by Garon Whited
“So I have to ask: What are you? Are you some impostor, warming my King’s chair until you can arrange for the Queen to rule? Or are you the true King? My King? I must know.”
I sat there and thought about it, hating myself, hating being a king, hating my life, hating everyone and everything. By God, I felt like an angsty teenager again.
“All right, you’ve asked your question. I agree you deserve an answer. And I’ll give you one the moment I understand the question. As it stands, I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
“How can I make it more clear?”
“First, what brought all this on? What made you decide I needed a smack across the chops?”
“You heard the traitor Thomen?”
“I did.”
“You agree he is a traitor?”
“Oh, yes. He’s made his position very clear.”
“Has he?” Seldar snapped.
“Yes,” I agreed, surprised. “My only concern now is how to deal with him. For that, I need to understand how Lissette feels about him.”
“And that, Sire, is why I feel the urge to hit you again,” he replied, hands flexing into fists. “And again. Until you cease to spiral into stupidity.”
“Please don’t. Explain, instead.”
“Did you not hear Thomen? He spoke of troops, and ships, and forces, did he not?”
“He did. So? I’m well aware they’re on their way.”
“Whose forces are they? No, wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “Whose forces did he say they were?”
“Why, they… he said…” I trailed off as my memory played back parts of the conversation.
…you know my forces… persuade me to recall them…
“…they were his forces,” I finished, softly. “Not the Queen’s forces, not the kingdom’s armies, but his.”
“With all the other evidence, do you need anything further to make a decision? Or will you continue to be hesitant, uncertain, overcautious, even cowardly in your decision-making?”
I sat there for a bit, thinking. When Seldar lectures me on how I’m being a lousy commander-in-chief, I need to listen. Come to that, I am a lousy commander-in-chief, so I need all the help I can get.
“You’ve brought it to my attention. Now get out.”
Seldar did the one-knee, fist-on-floor thing and departed. I turned off the light and sat there, in the dark, thinking. Somehow, I feel more comfortable in the dark.
At least I’ve finally got the hang of this brooding thing.
One good thing about brooding, it involves thinking. That’s kind of the point to brooding. I gave serious thought to a number of things, most of which needed to be done immediately if not sooner. I need to find Tort. I need to stop a fleet. I need to kill Thomen. I need to put Lissette on the throne. I need to rip Johann’s face off and shove his head in a bucket of vinegar. I need to talk to a family of magi—probably the Etiennes; they seemed like decent people. Maybe the Stuarts, if I could appeal to their self-interest… blah, blah, blah, all the stuff on my To-Do List.
But Seldar raised a point. Have I been acting like a king? I’ve never been anything great, as far as kings go, but have I been especially goofy? Probably, if Seldar is willing to smack me across the face to get his point across. That’s either profound courage or total desperation.
With Seldar, my money is on the courage. He may be the bravest man I know.
And I didn’t see the smack coming, that’s for sure. He’s grown up a lot. The kid I knew would have followed me to the underworld and never asked if we were coming back. I think I like the grown Seldar even better than the too-serious youngster, right cross and all.
Ever since I’ve been back, I’ve been trying to soft-pedal the whole King thing. I want people to look to Lissette, not me. But if I’m not being much of a king, how can I hand her my authority? To be free of the crown, I have to put it on, first… and if Thomen is controlling the Queen, she can’t rule. I have to. Then I have to put Lissette in a position to rule, which means I have to fix the damned political system, which is oxymoronic.
I’ve probably said it before, but it bears repeating. Politics. From the Latin poly, meaning many, and tics, meaning blood-sucking parasites.
That may be incorrect, but it’s not wrong.
So, what to do? Answer: Something. Anything. Progress treats depression. Success, however small a dose, is my drug of choice for treating despair. And a king doesn’t dither and vacillate; he acts. I’ve been… I don’t know. Seldar had trouble putting it into words, so how am I going to do better? I think I know what I need to do, though. If I can at least act… decisive? Resolute? Determined? Purposeful! That’s the word. If I can act like I have a purpose, have a plan, maybe it’ll be catching.
I’m afraid to do things which might end badly, might cause innocents to be hurt. I’ve done it so many times before.
The risk, though, goes with being King. And, whatever else I’m going to do, I have to be King. For a little while, at least. Time to put on my invisible crown—maybe my real one, too—straighten my tie, grab my lapels, stand up straight, and act like I know what I’m doing.
I really wish I did.
I turned on the lights and did a little spell-work. The mountain has veins of metal and other minerals it squeezes out of its structure. Lower down, in the forges, it does this with iron and coal, possibly some other metals—I haven’t checked recently. Higher up, in what I used to think of the metals room, it does this mainly with gold and silver—the royal treasury. I looked in on it earlier and it appeared to have stopped when thirty or forty pounds of the stuff accumulated. My message spell for the mountain restarted the process and set a higher limit. I might need a hundred thousand pieces of gold in the near future.
I wonder where they keep the stamping thing for making coins? Or do they just hammer them out by hand?
With the money sorted out, I opened the door. Mary and Kammen were waiting. Seldar was nowhere to be seen.
“Seldar?”
