The Questing Game f-2

by James Galloway

  Her father had no idea that Lizelle was actually Keritanima. Nobody did, for that matter. Her father had no inkling how much money Keritanima really had, though as smart as he was, he should certainly suspect that she had some kind of legitimate business to fund her spy operation. Provided, of course, that he didn't know that she had a copy of his seal and a key to the treasury which allowed her to simply proocure the money she needed. The expenses she incurred were usually just a bit more than the combined total of her allowance plus what she could manage to steal from the treasury without raising suspicion. But sometimes she needed a bit of extra cash, and Lizelle's deep pockets were there to provide her with a loan. Because she didn't often touch the money of her trading business, she had amassed a staggering amount in the six years she had been dabbling in commerce. She forgot about it from time to time, because her agent, a badger Wikuni by the name of Rallix, was an exceptionally gifted merchant and organizer. It was his brilliance that made Lizelle's business so successful. All she had to do was wander in from time to time in a disguise and look over the books, to make sure Rallix didn't think Lizelle dropped off the face of Sennadar.

  Rallix had been something of a godsend. She started Lizelle and her business with small ideals, to create a cash fund for emergencies, but not a huge amount. She was too busy to be a merchant, so she didn't really expect the business to be more than a small-time affair. She had hired Rallix to act as her agent, and the badger had taken the initial investment and quadrupled it in the first six months. He was a brilliant merchant, with a nose for what was valuable in what part of the world, and a penchant for getting the better of anyone in a trade. He turned her small trading company into a huge enterprise, with six clippers and two rakers, warehouses and property, and employing nearly five hundred Wikuni and humans on three continents.

  Rallix and the Twenty Seas Trading Company were going to be very important to her now.

  Even without her dresses and jewels, Keritanima felt that she could impress the nobility of Wikuna. They didn't see the dresses and the jewels anymore anyway. The looks on their faces in the throne room told her that now they saw Keritanima, not the Brat, and it was her that had captured their attention. Not what she was wearing, but what she was saying. Not how she looked, but how she carried herself. Overcoming the hostility of the assorted nobles of Wikuna was a critical requirement for her plan, and it seemed that the first step on that venture had been a successful one.

  Eyes closed, Keritanima shuffled along the carpet in her room. Her attention was focused inward, on her Sorcery, as her probes of mind-seeking energy fingered out from her and saturated the area around her apartments. It didn't take her long to locate and catalog every contact that returned a response to her mental seeking, and then separate the spies from the servants and nobles. She only needed one. Finding the most suitable candidate was what was taking her so long, looking for a strong mind that was drifting a bit, distracted and more prone to her intended plan. Someone with information, yet not so high up in the hierarchy that he would be well trained.

  She finally chose her victim, then wove together her spell. She had never tried this before, but she had a good idea of how it was supposed to work. She wove it loosely, a respectably complicated knot of flows of Mind, Earth, Water, and Divine power, then she snapped it taut and released it against her victim. It struck like a viper, inundating him with enough power to send him into a trance-like state. His mind opened up to her like a book, and she found that she could walk through the passages of his mind and look through his memories, hear his thoughts. There was a bit of fuzziness and difficulty digging deeper than surface thoughts and short-term memories, things she knew were off because of her weave, things she could correct with practice. Lula had shown her something similar to this, a simple Mind weave that would allow a Sorcerer to hear the surface thoughts of a target. Katzh-dashi didn't often use such Mind weaves, because they fostered intense distrust in others if they realized that their very thoughts were being overheard, and the public image of the order was an extremely important issue with them. Keritanima had modified the weave, nearly by the seat of her dress, improvising literally as she wove together the spell. Mind weaves were dangerous, because a botched weave could destroy the mind of the target, and it could also backfire on the Sorcerer that was using it. A Mind weave like the one she was using exposed her mind to the weave as well, and a badly woven spell could damage both of them.

  It was times like that that she was incredibly thankful she was Wikuni. If she had been human, the Tower could have simply used Mind weaves to persuade her to do anything they wanted.

  Concentrating on maintaining the weave, she picked out where she had made her mistakes in weaving it together, even as she reviewed the memories of her target of the last hour or so. He'd been at his post the entire hour, trying in vain to listen through the stone of the floor-her ceiling-with a horn-like listening aid. There was a stray thought about the cowardly priests, afraid to use spells to try to eavesdrop for fear that she would sense their magic and follow it back to them. She could do something like that, she realized, after thinking about it a minute. She couldn't see them, but she could simply trace them back through the Weave. Sorcery required a Sorcerer to know exactly where the target of his spell was located. Mostly that required visual sighting, because a Sorcerer had to be able to see both his weave and his target in order to make it correctly, but some, like Dolanna, Keritanima, and Tarrin, had learned that knowing the exact distance and direction of the victim was also enough to target the victim with magic, and they could weave spells without having to literally see it with their eyes. Tarrin and Keritanima had learned that little trick from Dolanna. Dolanna could weave together complicated weaves blindly. For her, it was an amazing talent, something that no other Sorcerer Keritanima had ever seen, even herself, could do as effectively as she could. It has astounded her to see Dolanna weave spells blind, or with her eyes closed, something that Lula had said was absolutely impossible. That, of course, made her demand that Dolanna teach her that trick. Keritanima could manage moderately complicated weaves blind, but if it got complex, she had to be able to see it to do it right. It was about all she could do to weave together the spell she had just created blind. Weaving blind was exceptionally difficult, and it drastically increased the chances of an error in the weave, cause the spell to fizzle, or knot up and generate a wildstrike.

