~~~~~
At around midnight, the meal was done, and the travel kits refilled, organized, and doubled in number. The all-terrain was especially loaded up, its back cage crammed with enough supplies for the almost week-long trip west. That voyage was unfortunately going to take Saan and her team mostly through the barely-charted forests, curving southward two-thirds of the way across the continent. It was a similar trip to the one Dastou and her took together when she left Nebasht, but more direct – no stopping to rest in further north mining towns. She was not in the least cheery on that longer trip, and hopefully with Nes to balance her out she’ll say more than a dozen words this time.
The boat trip east and north would also, as previously mentioned, take several days. Dastou could only hope that being unable to enter Davranis directly would slow Vaiss down enough for his own travel time to not be such a crippling deficit. The thought of being right about the movements he was putting together and still late to the party was an itch in the back of the Saint’s brain that wasn’t going away.
Immediately after dinner and packing things up, everyone had gone to bed. When everyone else was asleep, Dastou went with Husband to the monitoring station in the basement, with Wife keeping an eye out so no one walked into the subterranean space.
The basement of this house could easily be called a paranoia-induced dream hut. Four monitors sat on a long table split, each screen split into four sections sitting a long corner table showed every inch of visible area outside of this house. A dozen storage drives – four in use, four for backup, and four for redundancy – recorded data onto machines situated below the same table. That backup system was far too much for sleepy Hyugesten, and was in truth meant to function as this continent’s main communications core for the DSF.
The process was this: small teams of three agents assigned nearby would wait until a Social Cypher project began, hopefully something that wouldn’t end by the time they fished out where it actually was. Then began a dance of dead drops, pickups, notes with new dead drop locations, and sooner or later getting picked up by the Caravan. If the mobile headquarters was in scheduled maintenance or didn’t show up for three hours, the team would stow aboard a freight ship and come back to the Academy complex the slow way. Any information agents collected on the Social Cypher from Horebaxi’s towns and city-states was delivered and retrieved by Husband or Wife, backed up, then deleted once those agents were confirmed to have arrived at the school.
Additionally, a big portion of the Thousand Kilo Shore could be monitored from here using wide-field cameras on Husband’s fishing boats. This continent and the landmass across the Baritr Ocean to the east, Davranis, featured numerous valuable shipping lanes, docks, and the re-appropriated underwater tube rails used for the Caravan. Keeping an eye on all of that was essential. The Thousand Kilo Shore had Husband and Wife for that, and Silverline, Davranis’ coastal range, was partially monitored by the DSF itself, and partially by other spies or moles.
The Tribeslands to the far east was full of clans, nearly a dozen different groups of people, some nomadic and some sedentary, but no Cypher activity so no need for in-depth monitoring. Dastou did a lot of trade with clans over there, and those friendly relationships were enough to make sure he could buy all the information he needed without the need for electronic surveillance or subterfuge.
“This is slightly more equipment that you’re supposed to have,” Dastou said, impressed by the setup. “And you didn’t exactly requisition more.”
“Myself and my lovely Wife are very sneaky,” Husband said. “And the manufacturing town northeast of Blackbrick makes all of the computer equipment for the continent’s holdings.”
“So you stole the extra monitors, hard drives, and computer?”
“And doubled what we stole in case anything broke later,” Husband admitted, pointing to a small closet on the opposite side of the room as the table full of electronics.
“Not very honest.”
“Yet still far less than what you had stolen for the school.”
“Plus, we weren’t sneaky about it. We had the numbers to simply ransack our closest manufactory.”
“Those are some of the best stories the faculty has, by the way. Very exciting. Though, sir, to move on, I’m glad you’re here.” Husband was no less charming than he’d been all evening, but with an air of apprehension added on top. “I have to tell you that we’ve seen some odd activity lately.”
“You could’ve told me through a coded message,” said Dastou. “I was at the embassy pretty early this morning. I always have Saan inform moles about similar meetings however she sees fit.”
“I was forced cut off all communication a little while ago,” Husband said, “therefore her message would have been deleted or ignored. However, I have someone I trust visit Blackbrick regularly, and he’d been telling me about this meeting you were supposed to be there for.”
“Ah,” Dastou realized, “that’s why I didn’t know about Tryst plastering my name and when I’d be coming all over the place – you couldn’t actually tell me.”