“Off doing the organizing and operations thing,” Mary replied.
“Did he say if he was avoiding me?”
“No. Why?”
“He made a very pointed point, and one I disliked as much as I appreciated.”
“That’s weird, even for you,” Mary observed.
“I know.”
“He said you might want him, though, and he’ll be in your council chamber for a few hours.”
“Good man.”
“I’ll say. If he wasn’t married, I’d have to seriously consider taking him on as a substitute for when you’re busy.”
“Noted. I have a lot to do.”
“That was my point,” she agreed. “But, since I can’t have a Seldar of my own, can I help?”
“Yes. You were going to tell me something about Lotar.”
“Oh, yes!” she said, clapping her hands in delight. “He’s definitely out to get you!”
“This is news on Mars, maybe, but not to me.”
“But the details, my doofus dear, the details. Someone you may know broke into the building they’re using as a temple—during the day—and stole a fair amount of his private correspondence. You’ll never guess who he’s been negotiating with.”
“Thomen.”
“Aww.”
“Sorry.”
“Yes, he was negotiating with Thomen. From what I’ve read, Lotar was ordered to base himself here by someone higher up—a patriarch of the church, something called the deveas of the Lord of Light.”
“Deveas is sort of like a direct agent for the deity. God’s spokesman. Amber would probably be Sparky’s.”
“And Beltar is yours?”
“Wash your mouth out,” I suggested. She giggled and continued.
“Anyway, on this side of the Eastrange, the church could hope to avoid the Demon King’s notice. When the King vanished, Lotar started pushing a major move into Rethven. Little cults all over the place geared up into actual churches and sent missi
onaries—or evangelists or whatever they’re called—into any town or city lacking a franchise. When you reappeared, he started talking things over with Thomen about giving religious support in exchange for official sanction.”
“Official sanction? The local religions don’t need to be fill out a form. They just are.”
“Lotar’s negotiating for acknowledgment as the state religion.”
I sat down and rubbed my temples. When I first arrived in Rethven, almost a century ago, the place was ruled by a king, had the Church of Light for a state religion, a failure of the dynasty, corruption in the church, a demonic Thing posing as their deity, and the organized hunting of vampires.
Everything could revert to that in amazingly short order. We were practically there already.
Is this how the world works? Or is it human nature? Which, of course, leads me back to my usual dilemma: I’m trying to change things without fully understanding how those changes will cause other changes. Like a little boy throwing a rock into a pond, I make ripples. Stopping the ripples is as futile as throwing in more rocks to make ripples to cancel out other ripples. It doesn’t work.
And I’m still throwing rocks. Am I irresponsible, stupid, or too egotistical to care? Maybe they have their system and should be left alone. Have your kingdom, your church, your crazy vampire-hunting club. If you’ll leave me out of it, I’ll leave you alone, too.
No, that won’t work. Religious fanatics on a holy mission never compromise, and if they do, they’re lying about it.
“All right,” I said, finally. “What did Lotar promise?”
“According to his latest letters—well, Thomen’s latest letters—”
“Wait a second. Why is Thomen talking to Lotar via messenger? Why not use a magic mirror?”
“Sire?” Kammen offered.
“Yes, Kammen?”
“I can answer that one.”
“By all means. It’s not often I actually get answers.”
“Two reasons. Lotar don’t trust wizards and magicians. None of the Lighters do. The Hand uses ’em for stuff, if they swear to the Lord of Light, but there’s no love for any of ’em. And makin’ a mirror’s a tough job. Some wizards will sell you one, sure, but it’ll be days of work to make it.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “It’s not so hard.”
“I’m the best of us three, Sire, at makin’ mirrors and such,” Kammen pointed out, “so I oughtta know. With all the respect due you, you ain’t the best judge of what’s hard for mortals.”
“Well, no. I suppose not. But making a matched set of mirrors only takes an hour or so, at most.”
“For you, Sire. You’re a more than half-demon Thing with the powers of the gods, remember? And Thomen, he’s the Guildmaster, but he’s still a wizard. He hasn’t done the magician thing for the higher magic, or whatever it is, and magicians take a couple days to put magic in a mirror. Like the rest of us, Thomen can’t handle big powers without a lot of painted lines and chanting and helpers. He also don’t gulp down souls and stuff them into things, neither.”
“I do not—”
AHEM, Firebrand said.
“—usually—”
That’s better.
“—do that sort of thing,” I finished. I remembered the dragon-spirit, of course. Come to think of it, there was also the incident with Linnaeus, taking a little bit of his soul and enchanting it into the three instruments for him… and the tendrils of power I put into the blades for my first three knights, Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar. And a small herd of sheep when I attacked the Hand compound in Telen with a tornado…
“Don’t matter,” Kammen rumbled on. “Thomen’s just a wizard when all’s said and done. Making magic mirrors ain’t something he does lightly. Nobody does. Nobody mortal. Most people don’t send even messages anywhere, ever. Sometimes rich people send letters. We use mirrors because you set a whole slew of ’em up for us.”
“All right. So, from his point of view, he has good reason to communicate by letter. Question answered, and well done, Kammen.”
