I've decided to start a new site on a server I manage myself, using the flexible TextPattern package. As such, while I won't be deleting this blog right away, no new episodes will be posted here.
Instead, check out Satellite Five.
[Prologue: Some Days, Episode 1, Episode 2a, Episode 2b, Episode 2c, Episode 2d]
Worldweavers Guildhall and the Renara Council Chamber, Atharin City, Kingdom of Renar, 4 Alana 1507 AC
The duke rose at this point, and gestured to one of his retainers, who placed his cloak about his shoulders. "Well you're going to have to figure your own way out of this one, Ambassador. You might convince my colleagues to bleed themselves dry for you again, but Athar will not give any more than it already does on a daily basis."
While the duke was finishing his oration, two other councillors, including the other youngster and the older sceptic from earlier, rose and gestured for their cloaks. When he was done, the three walked out in near-unison.
Rather predicatbly, the council dissolved into something less than orderly at that point, and the justiciar wisely realised that nothing more was going to get done. That was all right. Tezhla had stated from the outset that he wasn't looking for solutions or help -- he was just being neighbourly.
Krisa and I watched the chaos for a little while, but it wasn't all that interesting. I looked over and noticed that Krisa was looking somewhat sadly at the bottom of his empty popcorn bucket. Here was one of the people who secretly manipulated events in this world -- one of the mythical "They" that feed all the conspiracy theories -- looking like a forlorn child because he was out of popcorn.
I interrupted his solemn contemplation of greasy cardboard. "That was a bit of an overreaction from the Young Duke, wasn't it?"
Krisa started a bit, as if he'd been lost in deeper thoughts -- and maybe he had. "A bit, but not much. Duke Korza was a nephew of the Old Duke. The Old Duke and all his heirs died from the plague the Korza mentioned. While Korza and his retainers fled to the deep north, the Old Duke and his family waded into the fray of actually trying to help, both north and south. Thus we have one of the classic, sad ironies of history: a good, wise man and his enlightened household were largely destroyed doing the admirable thing, while his cowardly relations survived to inherit."
I noticed Tezhla making his farewells and preparing to depart the chamber. "I suppose you've already asked the ambassador to come here, next?"
Krisa smiled. "There was no need. At this point, it's habit. He'll deny to his dying day that he's an agent for anyone but his own government, but he does like to keep us informed. I imagine we'll be seeing the justiciar, as well."
"Really? I thought you avoided such direct involement with high-level government officials."
"The justiciar found us."
"I'm not all that surprised. The Guildhall is not that hard to miss."
"Hiding in plain sight has worked very well for us for several thousand years, William. Most people see what they expect to see. The apothocary and bakery storefronts are all most people notice about this building. The justiciar, however, is one of those clever folks who puts together the clues and hints she sees and hears over the years. She's a skilled huntress, and she neatly tracked us down about three weeks before she was appointed to her current post."
"And she didn't immediately try to run you out of town?"
Krisa laughed. "Hardly. She's also an ambitious woman. She immediately saw the value of being cooperative with our order. She even knows about the talisman embedded in the chandelier in the council chamber."
"Cooperative indeed. The Crown would skin her if they knew she was in bed with you, you know."
Krisa blushed -- a bluish flush to his pale cheeks. I think he's slipping. He never used to blush that easily.
"You realise I intended that as a figure of speech."
Krisa cleared his throat. "Yes, well, anyway, they should be here soon." He banged his staff and muttered again and the council room went away, replaced again by his office.
I smiled and took his emtpy popcorn bucket from him, nesting it my own, and wandered off to dispose of them and let him recover his dignity.
[Prologue: Some Days, Episode 1, Episode 2a, Episode 2b, Episode 2c]
Worldweavers Guildhall and the Renara Council Chamber, Atharin City, Kingdom of Renar, 4 Alana 1507 AC
"When he was done, his mouth was a bloody mess with bits of rope embedded in his gums and lips and at least two teeth missing. If he noticed that, he gave no sign, either. Once freed, he resumed his walk."
Everyone was with Tezhla at this point. The younger one who had earlier been unimpressed earlier still seemed to be wondering why any of this should matter to him, but he was ensnared by the tale. I pointed him out to Krisa, who nodded. He'd give me details later.
The exchequer broke the silence. "You say the phenomenon is moving northward. How fast?"
"It varies. The border seems to undulate like waves on the sea, but the sea is rising.
"When I took ship, the last report was that about a third of the territory across the southernmost principalities was...no longer accessible. By itself, it might not seem a great loss. A lot of the land is tundra, with few villages and only three real population centers. All told, we believe perhaps 100,000 individuals are on the wrong side of the line.
"But the effect shows no sign of stopping, and clear signs of gradually accelerating its northward migration, as if the more territory it covers, the more it's capable of covering.
"I said at the beginning that this could well have been going on for a century, and I was not exaggerating. Some experts at numbers have done some extrapolation, and although they admit they can't be certain with the meagre evidence we currently have, the rate at which the...creep is accellerating would be in keeping with something that started small and localised and much slower about 100 years ago.
"They've made some rough estimates in the other direction as well. If the current observed behaviour continues, including the rate of change, the whole of Hiz'ol will be engulfed in eight years."
"And the nature of the phenomenon?" Again, the exchequer, without pause. Apparently all the dramatic pauses earlier had gotten on his nerves. He was a man who wanted answers, quickly and precisely.
"A complete mystery. There is no obvious taint of magic about what's happening, and yet efforts to use magic to sense what's going on south of the line are clearly being prevented, which requires some understanding of magic. There are some who believe that magic is being...suppressed, generally, within the effected area. It would explain both why scrying fails and why all magical links with people and animals fail the moment the line is crossed, but no one has yet offered a hypothesis as to how such a complete suppression might be accomplished."
"Beyond that, we're fairly sure we know what it isn't. It isn't infectious, per se, not a disease. There is no obvious physical effect observed -- no rashes or lesions or sudden physical transformations. Even the strength with which the volunteer in the fourth experiment resisted our efforts to reel him in is not conclusively a result of the effect. Had he been determined enough, he might have been able to resist us entirely on his own.
"It also cannot be passed by mental link -- the time we lost both bondmates we know for certain the border swelled northward and engulfed him rather than the effect being transmitted. We realised later that we came dangerously close to losing our entire party due to the same swell."
The sceptical young councillor let out a derisve snort at this point. Tezhla could have ignored it, but chose instead to give the offender a diplomatic way out. "Good health to you, Duke Korza."
The name was familiar to me -- a common given name in the Ducal Line of Athar. This, then, was likely the new duke, or his representative. The old duke had been an extraordinarily clever, cunning, and utterly unscrupulous individual. I committed one of my earliest intercultural moral blunders by teaching him how to play poker, and I paid for it almost every single visit, thereafter. The fact that he was apparently gone saddened me and yet left me feeling significantly wealthier.
At any rate, the problem with systems of authority that rely on heredity or family connections is that genetics are simply not that reliable.
"I didn't sneeze, Ambassador Tezhla." He rose, beligerent and very sure of himself. "What was it last time, Ambassador? A plague, wasn't it? A mysterious disease you needed our aid in quelling lest it consume the continent and spread north to this one via our frequent commerce. And before that? A religious movement that threatened that commerce unless we gave generously to help the Free City defuse it. And before that? A massive crop failure requiring us to give generously to feed our Southern partner."
