreign part.”
“Well, it’s dwarven for ‘May it please the gods.’” He looked back up at Ilbei, who had picked up one of the other molds and was looking into it, captivated by the idea of lettering from a long-dead race. “And why do you h
ave one of those, anyway?” Jasper asked. “They are illegal to own, you know. They’re all the property of Her Majesty’s mint in Crown City, and if you get caught with that, they’ll cut off your head. Turn it, and you’ll see that it says as much along the lower edge. They all do.” He didn’t bother to look at the one he held to verify it, as it was clear he already knew it would be true.
Ilbei looked, however, and he turned the one he was holding over in his hands. There was nothing on the edge he looked at, so he flipped it and checked the other side. He checked the back and then both the ends. He checked the other plate, then took the one Jasper hadn’t bothered looking at. “There ain’t nothin on any of these what says that,” he said.
“Then they must be counterfeits. Frankly, that’s worse than having real ones. If I were you, I’d bury them as deep as you can and then forget where you dug the hole. If the authorities find you with them, you’ll be tortured for a month until you give up where you got them, and after you confess, you’ll be decapitated by a headsman with a dull axe.”
“We are the authorities, Jasper. What do ya think them red moons sewed into yer sleeves mean?”
Jasper looked at the lonesome crimson arc, the moon, Luria, in its crescent phase, embroidered upon each shoulder of his robes, the demarcation of the lowest military rank possible for a mage. “Oh, yes, I suppose I forgot.” He made this odd little laugh, a faint sort of snorting thing, and for the first time since Ilbei had met him, he thought Jasper was genuinely amused.
“Well, we will get these turned over when we get back to Hast,” Ilbei said. He spent a few minutes looking into the molds, shaking his head. “Knowin what these are makes a different sort of mess of the same heap of questions, don’t it?”
Jasper’s colliding brows knit the nature of his confusion. He had not been privy to what had been going on in Ilbei’s head since the sergeant lay staring up into the shadows of his tent two nights before.
“Well, it’s like this,” Ilbei said, setting the lamp back in its place upon the bar. “I was out there wonderin why that feller took off out of here like he did, thinkin he might be ashamed of what he done, runnin off without helpin Mags and all. But that didn’t make enough sense to set with me, and now we got reason to see why. One way ya look at it, him runnin makes sense if’n he thought he was gonna get caught with these. Except now I have to wonder what kind of sense it makes to take off like that and leave this here stuff behind. Seems more likely a man thinkin straight would see to just playin it calm and regular, takin a moment to greet us before easin on outta here normal like. All he had to do was not act the part of a criminal, and he’d have gone off without us thinkin a thing of it, and with all his packhorses in tow. Even a boy plays a better hand a’ ruffs than that.”
“Well, maybe he’s not a good liar,” Jasper said. “I know I’m terrible at it, and my mother always caught me every time I tried. She says I include too many details, which is how she always knows. It does seem to be the case that when people lie, they want to include as much detail as possible to add authenticity to their falsehood. But even knowing this, I find that I will still do it anyway. I’m not sure what that is, but there was a priest of Tidalwrath some years back who wrote about how sometimes when people are—”
“By the gods, son, ya add too damned many details when you’re tellin the truth. Now pipe down and let me think.”
“Well, I was only trying to explain—” Ilbei silenced him by walking away, taking the plates outside with him as he returned to the packs at the back of the house. He unloaded the second pannier and found that it too had ten plates, just like those in the first. They too were tucked carefully down at the very bottom of the pack, buried beneath items that were in keeping with a typical trip to town, expected items like flour, salt, beans, and even a small sack of Goblin Tea. While that last might be seen as an unexpected extravagance for the sorts mining these bare hills, nothing was out of the ordinary but those plates. But the plates were an abnormality that had to be dealt with. It was his duty to the Queen.
So now Ilbei had to decide how best to carry that duty out. Should he take the plates and head down to Hast, come back with a bigger troop of men, or go back and tell the major what they had found? Or maybe he ought to take the lads up to that Fall Pools and have a look himself. Speaking to the major was surely the worst idea, and going back to Hast meant losing a lot of time. If that coward Gad Pander figured Ilbei would discover those plates at some point, there was a good chance he’d pack up and hide for a time. He hadn’t come back to ask for his gear, and he hadn’t come back to take it by force. So, unless he showed up over the course of the night, Ilbei expected he didn’t care to tangle with the army at all. That made hiding seem a more likely course. And he had time for it, as he’d seen Ilbei and company come into Camp Chaparral on foot, which would have told him they had no teleporter as much as it told him they had no mounts. That also told him that they were several days from Hast, which was time he could use to make an escape. Assuming that was his intent. He might just as easily be setting traps around his operation, in anticipation of Ilbei and his men coming up looking for him.
