by Damien Lake
Marik pulled his face away from Tru’s fingers with a start. “That part was exactly how it looked. He never would have attacked my sword if I hadn’t tried to get too clever.” Which, he reminded himself, would be a valuable lesson to remember while he searched for ideas here.
Don’t be too clever.
To distract Tru from talking about the abnormal ways in which Marik had come to use his mage talent, he gestured at the table. “What are you looking for in this mess? Is the sand telling you anything interesting?”
“No,” the magician replied. “Tybalt wants to know if there’s any magic traces on the prisoners the Arm brought yesterday. I haven’t found any.”
Marik raised the monocle in silent question.
“That’s a nice trick Belita made. If I use the right spell, it works it better. It lets me see any magic change on an item, not just magician changes.”
“There’re no spells in this,” Marik stated, lifting the cure-belly square. “A friend of mine explained it. The leather is boiled in wax or something so it becomes almost as tough as steel even though it’s still supple enough.”
“That’s one way,” Tru agreed. “Except Tybalt wants what he wants. The eyepiece is good because I can see if it’s still natural, or if any magic has touched it and it’s unnatural.”
Marik shook the words in his mind before decided he understood what Tru meant. “An item doesn’t have to be enchanted into a permanent magical object. It could have been altered by magic to change its state.”
Tru nodded. “That’s right. My spell checks for magician traces. Belita’s eyepiece makes it so I can see any user’s traces, because it changes my spell to see if the item is in a natural or unnatural state.” He finished pushing away the plate with the leather square. “This has been altered normally, but it’s still natural.”
Marik spun the monocle between his fingers. “So this thing is enchanted. Belita must be a court magician if she could make a lasting magical object.”
“No, she’s a conjuror working for the cityguard.”
“Conjuror,” Marik muttered, reviewing what he knew of the class. “She has the sorcery talent too. And, what…she helps the cityguard?”
“Right. She isn’t that strong, you know. Or else the enclave would have taken her into the palace. The cityguard has a few dozen mages who help them find whatever they can’t find.”
“A few dozen!” The number sounded absurd. He remembered how the mage numbers in the Nolier war had been considered crucial, how the Crimson Kings’ magic users added significant strength to counter what mages Nolier employed. There had been roughly fifteen mages dedicated to magical combat on top of the regular, lower-strength users employed by the army. Army mages were primarily used for duties such as communication, detection or general usefulness depending on the individual’s skills.
How many mages did the army regularly claim, he suddenly wondered? Within the army ranks, how many ‘sub-mages’ might be drifting about, magic users considered of no consequence by the men who should be tallying every scrap of strength they could muster. Mages so weak they were not worth counting as such.
Tru, reacting to Marik’s startled tone, responded by arching his thick eyebrows. “Crime is not so bad as that. The guards can figure out most crimes themselves, or else the city’s business mages would be pressed harder to work for the crown.”
“Then where,” Marik sighed, hoping he sounded more tolerant than he felt, “would the people go to buy their good-luck charms and have their lives foretold?”
“They’d be better off without them anyway. But we’re better off without them, so it works out.”
“Perhaps.” Turning away from the table, he added, “On a different matter, did you ever manage to locate my father?”
“I would have said so, wouldn’t I?”
“I wanted to know if you had any better luck since then.”
“No. I didn’t have much in components.”
Marik scowled. “I left you plenty to work with!”
“Enough for eight or nine tries. I can only use a component once. That’s why you should have pissed in the bottle.”
“If you couldn’t find him after nine attempts,” Marik growled through gritted teeth, “then I doubt it would have made any difference.”
Tru shrugged it off. “Last try I tried was before the first snow last winter. Always the same. My spells couldn’t find anything to latch onto.”
“You’d know if he were dead. That must mean he’s still alive.”
“Right. Once I’m done with this,” the man gestured with a wave over the many plates, “I can try again if you like. It’s been months so things could have changed.”
“That would be good,” Marik answered. Any chance to uncover new information regarding his father would be accepted eagerly. To bolster Tru’s enthusiasm for the search, he deliberately mused allowed, “If you haven’t found the man with the red eyes yet, then Celerity must be desperate to find out what she can about him.”
“Yes. That’s why she didn’t assign me any jobs until Tybalt started shouting last night.”
His words brought Marik up short. “No? So instead of ‘if you like’, it’s ‘as soon as I can stick my knife in your arm’. I should have guessed as much.”
Marik waited patiently while Tru finished his duty. Most of the plates had been pushed to the table’s far side already, leaving only four to be examined after Tru scooped as much sand as he could recover back into his pouch. In the spare moments, Marik gazed about the room, setting the doings he observed in his mind, gaining a better feel for the controlled chaos. He used his magesight to study the scrying spells, unable to determine any specifics regarding their structure due to the foreign magics that gave them life.
When Tru pushed aside the last vessel, Marik believed he understood the majority of what transpired. As he had earlier supposed, the royal enclave, with no enemies or threats at hand to vanquish, directed their efforts at painting a detailed picture of these invaders. The brushes they used to accomplish this ranged from the mysterious occult to the mundane ink on paper hurriedly scratched out by men across the battlefront.
