1a: The Other Side

The Keshir Wood, Atharinshire, 3 Alana 1507 AC

I walked through the portal, out of my suburban life. As the scene around me changed, I changed with it. Not so much taller as less inclined to slouch; a bit more muscle (well, OK, more than a bit); and clothes appropriate to the place and weather. These were all part of the service, as it were, so I didn't have to think about it.

I was glad for the change, because on the other side of the portal, it was very definitely winter, and I had not been remotely dressed for it. But the sword took care of me, as it always had. I sheathed it in the handy scabbard that now appeared across my back, and adjusted myself to my new surroundings.

I was on a well made road, paved with stone, on an incline, rising to the north. From here the angle was all wrong to see the city that covered the plateau, but the smoke from its many chimneys was wreathing through the air in the distance. Pine-like trees dominated the wood to either side of the road. Snow blanketed the ground, but the road had recently been cleared. Across the road from where I'd emerged stood an older but still-sturdy horse (well, not exactly a horse, but close enough to translate), with saddle and packs. I smiled. I was home.

Winter is not really my favorite season, but I have to admit, there's something very peaceful about standing on road in a forest of evergreens, with snow muffling incidental sounds. Peaceful. Serene. I like that.

It's an illusion of serenity, of course. A fact which was driven home a moment or two later when I got pounced upon by 300 pounds of solidly muscled diplomat. With claws.

I should have been expecting that.

The next five minutes were not so much a wrestling match as me wriggling a lot trying to evade an outright pin. My assailant had caught me by surprise, and was a champion wrestler who practised constantly. I really didn't stand a chance, but I wasn't going to ruin his fun by making it too easy for him, either.

The end result, however, was inevitable, and did a lot to deflate me from the whole Mighty Hero thing. When he finally had me thoroughly immobilised, I gave in.

Of course, he couldn't just let me go. No. He had to lecture me first. "William, my friend, you really need to remember to look around you when you come through. You never know who might be lying in wait for you."

That's a translation, of course. Another part of the service was a translation glamour. I heard what he actually said, but I knew what he meant. The same worked in reverse. Most people never even noticed I wasn't actually speaking their language, because, let's be honest, most people are unobservant. Myself, apparently, included, since I really hadn't sensed that my attacker was there until he was flying through the air behind me, and by then, really, it's too late.

"All right, Tezhla. You've got me. I need to be more careful. Now can I get you to let go before I develop a permanent kink in my neck?"

Tezhla ko'Zhalo disentangled himself and allowed me to stand up and brush myself off. Noliri faces can be hard to read -- try guessing a cat's mood from its facial expression, sometime -- but I was pretty sure he was smugly pleased with himself.

"Not that I'm unhappy to see you or anything, Tezhla, but what exactly are you doing here?" I was understating the case. Tezhla was one of two people whose whereabouts I always try to determine within days, if not hours, of my arrival, if only because whatever he was up to was bound to be terribly interesting. Possibly more interesting than what I was supposed to be doing, and therefore, possibly worth a side trip. He'd done the same for me on several occasions, and I suspected this was one of them.

"I'm on an embassy to the Renara Council. The usual. Intrigue, backroom deals, possibly an assassination or two, but probably not this trip -- relations between Renar and Kza are pretty good right now, and there's just no one in the Senate who needs killing that badly."

"And you just happened to be passing through here when the portal opened?"

"Of course."

I held his gaze steadily until he realised he wasn't going to get away with that.

"Well, all right. It was not quite happenstance. One of our mutual friends met me on the road about two days ago and told me you'd be coming through."

That was clearly all I was going to get out of him here, but that was all right. The whole conversation had been very instructive. The thing with Tezhla was that you had to read the negative space of just about every utterance. If you knew him well enough, what he didn't tell you was usually far more interesting than what he said, even though both were usually true.

For example: in a time without telephones or telegrams, if you send an ambassador somewhere, usually they're delivering a message of some kind -- perhaps the latest round of a negotiation, perhaps something innocuous like a trade deal or a letter of good will on the occasion of the birth of a new royal prince.

If he were delivering that sort of message, he'd have mentioned it. Instead, he focused on the shadier side being a foreign agent. Which meant the message he was carrying was far more interesting.

The most immediately critical news he had but had not imparted was that we were almost certainly being watched.