If Ilbei took his crew up the hill and did find that there was an operation underway, there was no telling how many men they would come across. Ilbei didn’t figure it would be less than three, as the work of mining, smelting, melting and molding was a lot for one man to do, and there were likely extra steps for counterfeiting that Ilbei couldn’t even account for. For all he knew, there was a whole troop of them up there; although, if the amount of supplies in the panniers was any evidence, there couldn’t be more than a few—the nature of greed makes men stingy about sharing ill-begotten rewards. Which meant Ilbei needed to decide what he was going to do. Should he go after Pander or just do as they’d started out to do: get Mags, go up and get that other miner if he cared to come, and then get them all to Hast? Whatever he decided would shape what he did with the plates as well, and, frankly, what he did with Mags. If she didn’t want to come with them, he wasn’t too keen on leaving her at Camp Chaparral alone either. It was a lot to think about.
He decided to put himself on watch, since he wasn’t going to sleep anyway. He poked his head inside the tavern long enough to tell Kaige to come spell him a few hours after midnight. He simply needed more time to work through what to do. He’d never been one of those sorts who could just blink and have the right idea. Nonetheless, by the time Kaige came to relieve him, he’d figured out what to do.
Chapter 14
Ilbei and his crew, which now included Mags, set out early in the morning, making their way up Harpy Creek toward the shack of the lone miner still working up there. They were just approaching the little bluff on which his shack was built when they saw the dust rising up over the line of brush before them. They saw it just before they heard the cries. By the time they’d run up the slope, ducking and weaving through the snagging, slashing scrub, they were too late to save the man. The miner they’d spoken to only two days before lay facedown in the creek, his blood painting a foggy red line down the center of the flow.
Ilbei and his men dropped to their bellies. Ilbei twisted so he could look back down the hill. He motioned for Mags to stay where she was. She saw and nodded, leaning closer to the packhorse, whose lead rope she held. The four of them snaked their way to the top of the cut bank and peered through the weeds, watching and listening.
Eight men surrounded the body, talking casually as the miner’s life poured away. The largest among them was a monster of a man whose height and bulk rivaled Kaige’s for size. He carried a huge crossbow, which he motioned with toward the center of the creek, where Ilbei noticed that the great boulder the miner had been beating on with his giant sledge was now broken in two. Part of it had splashed down straight across the waterway, partially damming it up on that side, and the other part had fallen onto the gravel closer to the bank. It was a lot of work to break such a thing, and now all of it for naught. At least for the man who’d
been at the labor of it for so long.
“Get in there with that shovel and see if he was chasing his tail,” the man with the giant crossbow said. He jerked his chin toward two of the men on the bank closest to where Ilbei and company lay. “You two go through his place and see if he didn’t dig up something we haven’t heard about. Check for false bottoms and loose boards, and any dirt that looks softer than the rest. Feel through the seams of his clothes.”
The two men, one a short, lean fellow and the other a medium-sized brute missing half of his right hand, turned and climbed the bank, moving upstream and around the base of the bluff at the start of its curve. They were bound to see Ilbei and his men where they were.
Ilbei nodded for Meggins to come with him, signing with his hand for Jasper and Kaige to keep watch and call out if trouble came. He mouthed down the hill for Mags not to make a sound. She looked nervous as she nodded, her right hand hooking under and around the mare’s neck protectively while the knuckles on her other hand turned white around the quarterstaff she’d been using as a walking stick.
Ilbei pulled his pickaxe off his back while Meggins drew a long dagger from his boot. They slunk up behind the miner’s small shack and peered inside through a crack. They waited for the two men to go inside. Soon after, they saw shadowy movements between the boards and heard grunts along with the sounds of the dead man’s few belongings being carelessly tossed about.
Ilbei and Meggins went around to the front door, pausing long enough on either side for Ilbei to nod to the left, indicating Meggins to take the smaller man. The younger soldier nodded back, and in they went, two steps each, then wrapped a hand around the face of their respective targets, simultaneously silencing them. Ilbei gripped the haft of his pickaxe right near the head, and with one powerful thrust he shoved a long steel fang right through the back of the half-handed man’s neck. Meggins cut a long line straight across the scraggly week-old beard that stubbled his victim’s neck. They muffled the mouths of their marks until the thrashing stopped. Then together they quietly set the bodies down.