Beside the entry door sat a man who had adopted the sanctimonious doctrine inherent to a fanatical religion Marik had long since grown to despise. Clerking. Not for an instant did Marik believe him to be a mage, either weak or strong in his talents. His purpose lay in his quill’s non-stop journey across his parchment, hardly glancing at what he wrote, his eyes fixed on the various notes delivered every other minute by mages who never spoke a word. He transformed their findings into passages the council would be able to comprehend.
It would be a minor miracle if the report ended up containing any information that forced the council to appreciate the dire situation. Scattered fragments strewn over a dozen pages would do little toward that end.
Tru worked for a moment to affix the sand pouch among the rest dangling from his belt. Once satisfied it would remain where he intended it, he addressed Marik. “When do you want to see the mountain?”
“What? Celerity is supposed to show me the information you have on these black soldiers. Is there much that I don’t know already?”
“How am I supposed to know what you don’t know?”
Marik ground his teeth. “Well, if you don’t know, then when will Celerity be back? I’m not going to stand like a coat rack all day, waiting for others to let me do what I came to do.”
“To see the mountain, right?”
“To see whatever you have about the black soldiers. Show me what you have. That way when Celerity returns we won’t have to start from the beginning. It sounds like she might take a while.”
The magician nodded in perfect agreement. “Council meetings are always several candlemarks. This way. We’ll look at the mountain later. It’s still too early to see it good. Dawn comes later that far west, you know.”
Marik had no idea what Tru meant by that. He ignored it in favor of getting the day�
��s work underway. Dawn had already broken a mark earlier. Asking would only distract the man, delaying them in their work still further.
Tru brought him around a desk cluster to the wall opposite the scrying window. There they found paper mountains burying a long worktable. A second clerk, little different from the first except for the fact of her gender, ran her fingertip down these towering piles, fanning the papers’ protruding edges.
“Minna, Marik,” Tru said simply, nodding his head at each by way of introduction. “He needs to know whatever we know about the people we don’t know about.”
The woman straightened, keeping her finger at one point on the stack while she glared at Tru. After a heavy moment, she shifted her look to Marik. “Exactly what is it you need?”
“I’ve been told to review all the information you have about the black soldiers. I’ll add it to what I learned first-hand from fighting them in battle.” He stopped there, mindful of the seneschal’s warning about saying too much to the wrong ears.
She graced him with an irate expression that told much. In the proper scheme, it was the clerks’ duty to sort out information and evaluate it, or failing in that, the duty of clerks specifically trained to work with army analysts. Her eye fell without comment, at least without audible comment, on his clothing. He was easily the shabbiest in the room.
“All the information we have,” she coolly informed him, “is here.” With her free hand, she patted the thousands of pages.
“I…” A leaden weight sank into his stomach at seeing a month’s hard reading waiting in ambush for him. “I don’t think I need that much. A, um…a summary on the current positions of their forces. Evaluations of their manpower, supplies…anything like that. I only need a current picture of them.”
She clearly found this to be nearly as foolish as Tru’s earlier comment. Minna ignored him long enough to resume her finger’s trail down the stack, skipping over protruding tabs with letters too small for Marik to read. When she found what she wanted, she braced the stack with her body and did a masterful job of removing a quarter-inch report from its midst.
“There are no such summaries available. We are in the process of breaking down the information that we’ve received, which, I might add, only started coming in an eightday ago. Before that, all we had to work with were what trickles the mages came up with.”
“I need to understand where the enemy is and what they are up to.”
“So does everyone else. By tomorrow or the day after, we’ll have the beginnings pieced together.”
“I don’t have that long,” Marik asserted. He kept his voice level. “What I need is the useful information by this afternoon, and in such a way that we understand what we’re facing. I don’t need snippets about squads scattered across fifty miles.”
“If we had such available to us, do you not think it would have been presented to the king’s advisors long since?” Her tone grew waspish, her patience short.
“The information is right here, according to you!” Marik could feel his tone slipping to match hers. “Every mark spent is a mark those black soldiers have to dig in and fortify. Detailed facts about them are needed, and right now!”
“With a flood of—” Minna started hotly, until Tru moved between the two, hands raised to placate them.
“Easy. You want the same thing. You’re on the same side.”
Minna reserved her judgment on that. Whatever sides she perceived were a far cry from Galemar versus an unknown adversary. In all probability she thought in terms of laboring workers versus inept and brainless oafs placed in positions over her by gods in the mood for a hearty laugh.
Marik sucked in a breath to steady his composure, curtailing the inhalation to avoid calling attention to the action. “L—” he began, then stopped sharply. He had been about to start with ‘Look, I’m…’, deciding as his lips formed the syllables that it sounded a bit childish.