“No, sir, I couldn’t.” The guilt in that phrase made Dastou put a hand up to show forgiveness, and Husband went on. “My man saw you leave the embassy to hunt down the criminals and wasn’t sure when you would return. He decided to rush back and tell me everything.”
“But you cut off communication long before all that. Why?”
“Because someone is hunting for spies,” Husband said bluntly.
Dastou looked at him squarely, raising an eyebrow. “Are they trying to find you specifically?”
“No. They couldn’t be,” Husband said, falsely abashed. “I was born only fifty kilometers away. I visit my parents every other weekend, when my crew are busy with regular maintenance on my fishing boats.”
“Yes, of course,” Dastou said, smiling while recounting some of his spy’s cover story with a dramatic vocal flourish. “A native from a local farm, home-schooled, and so on.”
“Exactly, and the contact lenses seal the deal,” Husband said while tapping his head near one eye, grinning.
His eyes were, right now, a deep blue, but were actually a dull blue-gray when not being hidden by false coloring. The Saint was quite proud of that trickery, as it was his idea to hide entourage members from public scrutiny with contact lenses before he started thinking about building a school and expanding the number of people with those attention-grabbing eyes. Before then, hypnotism was used for hiding, but too much of that could lead to suspicion. The hardest part was paying off night guards of the manufactory to let them into the lenses wing and make what they needed; they were starting to get greedy, but that’s a problem for another day.
“They’ve been looking for a while now,” Husband continued. “Thankfully, they aren’t very good at it. People pretending to be on vacations and asking bold questions like ‘hey, I bet y’all don’t get many new people around here year to year, am I right?’” He slathered an extra thick midland Horebaxi accent on the quoted question.
Dastou shook his head in shame. “Amateurs. Though technically we’re amateurs too with how long we’ve been doing this.”
“I would say we’re talented amateurs,” said Husband in his normal half-accent. “Wife took maybe five minutes to carve out more information from the last person than he was trying to get from her.”
“Oh?”
“Mhm. From what she could tell of that guy and another pair, the people were all from Blackbrick. References to the city in their conversations were easy to pick out. Recently they had been elsewhere, for at least two years. Those aforementioned references were precisely that far out of date.”
“When did these spy hunters start showing up?”
“To figure that out, we headed north and then south to the next towns over. We got fishermen and dock workers drinking and laughing and talking all about the annoying people that came around. Altogether, the search started around six months ago.”
“Six months!?�
�� asked Dastou in a loud whisper after forcing his volume down past the first syllable.
Husband chuckled at the awkwardness of the change in speaking tone and pointed at the ceiling of the basement. “Soundproofing hidden in the ceiling. The computers wouldn’t be too secret otherwise – anyone visitors we’d have would hear all those fans spinning after a while.”
“Yeah, I know. Forgot for a second.”
“Understandable, sir. In any case, yes, six months. It stopped about two weeks ago. When Wife got one of the strange visitors especially drunk, he told her that he was tired of coming to these backwater towns to find a monster’s pet and was glad he was going to get to stay home. I abruptly cut contact for safety, thinking the searching stopped because they found us, as unlikely as that is. Is there significance to that timing?”
Dastou thought back. “There is. That was when Councilor Jandal Tryst sent a telegraph invite for me to come meet with him and the rest of the Council.”
“Hmm, Tryst had been mentioned in our investigation,” Husband said, “as some kind of ‘bossy idiot.’ Seems it was him who set to trying to find us here.”
“Heh, funny. Constable Renker would have been a better person to ask about finding someone specific, but Tryst probably doesn’t expect someone as dedicated as her to fall for his bullshit. Honestly, she might already know who you are.”
“She does, actually,” Husband admitted. “She keeps a record of possibly dangerous individuals, and I’m on that list as a ‘collaborative element for the Sainthood.’”
Dastou snorted.
“Sad to say,” Husband continued, “that the spy hunt was a very small problem compared to what it led us to find.”
“Husband, I’m starting to think you do too thorough of a job here. You’re supposed to take away my worries, not add to them exponentially.”
