by JD Byrne
“You mean what are you to do with the Azkiri, President,” Demaris said. “Contrary to your assertion, the majority of the Council appears to disagree with the Kingdom about the threat posed by those wanderers. This is not a problem for the alliance to solve.”
Antrey smiled, just slightly, at the understated insults being traded back and forth. Unbiased observers knew that the Kingdom of Telebria was enjoying a slow decline in power and influence. Its citizens, not to mention its leaders and politicians, either refused to acknowledge that fact or did not know how to address it. The Azkiri, everyone knew, had been dealt with efficiently by the Guilds. There was no reason the Telebrians could not do the same. Atilleo needed to make the problem, one that extended beyond the Kingdom, into the kind of existential threat posed by the Neldathi. To his credit, he refused to rise to the taunting bait Demaris set out for him.
“Yes, President, what is your proposal to the Council?” another member from the Arbor asked. “We can’t know whether the alliance should commit to any action without knowing the action you would have us take.”
Atilleo took a deep breath and reset himself. “The only sensible solution to this problem, my brothers, one that faces all our nations, is to follow the example upon which this alliance was founded. The Council should appoint a quashal to put down the insubordination of the Azkiri once and for all. He,” Atilleo paused and caught himself, “or she, should be given all the authority necessary to complete that task.”
“You have someone in mind, president?”
“I do. I propose this Council appoint General Glacco Birros, current commander of the Telebrian Expeditionary Force in the Badlands, as quashal. He knows the area, he…”
Demaris, in a breach of diplomatic protocol, cut off Atilleo before he could finish his argument. “Your proposal, President, to deal with a problem faced only by the Kingdom of Telebria in its own territory is to appoint a quashal who is, at this moment, a leader of the Telebrian army that has, to this point, failed to solve the problem. Is that correct?”
The answer was left unsaid as a ripple of excited murmurs raced around the room in a way Antrey had never seen. No quashal had been named since the Rising. To suggest such a drastic maneuver was a sign of desperation on Atilleo’s part. This was his last session as president of the Grand Council. He was apparently willing to use up whatever good favor he had earned to see the gambit through.
Before the room erupted completely, Galenna stood. “President, may I have the floor? I have an alternative proposal that might resolve the issue.”
Atilleo looked torn between the need for a respite from the attacks on him and the suspicion about what Galenna might propose. After a moment, he nodded, and said, “Of course,” then stepped from the speaker’s circle.
“Thank you, President,” Galenna said as she stepped down into the circle. “I don’t think it is speaking rashly to say that the mood of the Council is not in favor of the proposal that has been made. However, we need not discover if I am correct. Instead, let me make an offer, President, from my government to yours. The Guilds offers the Kingdom of Telebria the assistance of our top regiment of rangers, those who led the pacification of the Azkiri in our territory. The experience they have gained will be invaluable to General Birros. To be clear, Guild troops will act merely in a supporting and secondary role to the Telebrian Expeditionary Force. All I ask of this Council are two things. First, that the Council witness the agreement made between the Guilds and the Kingdom. Second, that the Council allocate those funds necessary to transport the Guild troops to link up with the Telebrian force.”
The chamber buzzed in reaction, reflecting the surprise of the offer. Antrey was stunned. The Guilders had no reason to assist the Telebrians that Antrey could fathom. She was sure there was some goal embedded in the plan, however. The Guilders were so focused on achieving results, rationally analyzing what worked and what did not, that there must be a theory behind the offer.
Antrey was not the only one who was suspicious. “That is a very generous offer,” Atilleo said. “But I do not understand what benefit the Guilds hope to gain from it. What is it that you expect in return?”
“Nothing, President, at this point,” Galenna said. “We seek only to aid one of our allies, secure in the knowledge that our graciousness won’t be forgotten.”
Atilleo nodded, improbably at a loss for words.
“I put the proposal to the Council, then,” Galenna said, turning her back on the dumbstruck Telebrian delegation. “Is there an affirmation?”
“I affirm the proposal,” said Demaris.
“President,” Galenna said, nodding in Atilleo’s direction while she took her seat.
The old Telebrian returned to the circle with slow, methodical steps. “The proposal has been affirmed. What is the decision of the Grand Council? Shall it be agreed to or rejected?”
In a well-oiled procedure, Alban called out the name of each member of the Council, writing down their vote as he worked his way around the chamber. Atilleo was the last to record his vote. The decision was unanimous.
“Very well,” Galenna said from her seat. “I will contact the Guild of Soldiers and determine the cost of the rangers’ transport to the Telebrians. I will report back to the Council as soon as I have that information.” She turned around and said something to an underling who promptly dashed out of the chamber.
Antrey was so taken by the events unfolding in front of her that Alban had to poke her to get her attention. “Antrey,” he said in a loud whisper, “go back to my office. On my desk there should be a notebook bound in deep blue leather. It has notes about the alliance’s finances. Bring it to me, please.”