"What exactly are you saying, Your Grace?"
"That I find it odd that, despite all the advances and modern conveniences that change our lives almost daily, emanating from your fair city and its innovative philosophers and engineers, you seem so very...accident prone. And so incapable of mustering the resources to clean up your own messes. How convenient that you have such friendly partners in the north, so willing to give of their fields and coffers to make up for your incapacities."
Only someone who knew Tezhla well would realise that he was on the verge of violence. His voice, his demeanour in general, remained overtly diplomatic, but there was a tension to him, a sudden shift in the set of his ears. "Your grace, as far as I'm aware, Kza's account with the Kingdom of Renar in general, and with your duchy in particular, is current. The loans and aid generously granted by this council have all been repaid --"
"-- with our own money. We pay your artisans handsomely for the new machinery that works our fields, for better wagons and carriages, for all sorts of things we got along without for generations. Your city is enjoying quite a surge of inventiveness, lately...and quite a solid monopoly on the manufacture of its inventions. We buy those goods in quantity from you because you're the only game in town, and you tax those artisans from whom we buy, and pay us back with the merest fraction of that revenue.
The duke rose at this point, and gestured to one of his retainers, who placed his cloak about his shoulders. "Well you're going to have to figure your own way out of this one, Ambassador. You might convince my colleagues to bleed themselves dry for you again, but Athar will not give any more than it already does on a daily basis."
While the duke was finishing his oration, two other councillors, including the other youngster and the older sceptic from earlier, rose and gestured for their cloaks. When he was done, the three walked out in near-unison.
Aralla has languished in the midst of episode two for the simple reason that my day-job ate my brain. That, and I'm really bad about imposing deadlines and conditions on myself, even when it's important to me.
Well, while I don't really believe in New Year's Resolutions, as it happens, in close proximity to the New Year (like, yesterday or so), an LJ acquaintence of mine, Elizabeth Bear, started a challenge community: 750 words a day. If one keeps at it for 90 straight days, one has something novel length.
I think I can do this. I hope I can do this. More to the point, I hope I can do it and have it not suck :-)
Episode 2d goes up shortly.
[Prologue: Some Days, Episode 1, Episode 2a, Episode 2b]
Worldweavers Guildhall and the Renara Council Chamber, Atharin City, Kingdom of Renar, 4 Alana 1507 AC
"But in the last two years, not a single traveller from those cities has been seen, and not a single traveller to those cities has returned."
Tezhla pasued again, waiting for his pronouncement to percolate. This time, just about everybody seemed to understand the import of what they were being told. A couple of the councillors -- one older one I recognised and one younger one I didn't -- seemed unimpressed, and another new-seeming younger one seemed to still be puzzled.
Even so, it seemed to take a while for the full impact to percolate around the room. The effect was, if you'll forgive the imagery, not unlike the after-effects of eating food that doesn't agree with one. You can't un-eat it -- it's going to go through your system one way or the other and all you can do is hope that your system digests enough of it to get by.
But what interested me most is that the justiciar, while clearly taking Tezhla seriously, was not surprised. She had either already heard this news, or something like it...or else something similar was already afoot here in the north.
The Noliri who had been bold enough to ask the "dumb" question now ventured another, not nearly so dumb. "Has magic been attempted, brother?"
The two youngest councillors looked openly derisive at the suggestion, while the older one who had seemed unimpressed before perked up a bit for the answer.
"It has, brother, in several forms. Simple scrying, mental bonding with an agent, animal familiars of various sorts. Scrying returns...nothing. A blank. Redirect the spell north of the line and the same mirror works perfectly. That, in fact, is how we've kept track of the progress of this...pheonomenon...now that we know it's happening. Bonded comminicators simply go silent and never return; the same with familiars. They cross an invisible line and they're good as gone.
"We sent a bonded pair right up to the estimated border, along with other observers who stood a bit further north but well within view. One member of the pair stood firmly on the safe side while the other bondmate walked south. The minute they crossed the line, the mental link was broken, and the southgoing bondmate kept walking until she was out of sight. No entreaty or mental projection could re-establish the link or convince her to turn around and return to safety. This experiment was repeated four times. The second time it was much the same as the first.
"The third time, the stationary bondmate was also lost, as the border drifted further north while he was still trying to retrieve his partner. The observers watched helplessly as he suddenly began marching south, following his bondmate.
"The fourth time, we actually attached the south-going volunteer with a rope to a stout rock, so there was only so far he could go. We hoped we might at least be able to reel him back in and maybe learn what was happening. Magic was used to alleviate the need for knots that could be easily untied -- we didn't know if the victim would think of it or not, but it seemed an obvious precaution.
"When he reached the point where he could not walk any more because the rope held him back, he turned around and gnawed through the rope, instead. We were trying to pull him back, but he dug in his heels with greater strength than we would have expected. He was looking right at us at one time, but if he actually saw us, he gave no sign. There was nothing...significant in his eyes. No abjection, no pain, no concern... I had fancied that, if we could see their eyes when they become caught, we might see some spark of their personalities fighting what was happening to them.
"There was no sign that he was even aware there was something strange about his circumstances. It wasn't a blank look, mind you. There was thought there. But no sign of struggle, and no interest in us on any level. Not even annoyance at the rope. It was a hinderance to be eliminated, and he was eliminating it with the tools available to him.
"When he was done, his mouth was a bloody mess with bits of rope embedded in his gums and lips and at least two teeth missing. If he noticed that, he gave no sign, either. Once freed, he resumed his walk."
[Prologue: Some Days, Episode 1, Episode 2a]
Worldweavers Guildhall and the Renara Council Chamber, Atharin City, Kingdom of Renar, 4 Alana 1507 AC
As Tezhla, in full ambassadorial array (and pumped full of ambassadorial pomposity) came in, Krsia and I each almost simultaneously reached for our popcorn buckets, and settled in to listen.
"Most esteemed lords and ladies of the Renara Council, I would love to be able to say to you that I come here entirely as a tourist, come to enjoy the bounty of Atharin City during its Winter Festival. Indeed, I do intend to sample more than a little of that bounty before I depart again, but that is not my purpose here.
"Also would I love to be able to that I come here simply to reinforce the great good will that exists between Renar and the Free City of Kza. I could dwell fulsomely upon that long-established amity and never exhaust myself for words and never once exaggerate. And I have no doubt that I will have many pleasant words to say to each and every one of you, most of them sincere, over the next few days, but that, too, is not the reason for my mission.
"I am here for much graver reasons. I do not come seeking aid, per se, although if you believe you have any to offer, and most especially if you believe you know the cause of the crisis I am about to relate to you, I would dearly love to hear it. I tell you plainly that my people, and our neighbours, are deeply concerned. I come to inform you, and perhaps to warn you, for if it is happening in one place in the world, it is just as likely to happen other places, as well."
"Ambassador," came a testy voice from a seat near the vacant throne, "you're stalling."
Normally the Council was rather more formal when treating with non-members, although its internal deliberations tended to be relatively unstructured. Tezhla, however, was a frequently-sent legate for Kza, almost as familiar to the Council in general, and to the testy voice that had just spoken in particular, as they were to each other.