“Oh, exponentially is dead on in this case. After the spy searching stopped, we decided to investigate a specific piece of scenery mentioned twice by drunk fools, a massive rock formation visible on the coast from long distances. We went farther north, a few hundred kilos, ostensibly looking for unmaintained locations to build up a new ‘freedom and fishes’ town to complement Hyugesten.”
“Well, now, aren’t you future-minded?”
“Yes, sir, quite. Wife and I went to that rock formation, and beautiful as it was, a lot of noise kept us from enjoying it. Tracking the sound, we found people marching further inland, through a forested area. They were headed to the cold northeast of Horebaxi, toward the Keymeign Lakes.”
Dastou was baffled by the term “marching,” and in his head all he imagined was a bunch of people moving in the same direction on a busy street. Something like the Davranis Central marketplaces, but all the people going in the same direction very orderly. Then he remembered that his students were actually taught to march sometime in their second year. He thought it was useless, but one of his predecessors for some reason wrote out how to do it in a book and Dastou didn’t feel like editing it out when he converted the whole thing to a training guide.
“Marching, like the patterned steps we know?”
“Yes,” Husband said tersely, a worried expression on his face. “And they wore uniforms.”
“Let me guess,” said the Saint, rubbing the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger and closing his eyes for a second, “blue cloth, white trim, gold badges or tags.”
Husband tilted his head in surprise, folding his arms across his chest. “Exactly right, though they had no badges. That was what the guards at the embassy wore?”
Dastou sighed in acknowledgment. “How many did you see?”
“Thirty in the first platoon we caught a glimpse of.” Dastou sighed again before Husband went on. “The same number in three more platoons we spotted during the two days we stayed watching, the platoons coming exactly twelve hours apart.”
Dastou took a long, deep breath, and exhaled. “Four platoons,” he said. “One-hundred-and-twenty people. The beginning of an army. And that’s only what you saw of them.”
“Worse yet,” Husband said, heaping more wood onto this fire, “we went directly onto their trail to look for indications as to who these people were. We found some pieces of paper stomped into the dirt: the marching orders themselves. They were signed by half of the new reps for Blackbrick as witnesses, including the man who wrote it, Jandal Tryst.”
Husband dug into a pants pocket, pulled out a twice-folded piece of yellow paper with black printed letters on it, and handed it to Dastou. The Saint read it aloud:
“This is a decree from your chosen leadership, the Blackbrick Council, in the words of Councilor Jandal Tryst.
My soldiers, we are now at the point of moving forward. The line has been crossed by Saint Cosamian Dastou and his underlings, as I predicted, and we now act in return. More of what we must do will be forthcoming, but for now these are your orders.
Platoons A and B: stay at Site Tarrib and prepare all vehicles.
Platoons C through F: march to Site Tarrib by foot, half-a-day apart, and await further instruction.
Platoons G and H: Wait two days after previous, prepare vehicles and use as needed to reach Site Tarrib.
Platoons I through P: Wait twelve hours after previous, in Blackbrick, then use remaining vehicles to go to Site Tarrib.
Further orders will be given upon arrival of all soldiers.
Thank you all, your hard work in this grand effort will be remembered forever in this new history we are at the forefront of.”
Dastou finished reading it without bothering to look at the signatures, then laughed softly.
“I... oh, I don’t think this could be funnier if they tried,” he said, gathering himself, but unable to stop smiling. “This is serious? You’re not playing a joke on me?”
“No, sir, not at all.”
“This... It’s not coded at all! It flat-out says where they’re going, when they’re going, how many are going, in general terms anyway.”
“No, in precise terms,” Husband corrected. “As you have said, these people don’t know how to use code or variance, so I’ll bet everything I own that each platoon is exactly thirty including commanders. Therefore, Four-hundred-and-eighty total.”
Dastou stopped himself from laughing again and re-folded the note to hand back to Husband, who refused it with an out-turned palm.
“It’s fine. I have six more.”
This time Dastou giggled like a little girl at how many “secret” notes Husband had. “This army may be big compared to any other organized fighting force, but they are truly, truly unprofessional. Heck, the only thing Tryst kept secret in this missive was what they’re doing after they meet up. Actually, I’m surprised he didn’t write that on here.”
“It’s a bold statement on how confident they are that it’s not coded,” Husband commented. “Or how impatient. Maybe they have reason to be both. Politically speaking, if Tryst got wind of you having spies nearby, that would be enough of an excuse, or slight, for someone that manipulative to put an army into action.”