  Keritanima had suffered one wildstrike during her training. She intended never to have to go through that again. If not for Lula, it would have taken weeks for her fur to grow back.

  The spy knew nothing of importance, but the test had been the reason for it, not what she could learn. She had proved to herself that she could weave blindly a spell that complicated, using nothing more than her Mind-weave sounding to determine her victim's exact location. She had also puzzled out the modifications she'd need to make to allow her to access more than a victim's surface thoughts, though just getting surface thoughts would make the weave much easier to create.

  His usefulness to her at an end, she attempted another Mind weave, a much simpler one that caused him to immediately fall into a deep sleep. She'd killed four sets of spies so far, blind-weaving the spell of Suggestion against them, but this set she wanted to keep for a while. To be her experimental subjects if anything else.

  She was positive that that was the one reason why they hadn't accused her of the killings. Her father's sages probably knew all about Sorcery, so they knew that a Sorcerer could only affect targets that he or she could see. Keritanima had learned how to transcend that restriction, but they probably wouldn't think of that for a while, thinking it was more likely that she simply had an agent or spy go around and wipe out the opposition. That had probably been one reason why her father had chosen the throne room as his meeting place. The distance between him and her would make weaving a spell against him less likely to work if she had so much distance between them. If she was irrational, he probably felt that she would make he
r attempt the instant he was in sight, so he arranged it so there was alot of real estate between them to make that more difficult.

  Her father wasn't stupid. In that respect, and only that respect, she could give him a little credit.

  "Kerri?" Azakar asked again, giving her an odd look when she clapped her hands in excitement that her experiment had worked.

  "Nothing, Zak, just proving something to myself," she grinned roguishly. "I have to amuse myself somehow until Miranda and Binter get back." They were in the city. Miranda was making contact with Ulfan, and Binter was along to protect her. Keritanima felt that Binter would be better for that task, since Ulfan didn't know Azakar, and Binter was more familiar with the city. Keritanima felt more than safe enough with Azakar. Binter and Sisska had trained him in all the things the Knights didn't, and he was a handful for ten men if it came to a fight. That Binter would leave her in his care said everything about the Vendari's opinion of Azakar's competence.

  "We could play stones, or chess."

  "True, but you're too easy to beat," she winked.

  Azakar gave her a flat look. "That sounds like a challenge," he said pugnaciously.

  "Go get the board then," she replied.

  Keritanima brushed out the fur in her tail as they played chess. Azakar had been suffering under the martial skill of his Vendari tutors in chess as well as in training, and he proved that he learned quickly. He was a dangerous opponent in a chess game. Nothing Keritanima couldn't handle, but he made her pay attention to the game, or he would beat her.

  "You know, you didn't seem very disappointed when they took away all your money," he mentioned as he made a move.

  Keritanima paused to touch the Weave and weave together a Ward that stopped all sound from passing out of it. It didn't, however, stop sound from entering it, allowing them to hear outside while preventing their words from being heard. "They didn't even scratch my worth, Zak," she grinned.

  "I sorta figured that," he noted. "I'm sure they did too."

  "I wanted them to," she said. "I want them to know that I have the money to stir up trouble."

  "That seems like a bad idea, since you are going to cause trouble. They'll be expecting it. You're giving yourself away."

  "Zak, trust me. I want them to look for it, because that will let me do what I need to do under their noses, without them seeing a thing."

  "Oh. So, they'll be looking for sheep, while you dress in wolf's clothing and walk right past them."

  "More or less," she agreed with a toothy grin.

  "I'm glad it makes sense to you," he grunted.

  "Of course it does," she replied. "I won't go into details, but let's just say that my father will be very unsettled knowing that I can still stir up the hornet's nest."

  "Ahh," he mused. "Keeping him off balance."

  "Exactly," she affirmed with a smile and a nod. "Right now, he's probably issuing a series of decrees to repeal certain laws," she said. "Laws that restrict his own power with respect to me."

  "That's bad."

  "No, that's good," she winked. "That's what I want him to do."

  "Why? You want to be flogged?"

  "I'd be flogged no matter what," she said calmly. "The important thing is to get those laws repealed."

  "Why?"