The testy voice had come from the Duke of Zilar, the southern province of Renar, whose port city of Zile was, along with Kza, the focal point of all trade between the two continents. Together, the two cities, Zile and Kza, were the economic capital of the world, and often seemed to be a single city split by a convenient ocean - convenient because the breadth of that ocean and the difficulties in navigating it between the two continents guaranteed the two cities' continued dominance. Somehow, the world of Aralla had been arranged such that the only really easy, consistent winds and currents brought ships into those two harbours. It was possible to sail directly to other locations on both continents, but it was rarely worth the effort.
The upshot is that Tezhla took the interruption in stride, rather than being offended as a stranger might be. "You're right, Your Grace. I am stalling. The implications of the situation I'm about to describe terrify me, but more than that, my instructions are quite explicit and very unnatural, in that they require that I be entirely open and candid in every detail, not that we have many details to be open and candid about. This deeply offends my diplomatic training."
There were chuckles around the room at this, as Tezhla intended, for he spoke this last part with clearly falsified gravity. And yet, he wasn't really making a joke. Opacity was Tezhla's stock and trade. I would have loved to have been in the chambers of the Kza Senate when Tezhla had been given that instruction.
Tezhla took a deep breath as the laughter subsided, and resumed. "It is almost axiomatic that, the closer to a market town one lives, the more likely one is to take up comparatively cosmopolitan view of the world. The result may still be strikingly provincial - the residents of the Borough of Kalarin, in the far north of this continent, despise Noliri and won't tolerate them within their walls, and yet think themselves worldly because all colours and creed of Iri are welcome to come and trade and even to sojourn if not to settle, while in their own suburbs only the bluer-skinned sort of Iri are generally welcome and in their hinterlands only those with particular shades of blue skin who worship Akaz are even admitted to be thinking creatures.
"The exact same progression exists on the continent of Hiz'ol. Kza and its immediate neighbours are as jumbled a mix of all the different sizes and shapes and colours and beliefs of Iri and Noliri alike that you could name, as Renar is. The further away you get, the less this is true, until, when you reach the near-polar south, you reach areas so insular that even their major towns only have market days four times a year, and hinterland villages can go decades without seeing a single stranger.
"I say this not because I think this Council needs an education in sociology, but to stress that we have not been withholding information. What is happening in the deep south of Hiz'ol may well have been going on for a century, and we would have had no way of knowing until recently...when contact with those market towns in the deep south was entirely lost."
He paused to let that sink in. This gave me a moment to assess the current make-up of the council. The Duke of Zilar was sharp as the sword I carried and had caught where Tezhla was going before he finished his sentence. Two of the other four dukes also got it immediately, while the other two, not quite as on the ball, puzzled it out. The justiciar also got it almost immediately, while the exchequer – more used to dealing with numbers than people and therefore lacking an instinctive understanding of what Tezhla was saying - took longer. About half the other councillors had figured it out during the pause, while the others looked like they wanted to interrupt and ask questions but were afraid of looking stupid.
Well, most of them. There was at least one among them, himself a Noliri, who seemed to be more willing to ask the stupid question than to lose the rest of the story for want of a detail. "Brother...what do you mean by, 'lost'."
If Tezhla was impatient with the question, he didn't show it even a little, but answered as a good teacher might. "I mean that ordinarily, there are people from Kza - both agents and legitimate traders as well - who make a point of visiting those market towns when the towns seem amenable to having visitors - during market days and festivals and so on. We have contact with the ducal and republican governments on something like a regular basis - I myself began my career as an ambassador to those lands. And that various traders and legates and no doubt agents from those towns do occasionally travel north to other cities in the midlands, despite their distaste for anything remotely different.
"But in the last two years, not a single traveller from those cities has been seen, and not a single traveller to those cities has returned."
[First: Prologue: Some Days
Previous: Episode 1]
Worldweavers Guildhall, Atharin City, Kingdom of Renar, 4 Alana 1507 AC
"You were what?!"
It's not every day I get to surprise my boss. As a Master of the Worldweavers Society, Krisa Njasita would like everyone to believe that he's literally incapable of surprise, because he already knows what's going to happen, because he helped to arrange it. Frankly, he's gotten more than a little pompous in the years since he'd first recruited me, so I have to admit I rather enjoyed his discomfiture.
"Ambushed. Well, sort of. They were only watching, but they were watching very intently."
"You're certain they weren't just ordinary bandits? The Winter Festival's coming up, and banditry always enjoys boom times in the week leading up to the Festival."
"If you like, we could summon my newly minted henchm...er...servant up from the stables and you can question him yourself."
Krisa blinked. "Am I to understand that you have retained one of the miscreants in your own service?"
"It seemed like the thing to do at the time. He's a natural born henchmen – he does what he's paid to do and he doesn't think about it much."
"A mercenary?"
I laughed. "No. A simpleton. Really. Like I said, question him yourself. Actually, I mean that in earnest. A second opinion wouldn't hurt before I go off into the world with him as a sidekick."
"What does Ambassador Tezhla think?"
"Tezhla thinks I'm crazy, but he doesn't think Kraz is a threat of any kind. He just thinks I can do better for servants. He may be right, but I've got an instinct about this one."
Krisa nodded thoughtfully. "Your instincts have served us well enough in the past for me to trust them, but I would like to speak to this...Kraz myself. That will have to wait a bit, however. The easiest way for me to brief you on why we've summoned you this time would be for us to listen in on what the Ambassador is about to report to the council, and that session should be starting shortly."
The older man was holding a tall, ornate staff, which he now banged against the flagstones while muttering under his breath. I guess we all have our own style for these things. I tend to prefer to be fairly surreptitious about my invocations, which is only natural given that I am, for all intents and purposes, a covert agent.
Krisa, on the other hand, likes to make a show, at least, when he's "at home". I've often thought he and other mages like him are frustrated actors, because their penchant for theatricality (and for drama, come to that) is pretty noticable.
The end result of Krisa's flourshy spell, however, was that we now both appeared to be floating in mid air in the high-roofed Council Chamber in the royal palace, just across the Central Market from where we were actually standing. Of course, we were really still in the same room at the Guildhall. The council was just now assembling - this close to Winter Festival, it was rare that any normal business got conducted on time, as there were many preparations to be made throughout the capital city.
Krisa and I sat down in the two comfortable chairs he'd provided. I ignored the sensation of sitting on a chair seemingly supported by nothing but air; this was not the first time Krisa had invited me to join him while he spied on somebody.
On the table between those chairs had appeared (whether as part of his spell or by action of a servant I hadn't noticed) two large containers of warm, buttery-smelling popcorn, a delicacy I'd introduced Krisa to many years ago, after enduring several similar intrusions without. Both of the sentient species of this world tended to be more heavily carnivorous than humans, but they did eat some vegetable matter as well, and Krisa had seen the appeal of popcorn as a snack one could quietly munch on while one's mind was really occupied with something else.
At last the councillors settled down. There were eight Iri and 6 Noliri present, reflecting the rough proportion of the Renara population. Noliri had been subjects of equal standing since Renar's formation from earlier, smaller kingdoms, most of whom had already developed similar customs.
Neither the king nor queen were present today, so the justiciar was presiding. Justiciars are often chosen for their focus and ability to get things done, and this one was no exception. Once everyone expected had assembled, she wasted no time calling them to order and summoning Tezhla in to speak his piece.