Resolutely, he quashed his temper, which had been flaring since arriving at Trask’s camp. Very rarely had he encountered trouble controlling it since his first winter in Kingshome. Before, it had been wilder, prone to erupt at the worst times. Discipline mastered through his combat training and unearthing sporadic answers in his quest to locate his missing father had gone a long step toward taming the beast.
“I am not an army officer who instantly demands faster results when he hears a prediction, no matter what it is.” He kept his tone calm, firm as he could manage. Which might not be overly much. “I am simply speaking the truth. We need to use the facts we have to get an idea of what we are facing. How old are the reports we have?”
Minna hardly looked mollified. “It’s all in a mix. The field reports are two to three eightdays old, from every part of the southwestern lands the invaders stole. These,” she motioned to the left side of the table, which seemed to strain under the load’s weight, “are from the mages over there, using their mirrors. The newest is a half-mark old. We haven’t had time to sort it out. All we can do is rush partial information to the council.”
Marik shifted his attention to Tru. “How widespread is the scrying?”
“Spotty, there and everywhere. It’s hard to focus on any one area, especially when it’s further away from the towns. We can’t put a lock on any of their forces since the catalyst is always ours, not theirs. And those armor chunks will only show us the men they came off. They’re all sitting outside the city.”
“I see. Right.” A second breath and he was ready to begin. “We need to figure out which information is worthless. Eightdays ago? They will have moved their forces since then, either away from where they were or moving additional men in. We need to find out everything we can about the monsters they use, especially how many they have under their control. Tru, if there’s any information on how the white robes control the beasts, I want to hear about it. Minna, you and I will start sorting out the newest reports on who’s stationed where, and how many in each position. We also need to find any reports, old or new, that deal with the overall size of the enemy, especially any references to a command structure the reporter might have noticed.”
They stood looking at him.
“Let’s get started. There’s a lot of work,” Marik ordered, stepping toward the overflowing table. Minna quickly rushed after him before his heathen hands could disrupt her filing system. After a moment without comment, she began handing him thick reports.
It relieved him tremendously.
Truth be told, he expected little enough difference if the evaluation were finished today or tomorrow. His motivations were simple.
Once people start listening to you, they would likely continue to listen to you. If a man got people to obey him, those people would keep obeying until he gave them a suitable reason not to. The challenge was to be levelheaded, to offer no reason for them to believe he might be incompetent or lacking in any manner. Landon had taught him that last summer after the contract to protect Hilliard had begun turning sour.
Tru crossed the room to speak with the tome perusers. Minna, after loading him down with enough weight to stagger a knight accustomed to wearing full armor, followed him to a barren desktop, giving him brief instruction on how the content abbreviations at the top of each page explained the report’s subject. Atop the table they started spreading pages over an ever-widening surface.
Marik became absorbed by the work. The abbreviations, at first a hindrance, quickly allowed him rapid comprehension once he grew used to them. By far the majority of reports dealt with the fleeing and surviving townsfolk. Seven villages had been assaulted in the first few days. Since then, surrounding settlements had evacuated before the violence could claim additional lives.
That meant the black soldiers could have expanded their claimed territory without any immediate signs. The potential area they controlled was twice the size of the area in which they were unequivocally known to be.
For what he wanted, most of the papers he breezed through were worthless. The information was too
old, the facts obviously distorted by the incredulous panic the report drafter felt coursing through him. Shaky letters would have been enough to reveal that, yet Marik, who had faced the foe in person, easily saw the flaws. There were no eight-foot barbarian hordes ravaging the countryside, nor twenty-foot monsters that breathed noxious poisons. Various claims of immunity to weapons could be accounted to the unfamiliar armor worn by the enemy, which he knew could repel sword strikes in startling ways.
He explained it to Minna as they worked. “These creatures are terrifying. Just seeing them in the scryes can’t prepare you for them. Only firsthand experience really lets you understand their power. Their roars punch you straight in the heart to the point they disrupt the rhythm of your heartbeats. Their muscles are so strong they can tear through almost anything. And once you finally get close enough, you smell their musk, which tries to overwhelm your brain. Your mind is screaming ‘predator!’, and your instincts are howling for you to run away. Their predator’s presence is powerful enough to overwhelm any creature’s whose presence is less than theirs. That’s why most of these reports are so incoherent. It’s the result of the reporter’s first contact with the creatures. Only killing one of them, or seeing one killed, lets your mind finally start to deal with them rationally. Only that lets you overcome their presence. Knowing that they are vulnerable.”
Several reports were repetitive. They winnowed through them, expunging those duplicates detailing the same enemy detachments, aware that several of the papers set aside likely contained differing estimates. The numbers were only offered on a ‘best guess’ system. When they attempted to accurately guess at the overall enemy size later, whatever number they arrived at would certainly be off.
Their progress increased as the marks passed. Minna, by seeing what he sent back to her, gained a feel for what Marik needed. Between them they blazed through the pile faster than he would have imagined.
Once they had determined which pages were best suited to the task, they crossed to a massive map displaying Galemar that hung beside the scrying mirrors. Rather than hanging against the bare wall, a massive cork board provided a backing, allowing artful pins to be placed at need.