“Except he wouldn’t be able to start up an army at all, how could he? Hundreds of people, missing from the system. Vaiss did this. I don’t know how, it can’t all have been that tattoo, but this new armed force, the impossibility of it, the fact that no one, including you, Wife, or myself noticed what was happening matches the impossibility of the Citizen himself.”
“Yet he gave control of such strength, as I would think of it, to Tryst. I’ve been in this town for some time, kept tabs on Blackbrick from afar, and I wouldn’t trust that man around a dog if the animal’s death would give him a meter more authority.”
Dastou shook his head, unable to out together anything about these marching platoons. “Something about that new army is off,” Dastou said with a shake of his head. “Its existence is as baffling as its purpose.”
This was a day that started, Dastou thought, as bad as it could get. And here he was, discussing an army of all thin
gs. The reason Dastou referred to his people as agents rather than soldiers is because he wanted the connotation of force, of danger, of control to be lessened. It’s the same reason that he cloistered himself away anymore, took fewer and fewer excursions into the world year over year: when people saw him, the situation changed. He’d quickly grown as tired of seeing people grab their children and flee from him as he did of others suddenly laying down petals as he walked, or asking for blessings. He knew his choice of words was a pretense – he was the commander of an army, and lately he had forced himself to grow more comfortable with the wording.
But the wording wasn’t as important as the fact that his people were being trained for combat against another organized fighting group. They were trained for reconnaissance, defense, information gathering. Whatever this army wanted, whatever reason Tryst had control of such a power in Blackbrick, in Horebaxi, Dastou wasn’t going to be able to deal with it for a long time, if ever.
“Exponential worries, sir,” Husband said into the multi-second silence Dastou had cultivated in this basement.
“Exponential,” Dastou agreed with an exhausted exhalation, then decided to ask about something else before the steam rising up his neck blew off his head. “I saw that Wife was helping Trenna earlier, chatting her up.”
Husband nodded his head once, a knowing expression on his face.
“I assume,” Dastou continued, “that she played mental health helper for our new friend.”
“Of course. Hold on.”
Husband knocked on the basement stairway banister three times, and then someone walked down to meet them. Wife glided down the stairs and met Husband’s eye.
“I heard what he asked,” she said, “I’ll take it from here.”
Husband squeezed her hand and walked upstairs to keep watch.
Dastou hummed, wanting her to continue where Husband left off.
“She is not one of your students,” Wife began, interrupting the humming, “or friends or subordinates like everyone else in this house. I had to make sure she wouldn’t snap on you thanks to all this stress she is in, especially with her entire core of friends dead or enslaved.”
Dastou felt an instant pang of shame at not having thought about that much until now. This was, put extremely mildly, a trying day for those in his company. He’d been so busy trying to put things together, figuring out how to help them all survive and get on top of their increasingly worrisome situation, that he was mostly ignoring the emotional problems the strain itself could cause.
“And will she?” Dastou asked.
“No,” Wife said in toned-down surprise, “which is strange. I would normally say maybe not, or maybe yes. I get the feeling Trenna Geil is much more solid than she should be for everything that’s happened.”
“That’s something I assumed earlier, yeah,” Dastou admitted. “That girl’s got metal in her bones and tragedy in her past.”
“Assuredly. All that has happened, I thought she was in shock at first, severe denial. She is not, she knows exactly what happened, and is struck deeply by it. She went through a few tissues telling me about it. She will go through a great many more in the years to come.”
“She hasn’t shown that level of emotion outside of you talking to her,” Dastou said, a half-question.
“How could she? She worshiped you this morning, and has come to call you an ally, possibly a friend. She likely thinks you are not the one she should talk to of such things. Nes might be a better friend for her, the way he is with Saan. He’s a natural emotion sponge, and an excellent listener. Unfortunately, she is about to go on a long ocean voyage with you and Crawford of all people.”
“Ugh,” Dastou grunted in quiet agreement. “An emotionally needy person with a bald ass and a redheaded ass. That’s no good.”
“It’s also an image I did not want conjured,” Wife said with a smile.
“Heh,” Dastou chuckled with hints of self-deprecation. “Sorry.”