As Tezhla, in full ambassadorial array (and pumped full of ambassadorial pomposity) came in, Krsia and I each almost simultaneously reached for our popcorn buckets, and settled in to listen.
[Previous: Prologue: Some Days]
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.
Now that I was becoming more attuned, I could feel it for myself, too. An itch between the shoulder blades. Nothing overtly hostile, but definitely watching.
Since it was just observation, as far as I could tell, I kept things casual. I continued to banter with Tezhla, and walked over to the horse - my horse - while Tezhla went to get his, concealed a short distance away.
Really, that's a strange phrase for a geek boy like me to be able to say: "my horse". Never mind that she's really more like a llama than a horse, and not really genetically related to either. A cowboy would have recognised the saddle and bags, and could have kept up with any real horse at a dead run riding her.
Epoxy recognised me, of course, and gave me that look she always gives me when I've been gone, a look that best translates as, "And where have you been, young man?" It's not like she's ill treated when I'm gone - heck, she probably has a much easier life when I'm not around. But that doesn't seem to matter. Every time I return, I get the Jewish Mother routine: You never call, you never write, you forgot to bring me apples. Again. How many times do I have to tell you about the apples? I'm wasting away here!
I spent a few moments stroking the wooly fur along her neck with one hand while making a show of looking through my saddlebags with the other.
I found what I was looking for pretty quickly - a small codex. It was a repository of recipes - spells, if you like, but I really don't like that word - I'd found useful in the past. Each was keyed on a glyph and a word. The glyphs and summaries of what they meant were visibly written in the book, while the structure of the recipes themselves were woven in to the substance of the book. The words, I'd memorised, and they weren't written down at all, but I didn't always remember the glyphs, especially the first few days back, so I had to actually look them up.
The two items I wanted were on the very first page, so I never had to actually take the book all the way out of the bag. Fortunately, I found something else in the bag to cover for the rummaging. Whoever had prepped Epoxy and left her here for me had left some fruit in the same pouch. It wasn't an apple, but it would keep her content, and provide me a bit more cover for what I was doing.
I gave her the fruit, continuing to stroke her neck and appearing to be speaking encouraging words to her. And for the most part, I was. But I was also forming the first glyph I'd chosen very carefully in my mind, while also reaching out with a sense I cannot easily describe to the Source. I felt energy crackling in my head, waiting to be used. The Source was the fuel, I was the engine, the glyph was the key in the ignition. Now, all I had to do was speak the right word to turn the key...
There were three of them, all Iri, two women and one man, at three nearly equilateral points around us. I could see them in my head. One of them had made a crude attempt to weave a shrouding spell to evade detection this way. The structure looked right, but he hadn't applied enough energy, and the result was patchy.
Amateurs.
Tezhla was walking his horse down out of the trees by now. I looked in his direction, and saw what he wanted me to see. If the pattern of watchers were not a triangle but a diamond, Tezhla's horse would have been picketed within a few feet of the correct point...
Ah! There was the professional. Novice, but professional. He was too intent on watching what we seemed to be doing to realise he'd been ratted out.
Tezhla, bless him, kept talking. I'd have to ask him later if any of it was consequential. I looked at him with a question in my face, and he answered with a barely perceptible shrug. OK. My call. Fine.
I don't especially like a man who uses henchmen as bait. I've done it myself, mind you, but I don't always like myself, either. So I carefully envisioned the second glyph I'd chosen, drawing it over over the man's face so that there would be no doubt. Touched the Source, spoke the word...
Even professionals tend to panic a bit when their beard is on fire.
And he did. He really did. Running in circles, screaming and shouting. I still couldn't see him with my eyes, but in my mind I could see him capering about. And I could hear him. The shroud only muffled the screaming a bit.
And that was my first hint that something was wrong. The shroud was still in place, about two seconds longer than I would have expected someone in the midst of panic to manage.
I heard two grunts, from my left and my right. Tezhla must have been watching my lips for the word that touched off this cheery beacon of burning hair. I never saw him arm himself with the two small crossbows, and from the sounds of things, neither had our uninvited observers.
That just left The Man with the Patchy Shroud behind me. I spun on my heels, already imagining the glyph for a formula that would immobilize him.
He was gone. Neither my eyeballs nor the sense conveyed to me by my earlier invocation could see him any longer, nor any trail suggesting where he might have gone.
Insert swearing here.
Tezhla took off past me into the woods. If there was a trace to be found, he'd find it.
I spun around again and completed the immobility glamour using Crispy Face as a target. He'd just recovered enough wits to contemplate running screaming into the woods looking for a snow bank to bury his face in. I took care of that, as well, dousing the flame. I was going to need to have a chat with this fellow in a moment, and it's notoriously hard to get a coherent sentence out of someone who's on fire.
I looked in on the two henchwomen at whom Tezhla had targeted his crossbows. His aim was impeccable, as always. This was a mixed blessing in this case, because both of the erstwhile spies now had quarrels sprouting from their left eyes, thus rendering them both less attractive and less talkative.
That left me alone with Crispy Face. Tezhla would spend ten or fifteen minutes trying to track down the real ringleader. I was pretty sure he wouldn't find anything - not because I doubt his skill but because I was now pretty sure we'd been duped.
There were constructs I could invoke that would immobilise any living thing for a mile radius, but these woods were teeming with life, and with legitimate (and quasi-legitimate) hunters and trappers and foresters and the like. I didn't relish having to explain why I had seen fit to bring the daily grind of a mile's worth of the King's Forest to a grinding halt. The bodies would be easy to explain, by comparison.
I wandered up to where Crispy Face was standing, frozen mid-panic. Now that I saw him up close, it was doubly obvious that this was not the professional in the bunch. There was no hint of power in him, and not many hints of intelligence. He seemed to be of the paler-skinned variety of Iri that I was usually mistaken for, but his hands were darker, suggesting perhaps that he spent his days in a tannery or a dyer's. His face, of course, was rather ugly with burns, right now, but I planned to take care of that in a moment.
I adjusted the structure of the immobility spell a bit, releasing his control over his head and neck so that we could more easily converse.
Of course, he immediately resumed screaming.
I smacked him across the teeth - the sort of smack that seems to be universally functional to all sentient life forms (at least, the three major groups I've encountered in my own lifetime) for cutting through hysterics.
It served the purpose, although only just barely. He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The tips of his slightly pointed ears were flushed, and he was baring his teeth - also pointier than a human's would be - in a grimace that was an instinctive holdover, a reaction to both fear and pain. Somewhere in the back of his brain was a lingering bit of tissue that desperately wanted to hiss or growl or something, but all the poor sap could manage in practice was a whimper.
"Okay," I said to him. "This is how it's going to work, and I'll keep it simple. You're in pain, because I set your beard on fire. I set your beard on fire because you were spying on me and my friend and that made me cranky. I'm going to ask you some questions. If you answer truthfully the first time I ask, the pain will get better; if you don't, it will get worse. If you answer all my questions truthfully the first time, you'll be completely healed. You'll still have to grow your beard back the itchy way, but your skin won't be scarred and the pain will be gone. If you refuse to answer me at all, or you lie to me consistently, I'll set you on fire again and leave you here to light the road tonight. Do you understand?"