  She winked at him. "Because they're getting in my way a great deal more than they're getting in his," she replied. "Knowing my father, he's repealing the entire decrees those laws are taken from. He'll be charging into it, because he's still angry over what I did to him. There are other laws in those decrees, laws that restrict my power a great deal more than they restrict my father's. Those other laws within those decrees are what I need removed."

  "That's why you mentioned specific laws?"

  She grinned. "The laws I need removed aren't in the decrees I mentioned, but my father will have the law reseached, so he'll find them and include them in his repeal. My father is anything but thorough."

  "You mean that entire scene was just a set-up?"

  She grinned even more.

  "Kerri, that's evil!" he laughed.

  "You're dealing with a professional, Zak," she said lightly. "I don't play around."

  "I'll say."

  "It's a calculated risk," she admitted. "If my father's smart, he'll only repeal parts of it. But I got him worked up, and when my father is angry, he sometimes gets rash. I'm counting on that."

  "How do you pull off these things?" he asked.

  "Planning, my friend, planning," she smiled. "Playing politics requires three things. That you understand your opponents, that you have clear and precise objectives, and that you have a good plan to reach them. I understand my father, as well as the general behavior of most of the noble houses. I can use that to my advantage in my plan, a plan with specific objectives. The better your plan, the better chance you'll succeed."

  "You make it sound like a war."

  "It is a war, Zak," she said seriously. "We don't fight it with armies and siege engines, we fight it with words and assassins. The only thing that makes our war different than yours is that there are no defined battle lines or territory."

  The door opened, and Miranda and Binter entered. Binter had a deep gash on his lower bicep, and Miranda's dress was torn. Blood stained the head of the Vendari's warhammer.

  "I see they didn't waste any time," Keritanima grunted, standing up with Azakar to tend their companions. "Are you two alright?"

  "Nothing Binter couldn't handle, Keritanima," Miranda said easily as Keritanima put her hands on her maid and touched the Weave. Miranda was unharmed aside from some minor bruises, which the Princess healed easily. Binter's gash was a bit more of a challenge. The Vendari didn't move at all while Keritanima used Sorcery to mend the wound, sealing the slash mark and even urging his scales to regrow over it. "How many, Binter?"

  "Ten," he replied as Azakar took his hammer and set it in the corner. "They attacked us not five blocks from the Palace, in an alleyway."

  "Who's were they, Miranda?"

  "I'm not sure," she replied. "They could be from your father, but he would have sent more. It may have been Jenawalani, or some noble that still holds a grudge against you."

  "That's half of Wikuna, Miranda."

  "Then we don't have to look far to find a suspect," she replied calmly.

  "Aside from that entertainment, how did it go?"

  "Ulfan is still more or less in control of the underworld," Miranda announced. "He assured me that he'd have as many men as we can afford to pay, whenever we needed them."

  "That's good. Kalina?"

  "He's tracking her down. She got caught pickpocketing and just got out of prison, so that means that she's prostituting. She can't afford another conviction. She could be in any number of brothels."

  "This Kalina is a prostitute?" Azakar asked.

  "I told you that before, Zak. You should've known that I'd have some rather shady friends," she added with a wink. "Kalina is a thief and a whore, and she doesn't make any excuses about it. Here in Wikuna, being a harlot isn't necessarily a bad thing. She'll never be high society, but it's a decent way to make a good living if you're a single girl with no family or friends. Did you tell Ulfan how to get Kalina here?" she asked Miranda.

  The mink Wikuni nodded. "She should be here tonight."

  "So, you're going to switch with this Kalina and go do things," Azakar surmised.

  Keritanima smiled. "More than do things, Zak," she replied lightly. "I have quite a bit to arrange in the next few days, and I can't do that here."

  "So what's our next step?" Miranda asked.

  "Our next step is to wait for Kalina," Keritanima announced. "I can't go any further until I can either get Kalina or be able to leave the room. And my father won't let that happen. As long as I'm in here, where he can see every person who comes and goes, I can't organize trouble for him."

  "So he thinks," Azakar chuckled. "Wait. If Kalina is a secret, how is she going to get in unseen?"

  "
Magic, my dear Zak," Keritanima smiled. "I already told Ulfan what to tell her. That's why we'll be in my room from now til she arrives, looking out the window and waiting for her signal."

  "You're going to magic her up here?"

  "No, I'm going to place an Illusion over her that will make her look like a palace servant," she explained. "Kalina will have instructions to simply walk in, that the guards and other servants won't challenge her. She knows where my apartment is, so that's not a problem. She's been here before. When she gets close, I'll put the guards outside and anyone watching to sleep, and she'll simply walk in."

  "Are you sure you can create the Illusion from that distance, Kerri?" Miranda asked dubiously. "It's five stories to the ground, and she'll have to stand off a ways so you can see her."

  "I'm pretty sure I can do it, Miranda," Keritanima replied. "I've worked weaves from even greater distances."