“Just... promise me you’ll be a person. Because occasionally, you aren’t.”
Dastou put a hand to his heart solemnly. “I promise.”
“Good,” she said, and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek, like a younger sister who finally got through to a moron older brother. “I should add that she will try to keep herself busy. She has an inquisitive mind, and she will not be trying keep her mind off of sadness, not completely. She will be acting as she normally would, more or less, and you should let her.”
“Okay, I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks, I owe you a ton.”
“Dastou, you’ve been good to me and mine for some time, and you are our boss. No favors between us.”
“Uh, no,” Dastou said as he dug into a pants pocket and pulled the lining out completely. “I mean I owe you a ton of money.”
A tiny zippered sack was further sewn into the pocket lining, and Dastou opened it. He removed three toy-marble-sized, deep violet stones. He put one of them back into the mini-pocket, zipped it up and folded pushed it back into his regular pocket, and held two out for Wife to take.
“Two?” she said incredulously, he words a breath-whisper. She still took them in hand despite the criticism, her hand not fully still.
In the muted light of basement, the violet color shone and warped oddly, a trademark of this exceedingly rare stone. When she touched one, it shone more, an inner glow that faded almost instantly. When Wife rubbed on the other, it sang. It was a real voice, more a trick of sound that was close enough to be haunting, but there was a consistency to it, a wavy beauty that was undeniable.
Wife took a fingertip and stroked one of the stones gently again, as if afraid. Music emanated from it, so light and airy that the sound barely left her palm. The glow that accompanied the outpouring tone was of a similar low intensity, then faded as the strange, repeating ups and downs of the music continued. It was like lyrics in a language no one knew, in a tone that was less air through a vocal cord than wind through a far-off valley, yet it felt so alive.
Just one of these dark purple stones known as Yodralki’s Voice could be exchanged for enough to buy the town of Hyugesten, rebuild it top to bottom without blinking an eye, and have quite a bit left over. Any of the free peoples of the world would willingly trade an immense amount of materials, labor, or favors to get one in hand. It was the year 439, and in that history a total of eighteen of them had been found; each one sounded different, and were the ultimate prized possession of someone or another. The Saints had collected six.
Who knew when Dastou would be able to return here, and giving his western spy masters leniency to be independent had, within a day, suddenly become a top priority. Handing over two pieces of Yodralki’s Voice was proof of Husband and Wife’s importance, and how much the last Saint trusted them.
“Two,” Dastou confirmed. “I want you as prepared as possible for the future here. Don’t go crazy or anything, but get things going how you see fit to possibly supply several more spies for the area, maybe a few long-term agents on occasion. You and Husband have acted as my extended leadership around the Stoneground for years, and I’m making it official. You two don’t have ranks, but no one besides myself or the general can give you orders from this point on. I may not be back for quite a while, and I need you two to be almost completely independent,” Dastou said while thinking of the mysterious army gathering together. “You two are now the western hands of the DSF.”
“Stepping up your presence, I see,” Wife said, subconsciously adding to the musicality of her voice as if impersonating the stone. People tended to do that, though she was also holding back tears at her multi-level promotion and newfound ridiculous riches.
“I absolutely am,” Dastou said, letting her change the subject partially. “I’m not happy that I let so much slip by my fingers here. By the void an entire army is in play and I had no idea. That level of ignorance won’t happen again. I want you two to have as long of a leash as possible.”
She raised an eyebrow at that phrasing. “So ma
ny interesting images you’re supplying me with today.”
Dastou sighed himself. “I leave the Thousand Kilo Shore, the west, entirely in your and your handsome partner’s capable hands.”
Wife smiled, nodded graciously, tossed the stones in the air and snatched them into her palm again. The half-hearted insult to how freakishly valuable those things were warmed Dastou’s heart, and reminded him that he was putting the right people in charge.
“Get some sleep,” Wife advised sympathetically. “Dream of her.”
Dastou smiled wide at the thought of a dream involving Paige Ki, whom he could no longer be with in reality.
“And nothing dirty,” added Wife.
“Can’t control that, sorry.”
Wife giggled, took Dastou by the elbow, and escorted him upstairs where a comfortable loveseat, fluffy pillow, and thick extra linens were waiting.
~~~~
Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1) Page 32