Now, before you wonder how a mild mannered programmer became so heartlessly willing to incinerate someone whose offence was really relatively minor, let me take a page from Mr. Goldman and assure you that Crispy Face does not get eaten by the eels at this time. If he'd been uncooperative, I'd have left him his burns, but I would have made up some convenient excuse to not actually set him on fire again.
Yes, I realise this is morally ambiguous.
He nodded his understanding, quite vigorously.
"Good. I prefer it when people can get along. Let's start simple: who are you?"
"Kraz."
"That's it? Just...Kraz?"
"Kraz."
He was telling the truth. I'm sure there was a sad story behind his lack of a family name, or even a name with two syllables, but it wasn't what I was here for. I began engaging a healing routine, which immediately alleviated some of his pain and improved the state of his burns. I focused on the area around his lips to encourage clear speech.
"Where are you from?"
"North of the City. Tola."
More healing, less pain. "I thought that might be it. You have the hands of a tanner. Am I right?"
He seemed inordinately pleased that I'd recognised his trade. It might have been the first time the poor guy had ever really been noticed in any detail. He nodded proudly, and I applied more energy to the healing structure I had wrapped around his face.
At this point, I was starting to feel downright foolish. Even without trying to read him, I had already gotten enough just off his surface thoughts to know that this guy just a dupe. I decided to make it easy on him.
"Let me guess: someone showed up at the tannery with a bag of coin and said he'd pay people to stand near the road leading south out of the city and watch a particular spot for him."
Kraz looked a bit nervous at this point, but he nodded. "Except it wasn't the tannery, it was the pub. That's where he picked up the other two, too. I didn't see anything wrong with it, and a guy needs some extra coin sometimes, y'know? He didn't even say he was watching for anything special. He just told us to watch this spot and try to remember what we saw as clearly as we could. I don't know what good it would have done him. I didn't understand what I saw, so I don't think I could have described it for him."
Guileless honesty. The perfect short-term henchman, in many ways. You could even let this sort get captured, because he really didn't know anything. At all. About anything.
I finished healing him. "You wouldn't have had to. He would have picked it out of your brain. Four observers, four different angles. The fourth guy was your employer, I assume?"
"No, but he was with him."
"It's too much, I imagine, to hope you ever got names for them?"
"Nope. Not for the women, neither. He hired us, stuffed us in a cart, the other guy rattled us down here and perched us in the woods and told us to watch."
I sighed and let the immobility glamour go, as well. He stretched cautiously. He was kind-of thick, but he realised that sudden moves would be a bad idea. "Sometime later, I will ask you to describe the men as best you can. How much did he pay you?"
"A silver."
I nodded. That was more money than this guy was likely to see in a year, and never all at once. Which also made me a bit suspicious. "May I see it?"
Kraz wasn't too happy about that idea, but he realised I could immobilise him again with a twitch, and we'd just made friends, sort-of, so he nervously reached into a pouch at his belt and handed me the coin.
Thought so. A fake.
"I have very bad news for you, Kraz, and I realise you've got no reason to believe me, but you probably want to at least think about it. This coin is copper with a bit of paint. You try to spend this in the city and what I did to your beard will seem pleasant by comparison to what will happen to you. His Majesty's Justiciar has no sense of humour about bogus coin."
His eyes glazed a bit as he contemplated the horror of it all. This morning he'd been a rich man for a day of easy work. Now he'd had his face roasted off and was returned to penury. He was not so far gone in contemplating his new-found misery, however, that he didn't jump a bit as Tezhla came back, swearing sulfurously. The Noliri's fur was bristled, his ears erect, and his nostrils flaring, as he stomped down the one hill, across the road, and up the other to where we were standing. When he paused for breath, however, I cut him short. "You done yet?"
He glared. "Not really, but I can be convinced to pretend otherwise for a few minutes while we figure out what we're doing with him." He nodded at Kraz.
"That's easy. He's coming with us, at least into the city."
Tezhla narrowed his eyes at me - not quite a glare, but close. I touched the sword and aimed a thought at it, and the translation glamour was dispelled. When Tezhla responded, it was in a language few others in either world spoke - Esperanto. I'd learned it years ago because...well, because I'm a geek, and it's a geeky thing to do. I'd taught it to Tezhla for just such occasions. Of course, few of you, dear readers, speak it or read it, either, I expect, so I'll translate here.
"I suppose cutting him loose would be a bit harsh. I assume he's just a patsy?"
"Yup. So were your target-practice dummies over yonder. We turn him loose out here and he'll be dead by morning, one way or the other. "
"Don't expect me to feel guilty. Spying's a job for professionals, dammit."
"Wasn't saying you should feel guilty. I was saying we've been thoroughly had."
"I'd noticed. Of course, he could merely be playing the fool and counting on our pity to get close to us."
"Thought of that. I skimmed him. Either he's good enough to hide the slightest hint of nefarious intent from his surface thoughts, in which case he's earned a peek and I want to keep my eye on him anyway; or else he really is a walking cheese sandwich."
"And of course, you always prefer the simplest explanation. And you're correct to do so infuriatingly often. All right. We take him with us. Then what?"
"Dunno. Maybe we hand him to the reeve; maybe we hire him ourselves. He's proven he can follow instructions, and he looks muscular enough to take on any number of menial tasks you and I dislike."
Tezhla nodded with a bit of a stern face. This was not directed at me, but was the beginning of characterisation. Tezhla made an excellent bad cop. "Do we camp for the night, or would you like to light our way?"
Tezhla raised a good point. The fight and its aftermath had neatly prevented us from making the city before nightfall. It wasn't full dark, yet, but it would be soon. Too soon. "We'll never make the city before the gates close, and inn outside the south gates is nasty."
"Tsk. So squeamish. You'll sleep on the ground under a pitched sheet, but you won't sleep in a drafty, buggy inn?"
"I don't have to pay to sleep on the ground."
"Good point. OK."
At this point, I touched the sword again, and the translation glamour resumed. To Kraz, I said, "Are you any good at pitching tents?"
"Yeah, I suppose."
"Good. You'll find canvas and poles and stuff in my friends' packs. Don't get any ideas. Just pitch the tent."
Without question or argument, Kraz went about his work. Tezhla watched him like a hawk while I pretended to ignore him. When the work was done - and quite competently, too - I told him, "Wrap up in your cloak and go to sleep. You've had a long day. We'll take care of keeping watch. When we go into the city in the morning, you're coming with us. Do you understand?"
He nodded vigorously, and seemed grateful that he'd get a chance to sleep off what was probably the worst day of his life. I had a feeling I'd just hired myself my first henchman for the upcoming mission.
I told Tezhla to nap now, as well. To me, it was only an hour or so since I'd woken up, and I had a lot to think about already. There was a great deal already afoot that I was going to have to catch up on quickly.
But for now, the winter evening was still and dark, the snow faintly luminescent, the sky clear and filled with stars. Two of the three small moons were overhead, bouncing additional light off the snow. I could, once again, soak up the illusion of serenity, at least until morning.
I was going to need it.
September, work ate my brain. Now it's coming back, so we return to Aralla.
A posting of all of Episode 1 follows (or preceeds, depending on how you're reading this -- silly blogosphere with its most-recent-posting-first mindset), and then Episode 2a.
Enjoy!
The Keshir Wood, Atharinshire, 3 Alana 1507 AC, continued.