“Pleasure to be of service, Sire.”
“You were saying, Mary?”
“According to his latest letters, Thomen will get the most devout and faithful of the priests and under-priests in old Rethven seconded to him for the war. When the attack comes, the rest of the faithful will work from within to open the gates, create diversions, and so forth, in both Mochara and Karvalen. In return, Thomen agrees to reinstate the Church of Light as the state religion of Rethven.”
“He can’t do that.”
“I don’t see how anyone will stop him.”
“No, I mean he’s not the King. He can’t do that.”
“I didn’t see anything about it in the papers I stole, but I’d guess he plans to be King after you’re gone. Presumably, he can arrange for a marriage to Lissette whenever you’re out of the way.”
“That would follow,” I mused. “Okay. Kammen?”
“Sire.”
“Get whoever is next on bodyguard rotation on deck; you need to find Dantos. The two of you are going to get knights you trust and arrest Lotar.”
“As you command, Sire.” He saluted and grabbed his pocket mirror, calling for backup.
“Mary, you’ve done a spectacular job, and I’m going to have to find some way to express my thanks. I’ll probably need handcuffs, but at least a rope. In the meantime, can I ask you to do a similarly-spectacular and dangerous job?”
“Does it involve breaking and entering?”
“Possibly. It certainly involves sneaking.”
“Tell me more, my love, for you interest me strangely.”
“How would you like to negotiate with and assist a house or three of magi?”
“How does that involve sneaking?”
“Without being noticed or caught by a much more powerful house of magi.”
“Now it’s getting interesting.”
“My problem with Johann is I simply can’t face him directly. He’s too powerful on his home ground and there’s no way to make him leave it. Thomen, on the other hand… I think I can deal with Thomen as soon as I figure out some details. But Johann worries me in another way. There’s the time differential between universes. Time is passing over there, maybe faster, maybe slower, and Johann isn’t sitting on his hands. He’s either taking over the world or consolidating his power or plotting to do nasty things to me, possibly all at once. The tentacle-thing that showed up was probably his.”
“Why do you think so? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“It wasn’t demonic. It wasn’t a Thing from beyond the world, outside the firmament. It was a biological organism. Around here, when someone sends something to kill me, it’s a Thing. That, all by itself, tells me it isn’t someone local.”
“Oh.”
“So I need someone to go back to your world and be my… negotiator? Ambassador? I don’t know the word,” I admitted. Mary nodded, thoughtfully.
“And I’m the only person—aside from yourself—who knows the place well enough to get by,” she said, still nodding, one finger twirling a lock of hair while she thought.
“Well… yes. I’d rather keep you here to help me; I don’t like dividing forces. As it is, if Johann is dumping nasty things into this world, he could wind up helping the local opposition without even knowing it. I don’t need to be in the middle of an attack on the palace in Carrillon when a two-ton landshark surfaces behind me.”
“I see the problem. And this needs to happen in a hurry?”
“That’s the real issue. I don’t know, and it worries me. Time could be going by faster over there. Even if it’s going slower, there’s a lot to get in motion. I can’t fight on multiple fronts like this, especially with the logistics problems involved in inter-universal conflicts. I need to be two people, maybe three or four, and I haven’t figured out how to do that.”
“Yet. But the possibilities boggle the mind!” she added, smiling brilliantly.
“Ye
s, they do,” I admitted, and paused to consider her smile. “You’re not thinking what I’m thinking, are you?”
Mary bit her lower lip and looked at me through lowered lashes.
“No, that’s not what I was thinking,” I said. “But if I ever do manage to duplicate myself, I’m sure you’ll have suggestions.”
“Oh, I have all sorts of ideas already.”
“I’m sure you do. But, back to my point? If we can get the other magi to engage the Fries family, that could be important here as well as there.”
“All right. I’m on board. Assuming the other magi will listen, you want me to tell them… what?”
“At the moment, just sound them out. By now, I’m pretty sure they know how powerful Johann is. Do they want to serve him, fight him, hide from him, or what? Are they willing to face him if they have help? What do they know about the situation we don’t? That sort of thing.”
“I presume you’re willing to help them.”
“Oh, yes! Don’t tell them I can open a nexus; if they don’t already know it, I don’t want them to. I’m afraid I’d have every house of magi in the world trying to get their own nexus and their own dome of power over their personal magical kingdom.”
“Surely, they wouldn’t all act like Johann.”
“No, but Johann did. I don’t want to tempt them with phenomenal cosmic power. I also don’t want them blaming me for Johann.”
“Another excellent point. What do you plan to do to help? They’ll want to know.”
“I’ll provide magical energy so they can attack Johann effectively. Yes, I’ll open up a nexus, but don’t tell them how I’ll provide it.”
“Gotcha. I can do this. They’ll also want to know what you get out of this.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I want to kill Johann and his magically-enhanced family.”
“Seems doable,” Mary said, nodding. “I can pitch that, but I’m going to need some stuff.”
“Already thinking about it. I’ll be working on it today, possibly later tonight.” I turned as the door opened. Torvil came in, exchanged salutes with Kammen, and took over guard duty. Kammen hurried off.