(First: Prologue: Some Days Previous: 1b: Fire on a Winter's Day)
Even professionals tend to panic a bit when their beard is on fire.
And he did. He really did. Running in circles, screaming and shouting. I still couldn't see him with my eyes, but in my mind I could see him capering about. And I could hear him. The shroud only muffled the screaming a bit.
And that was my first hint that something was wrong. The shroud was still in place, about two seconds longer than I would have expected someone in the midst of panic to manage.
I heard two grunts, from my left and my right. Tezhla must have been watching my lips for the word that touched off this cheery beacon of burning hair. I never saw him arm himself with the two small crossbows, and from the sounds of things, neither had our uninvited observers.
That just left The Man with the Patchy Shroud behind me. I spun on my heels, already imagining the glyph for a formula that would immobilize him.
He was gone. Neither my eyeballs nor the sense conveyed to me by my earlier invocation could see him any longer, nor any trail suggesting where he might have gone.
Insert swearing here.
Tezhla took off past me into the woods. If there was a trace to be found, he'd find it.
I spun around again and completed the immobility glamour using Crispy Face as a target. He'd just recovered enough wits to contemplate running screaming into the woods looking for a snow bank to bury his face in. I took care of that, as well, dousing the flame. I was going to need to have a chat with this fellow in a moment, and it's notoriously hard to get a coherent sentence out of someone who's on fire.
I looked in on the two henchwomen at whom Tezhla had targeted his crossbows. His aim was impeccable, as always. This was a mixed blessing in this case, because both of the erstwhile spies now had quarrels sprouting from their left eyes, thus rendering them both less attractive and less talkative.
That left me alone with Crispy Face. Tezhla would spend ten or fifteen minutes trying to track down the real ringleader. I was pretty sure he wouldn't find anything - not because I doubt his skill but because I was now pretty sure we'd been duped.
There were constructs I could invoke that would immobilise any living thing for a mile radius, but these woods were teeming with life, and with legitimate (and quasi-legitimate) hunters and trappers and foresters and the like. I didn't relish having to explain why I had seen fit to bring the daily grind of a mile's worth of the King's Forest to a grinding halt. The bodies would be easy to explain, by comparison.
I wandered up to where Crispy Face was standing, frozen mid-panic. Now that I saw him up close, it was doubly obvious that this was not the professional in the bunch. There was no hint of power in him, and not many hints of intelligence. He seemed to be of the paler-skinned variety of Iri that I was usually mistaken for, but his hands were darker, suggesting perhaps that he spent his days in a tannery or a dyer's. His face, of course, was rather ugly with burns, right now, but I planned to take care of that in a moment.
I adjusted the structure of the immobility spell a bit, releasing his control over his head and neck so that we could more easily converse.
Of course, he immediately resumed screaming.
I smacked him across the teeth - the sort of smack that seems to be universally functional to all sentient life forms (at least, the three major groups I've encountered in my own lifetime) for cutting through hysterics.
It served the purpose, although only just barely. He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The tips of his slightly pointed ears were flushed, and he was baring his teeth - also pointier than a human's would be - in a grimace that was an instinctive holdover, a reaction to both fear and pain. Somewhere in the back of his brain was a lingering bit of tissue that desperately wanted to hiss or growl or something, but all the poor sap could manage in practice was a whimper.
"Okay," I said to him. "This is how it's going to work, and I'll keep it simple. You're in pain, because I set your beard on fire. I set your beard on fire because you were spying on me and my friend and that made me cranky. I'm going to ask you some questions. If you answer truthfully the first time I ask, the pain will get better; if you don't, it will get worse. If you answer all my questions truthfully the first time, you'll be completely healed. You'll still have to grow your beard back the itchy way, but your skin won't be scarred and the pain will be gone. If you refuse to answer me at all, or you lie to me consistently, I'll set you on fire again and leave you here to light the road tonight. Do you understand?"
Now, before you wonder how a mild mannered programmer became so heartlessly willing to incinerate someone whose offence was really relatively minor, let me take a page from Mr. Goldman and assure you that Crispy Face does not get eaten by the eels at this time. If he'd been uncooperative, I'd have left him his burns, but I would have made up some convenient excuse to not actually set him on fire again.
Yes, I realise this is morally ambiguous.
He nodded his understanding, quite vigorously.
"Good. I prefer it when people can get along. Let's start simple: who are you?"
"Kraz."
"That's it? Just...Kraz?"
"Kraz."
He was telling the truth. I'm sure there was a sad story behind his lack of a family name, or even a name with two syllables, but it wasn't what I was here for. I began engaging a healing routine, which immediately alleviated some of his pain and improved the state of his burns. I focused on the area around his lips to encourage clear speech.
"Where are you from?"
"North of the City. Tola."
More healing, less pain. "I thought that might be it. You have the hands of a tanner. Am I right?"
He seemed inordinately pleased that I'd recognised his trade. It might have been the first time the poor guy had ever really been noticed in any detail. He nodded proudly, and I applied more energy to the healing structure I had wrapped around his face.
At this point, I was starting to feel downright foolish. Even without trying to read him, I had already gotten enough just off his surface thoughts to know that this guy just a dupe. I decided to make it easy on him.
"Let me guess: someone showed up at the tannery with a bag of coin and said he'd pay people to stand near the road leading south out of the city and watch a particular spot for him."
Kraz looked a bit nervous at this point, but he nodded. "Except it wasn't the tannery, it was the pub. That's where he picked up the other two, too. I didn't see anything wrong with it, and a guy needs some extra coin sometimes, y'know? He didn't even say he was watching for anything special. He just told us to watch this spot and try to remember what we saw as clearly as we could. I don't know what good it would have done him. I didn't understand what I saw, so I don't think I could have described it for him."
Guileless honesty. The perfect short-term henchman, in many ways. You could even let this sort get captured, because he really didn't know anything. At all. About anything.
I finished healing him. "You wouldn't have had to. He would have picked it out of your brain. Four observers, four different angles. The fourth guy was your employer, I assume?"
"No, but he was with him."
"It's too much, I imagine, to hope you ever got names for them?"
"Nope. Not for the women, neither. He hired us, stuffed us in a cart, the other guy rattled us down here and perched us in the woods and told us to watch."
I sighed and let the immobility glamour go, as well. He stretched cautiously. He was kind-of thick, but he realised that sudden moves would be a bad idea. "Sometime later, I will ask you to describe the men as best you can. How much did he pay you?"
"A silver."
I nodded. That was more money than this guy was likely to see in a year, and never all at once. Which also made me a bit suspicious. "May I see it?"
Kraz wasn't too happy about that idea, but he realised I could immobilise him again with a twitch, and we'd just made friends, sort-of, so he nervously reached into a pouch at his belt and handed me the coin.
Thought so. A fake.
"I have very bad news for you, Kraz, and I realise you've got no reason to believe me, but you probably want to at least think about it. This coin is copper with a bit of paint. You try to spend this in the city and what I did to your beard will seem pleasant by comparison to what will happen to you. His Majesty's Justiciar has no sense of humour about bogus coin."
His eyes glazed a bit as he contemplated the horror of it all. This morning he'd been a rich man for a day of easy work. Now he'd had his face roasted off and was returned to penury. He was not so far gone in contemplating his new-found misery, however, that he didn't jump a bit as Tezhla came back, swearing sulfurously. The Noliri's fur was bristled, his ears erect, and his nostrils flaring, as he stomped down the one hill, across the road, and up the other to where we were standing. When he paused for breath, however, I cut him short. "You done yet?"
He glared. "Not really, but I can be convinced to pretend otherwise for a few minutes while we figure out what we're doing with him." He nodded at Kraz.
"That's easy. He's coming with us, at least into the city."
Tezhla narrowed his eyes at me - not quite a glare, but close. I touched the sword and aimed a thought at it, and the translation glamour was dispelled. When Tezhla responded, it was in a language few others in either world spoke - Esperanto. I'd learned it years ago because...well, because I'm a geek, and it's a geeky thing to do. I'd taught it to Tezhla for just such occasions. Of course, few of you, dear readers, speak it or read it, either, I expect, so I'll translate here.
"I suppose cutting him loose would be a bit harsh. I assume he's just a patsy?"
"Yup. So were your target-practice dummies over yonder. We turn him loose out here and he'll be dead by morning, one way or the other. "
"Don't expect me to feel guilty. Spying's a job for professionals, dammit."
"Wasn't saying you should feel guilty. I was saying we've been thoroughly had."
"I'd noticed. Of course, he could merely be playing the fool and counting on our pity to get close to us."
"Thought of that. I skimmed him. Either he's good enough to hide the slightest hint of nefarious intent from his surface thoughts, in which case he's earned a peek and I want to keep my eye on him anyway; or else he really is a walking cheese sandwich."
"And of course, you always prefer the simplest explanation. And you're correct to do so infuriatingly often. All right. We take him with us. Then what?"
"Dunno. Maybe we hand him to the reeve; maybe we hire him ourselves. He's proven he can follow instructions, and he looks muscular enough to take on any number of menial tasks you and I dislike."
Tezhla nodded with a bit of a stern face. This was not directed at me, but was the beginning of characterisation. Tezhla made an excellent bad cop. "Do we camp for the night, or would you like to light our way?"
Tezhla raised a good point. The fight and its aftermath had neatly prevented us from making the city before nightfall. It wasn't full dark, yet, but it would be soon. Too soon. "We'll never make the city before the gates close, and inn outside the south gates is nasty."
"Tsk. So squeamish. You'll sleep on the ground under a pitched sheet, but you won't sleep in a drafty, buggy inn?"
"I don't have to pay to sleep on the ground."
"Good point. OK."
At this point, I touched the sword again, and the translation glamour resumed. To Kraz, I said, "Are you any good at pitching tents?"
"Yeah, I suppose."
"Good. You'll find canvas and poles and stuff in my friends' packs. Don't get any ideas. Just pitch the tent."
Without question or argument, Kraz went about his work. Tezhla watched him like a hawk while I pretended to ignore him. When the work was done - and quite competently, too - I told him, "Wrap up in your cloak and go to sleep. You've had a long day. We'll take care of keeping watch. When we go into the city in the morning, you're coming with us. Do you understand?"
He nodded vigorously, and seemed grateful that he'd get a chance to sleep off what was probably the worst day of his life. I had a feeling I'd just hired myself my first henchman for the upcoming mission.
I told Tezhla to nap now, as well. To me, it was only an hour or so since I'd woken up, and I had a lot to think about already. There was a great deal already afoot that I was going to have to catch up on quickly.
But for now, the winter evening was still and dark, the snow faintly luminescent, the sky clear and filled with stars. Two of the three small moons were overhead, bouncing additional light off the snow. I could, once again, soak up the illusion of serenity, at least until morning.
I was going to need it.
The Keshir Wood, Atharinshire, 3 Alana 1507 AC, continued. (First: Prologue: Some Days Previous: 1a: The Other Side)
The most immediately critical news he had but had not imparted was that we were almost certainly being watched.
Now that I was becoming more attuned, I could feel it for myself, too. An itch between the shoulder blades. Nothing overtly hostile, but definitely watching.
Since it was just observation, as far as I could tell, I kept things casual. I continued to banter with Tezhla, and walked over to the horse - my horse - while Tezhla went to get his, concealed a short distance away.
Really, that's a strange phrase for a geek boy like me to be able to say: "my horse". Never mind that she's really more like a llama than a horse, and not really genetically related to either. A cowboy would have recognised the saddle and bags, and could have kept up with any real horse at a dead run riding her.
Epoxy recognised me, of course, and gave me that look she always gives me when I've been gone, a look that best translates as, "And where have you been, young man?" It's not like she's ill treated when I'm gone - heck, she probably has a much easier life when I'm not around. But that doesn't seem to matter. Every time I return, I get the Jewish Mother routine: You never call, you never write, you forgot to bring me apples. Again. How many times do I have to tell you about the apples? I'm wasting away here!
I spent a few moments stroking the wooly fur along her neck with one hand while making a show of looking through my saddlebags with the other.
I found what I was looking for pretty quickly - a small codex. It was a repository of recipes - spells, if you like, but I really don't like that word - I'd found useful in the past. Each was keyed on a glyph and a word. The glyphs and summaries of what they meant were visibly written in the book, while the structure of the recipes themselves were woven in to the substance of the book. The words, I'd memorised, and they weren't written down at all, but I didn't always remember the glyphs, especially the first few days back, so I had to actually look them up.
The two items I wanted were on the very first page, so I never had to actually take the book all the way out of the bag. Fortunately, I found something else in the bag to cover for the rummaging. Whoever had prepped Epoxy and left her here for me had left some fruit in the same pouch. It wasn't an apple, but it would keep her content, and provide me a bit more cover for what I was doing.
I gave her the fruit, continuing to stroke her neck and appearing to be speaking encouraging words to her. And for the most part, I was. But I was also forming the first glyph I'd chosen very carefully in my mind, while also reaching out with a sense I cannot easily describe to the Source. I felt energy crackling in my head, waiting to be used. The Source was the fuel, I was the engine, the glyph was the key in the ignition. Now, all I had to do was speak the right word to turn the key...
There were three of them, all Iri, two women and one man, at three nearly equilateral points around us. I could see them in my head. One of them had made a crude attempt to weave a shrouding spell to evade detection this way. The structure looked right, but he hadn't applied enough energy, and the result was patchy.
Amateurs.
Tezhla was walking his horse down out of the trees by now. I looked in his direction, and saw what he wanted me to see. If the pattern of watchers were not a triangle but a diamond, Tezhla's horse would have been picketed within a few feet of the correct point...
Ah! There was the professional. Novice, but professional. He was too intent on watching what we seemed to be doing to realise he'd been ratted out.
Tezhla, bless him, kept talking. I'd have to ask him later if any of it was consequential. I looked at him with a question in my face, and he answered with a barely perceptible shrug. OK. My call. Fine.
I don't especially like a man who uses henchmen as bait. I've done it myself, mind you, but I don't always like myself, either. So I carefully envisioned the second glyph I'd chosen, drawing it over over the man's face so that there would be no doubt. Touched the Source, spoke the word...
Even professionals tend to panic a bit when their beard is on fire.
Because I want to present pieces of the story in a reasonably timely fashion, and also in chunks of more blog-like size than a typical novel chapter, many posts (including the next one) will represent only partial episodes. I will never stop in mid-sentence or anything like that, and unless I'm feeling melodramatic and cliffhangery, I will always try to bring things to a reasonable stopping place. Tonight, I realised I had written about as much as I could, and that while the episode was not really complete, the current thought was. And I was therefore ready to post it. So up it goes. Hope you like it.
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.
This story began its life in reaction to a challenge on a mailing list for writers, long defunct, called The Spoon. I no longer remember the exact wording of the challenge, but it was along the lines of "create a story whose first line is, 'The box was waiting on the porch when I woke up that morning...'".
The prologue, "Some Days", no longer begins with that sentence, as I rewrote it recently for LiveJournal's "Rabbit Hole Day", and then rewrote it again when I decided it was time to get off my ass and start writing the rest of the story. Beyond that, the prologue is pretty much what I wrote for that initial challenge.
For the most part, this "blog" will consist of episodes of the story. Occasionally there will be news and babble from your entirely not-humble author.
If you like your fantasy serious, you may not like this story. It's not that it lacks complexity or darkness or violence or sex or any of the other gritty things of "serious" fantasy. It's just that I think the real world is often very silly. Realism, therefore, requires silliness.
If you like your fantasy silly, you may not like this story, either, because I think it will get complex and dark and violent and occasionally involve sex (probably never more than a PG-13 rating, though, because frankly, I'm not sure I can write a sex scene. I've never tried).
Personally, I think you should read it anyway, because I think I'm going to enjoy writing it a lot, and therefore, being un-humble, as I've mentioned, I think you'll enjoy reading it.
Hope I'm right!
Some days, it's easy to make myself believe I'm just a normal person. I get up in the morning, pet the cat, have some breakfast, stumble into work, tell computers stories (which, being computers, they more or less have to believe, even when they're not true), wander home, pet the cat some more, have dinner, maybe get together with friends.
You know. Normal.
Other days are more difficult. Other days, various oddities that have woven their way into my life, mostly by chance, some by design, and a couple, perhaps, by fate, make their presence known once again, and my life gets not-normal for a while.
There's a problem, though, when you have one of those sorts of lives. You never really know which sort of day it's going to be.
Some days I wake up ready to unleash some serious mayhem upon the forces of darkness, brandishing my flaming sword (stop that, you pervs) and my arcane knowledge to right wrongs, square circles, and generally engage in Mighty Hero type things. Then the fog of sleep clears and I discover that it's just another normal day, and it's time to pet the cat and have some breakfast and go convince my employers' computers to do something new.
Other days, I wake up perfectly content with normality, in no mental state to deal with the Mighty Hero business whatsoever. Then the fog of sleep clears and I discover that I'm not even going to get a chance to get a cup of coffee before I get whisked off to slay a dragon or something.
(OK, so I've yet to actually slay a dragon. Probably never will. My employers -- that is, my other employers, not the ones who ask me to write computer programs -- kind of like dragons and would get very cross if I did. But you know what I mean).
Anyway. Today...today was closer to the latter than the former.
I stumbled out in my usual underslept and undercaffeinated state. I had no greater thought in my mind than the hope that I was sufficiently cogent to drive to the cafe to get my breakfast and desperately needed coffee.
And then, I tripped over the box that had been left on my stoop, along with a newspaper.
I'd never figured out how my employers learned enough about the world in which I live my normal life (I've learned not to call it 'the real world', at least, not where they can hear me) to do it. My instructions always arrived looking almost exactly like that day's paper (unless you actually read it), and the box always came to me looking like a perfectly ordinary UPS package. Once, I even checked the tracking number against the UPS website. It was not only valid, but told me where the box had been picked up from. I kept meaning to trace back to that depot and see if I could figure out how the connection got made, but somehow I'd never gotten around to it.
Anyway, I knew what the box meant. No computer programming for me today. Oh, I'd come back, and the calendar would still say it was today, and I'd probably even still wind up going to work, assuming I got a good night's sleep before returning. But for me, it would probably me months before I got back to the office, and worse, months before I got another cup of coffee. Another thing I hadn't gotten around to doing yet -- bringing over some coffee plants and seeing if I could grow them there.
OK, I thought. It's here. But they shipped it UPS Ground, so they're not actually in a hurry. I can, at least, have a cuppa and get my brain into the right frame of mind before I open it.
Back inside I went, lugging the box and newspaper in with me. I left the box in the living room and the newspaper in the dining room and stalked off to the kitchen, hoping I was correctly remembering the bag of beans I'd bought to leave in the freezer for just such an emergency. I'm lazy. I don't like making my own coffee. But the last time I had a day like this, I'd deeply regretted not having the option.
Sure enough, there they were. Beans, check. Grinder, check. Grind. Water. Filter. Switch. Stare at it for a full minute while it does absolutely nothing. Plug it in. Switch. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Blissful aroma.
Coffee brewed, I brought the pot with me into the dining room and set it down, poured a cup, and unfolded the paper.
The newspaper was not so much a set of well-disguised instructions as a briefing on the current state of my employers' world. As such, it contained everything you might expect an ordinary newspaper to contain...if that ordinary newspaper were based in a quasi-feudal kingdom in a different world where magic works and a shadowy organisation occasionally feels the need to hire outside help. Which may sound contradictory, but really, not as much as you'd think.
So, the front pages contained the latest in politics and war, from the point of view of the Kingdom of Renar, which told me where I was going, or at least, from where I'd be starting out. The next section was all the latest about the City of Atharin, the capital of Renar. There was a business section updating me on the current forces in local markets -- important to know when you've been away for several months and don't know what bread and cheese will cost you. Even a sports section, which was always a good place to gather names of possible henchm...er...assistants with a bit more muscle or agility or whatnot.
The last section was the entertainment section, which included all the latest court and "celebrity" gossip, listings for theatres in Atharin, and the funnies.
The impressive part was not that they thought to include a funnies section, although that was a nice touch, but that they were actually funny! Better than I could say for the real paper 'round these parts, that was sure.
All in all, it took me about three hours, and most of the pot of coffee. I like to go into these things fully wired up on caffeine. It helps to cushion the shock. Alcohol would probably work as well, but the quantity I'd need would make me useless for days afterward.
I folded up the paper, making a mental note to make a better effort to find out which of my colleagues was actually responsible for producing it. I wanted to thank them for doing such a thorough briefing job, and so creatively presenting it. And then, taking one last swig of coffee, I set aside procrastination and went to open the box.
The sword glistened even in shadow. It sang to me, called to me, and I heeded it and grasped it, drawing it from the box. It greeted me like an old friend, speaking to me of old times we'd had together. I smiled.
The mission was not going to be pretty. Political developments had complicated many things that had been simple last time, and made almost impossible things that had been complex. Few would welcome my return -- although at least one would do so with considerable enthusiasm, I hoped -- but most would appreciate my results.
I stepped out through my front door, and although the portal was only just opening, I could smell the piney aromas of the Keshir Wood, just outside the City, and taste a hint of its wintery air despite the spring-like day around me. I could feel the strength flow into me from the sword, followed by the memories of how to use it. Thoughts of code were set aside with thoughts of incantations of a different kind, and I could feel my connection to the Source strengthen with every heartbeat.
As I drew the sword and spoke the words that would complete the portal, I thought, perhaps today is not such a bad day to be a Mighty Hero after all!