“Yes, sir,” Antrey said, quietly slipping from the chamber.
The sunlight pouring in from the balcony nearly blinded her when she entered Alban’s office. She took a few moments to get her bearings, but did not have enough time to close the drapes. She went directly to Alban’s desk to look for the small blue leather notebook. It was stuck between a pair of bookends, along with other similarly bound volumes of various colors, on the corner of the desk.
She plucked the notebook from its spot and started to turn back to return to the chamber, but a blast of sunlight caused her to stop and gather herself. She turned away from the balcony, back towards Alban’s desk. There, sitting open on top of Alban’s desk as if he had left it in midsentence, was another book. Antrey did not recognize it, but assumed it must have been what he was reading before the Grand Council session resumed this afternoon.
Antrey’s curiosity about the book on the desk, which she had never seen before, was piqued when she noticed that the glass cabinet by Alban’s desk, where he kept the truly important volumes, was unlocked and open. Inside was a small shelf, big enough to hold perhaps a half dozen books. One was clearly missing.
It took all the effort Antrey could muster to avoid examining the book. Aside from the fact that it was one of those few volumes that was off limits to her, the Grand Council was still in session, and she needed to return to the chamber quickly. She backed slowly away from the desk, towards the corridor to the chamber. Then, with one last look at the desk and the open pages, she turned and dashed back to Alban’s side.
Chapter 6
The floor of what passed for Strefer’s office was littered with scraps of paper and parchment. A few lines here, an entire paragraph over there. In the middle of it all sat Strefer, legs crossed underneath her. She had a headache, the kind that comes from working entirely too hard with too little material. The words around her blurred in and out of focus. She closed her eyes, shook her head, and took a deep breath.
“Let’s try this again,” she said to the empty room.
Strefer was on the floor because, once she began to spread her notes about, she quickly ran out of room on her desk. “Desk” was too kind a term, actually, for what was merely a used end table she had found in a secondhand store down the road. It did not match the chair that sat behind i
t. It had only one drawer, though thankfully it did have a lock on it. Even more thankfully, the key had made its way into the shop and onto Strefer’s hands.
The advantage her tiny desk had, along with the hard wooden chair that sat behind it, is that it fit in the room at all. The Daily Register never intended to have a permanent correspondent in Tolenor, much less two. When she came to work for Tevis, the two-room arrangement of the office—one room for him, one room for the paper’s numerous files—worked perfectly. Strefer assumed that in some way Tevis hoped that banishing Strefer to the file room would drive her out of the place altogether. Large wooden file cabinets lined each of the room’s four walls. If it weren’t for the door to Tevis’s office, Strefer would be trapped back here. Some days, she felt like the cabinets were moving, growing, and expanding in a plot to play with her mind. She had not quite reached that point today. Not yet.
So she sat on the floor with a small pad of rough paper on her lap, pen in hand. Just as she was about to try and string the scattered pages around her into something whole, the front door opened with a loud thud. Strefer strained to see the clock on the wall. “Council session over already?” she asked, knowing it must be Tevis.
Tevis started to walk into the room but stopped before he walked over anything important. “Somebody had a crisis arise. You know how they are,” he said, looking over the room. “Strefer, what are you doing? You should be out on the street finding some news, right?”
She looked up from the floor with a sigh. “Were that there be any news to be had, boss. All my regular sources are dried up. The populace is in a rut. There’s just nothing interesting happening. What we need,” she said, shaking a finger and pausing for thought, “is a murder. A nice, juicy killing. Maybe something among the well-to-do? Those are always good for business.”
“What this paper really needs,” Tevis said, walking back to his office, “is some local politics. Everything in this town happens by decree from the Council and is administered by their flunkies. We need a mayor,” he said. “Can you imagine how many newspaper sales a mayor could generate?” He walked back in, paused for a second, looked down, and held out his arms as if to take in the mess around him. “And just what the hell are you trying to do?”
Strefer looked up at him. “I told you, boss. I’m trying to find a story.”
“You are not making something up, are you?” he asked, head cocked.
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Strefer said. She put the notebook down beside her and started to point out various stacks and piles of paper. “These are all my extra notes. Story ideas that didn’t go anywhere. Leads I didn’t have time to track down at the time because something else came up.”
“And with all this, you plan to do what, exactly?” Tevis was completely lost.
“Plan to do? Nothing, at this point. Hope to do? I hope that something will pop out. Maybe some bit of gossip that didn’t mean anything when I wrote it down, but does now. Maybe there will be a few different things I collected at different times that, when I look at them now, make some kind of sense. If I’m lucky, if you’re lucky, I’ll find a story in here somewhere.”
Tevis shook his head. “You keep all this stuff for how long?”
“These go back to when I first got here,” Strefer said, tapping a small pile of oddly shaped papers stacked by her left knee. “Why? Don’t you keep notes around?”
“Not really,” Tevis said, a little hesitantly.
“Then what in the world is in all these?” she asked, gesturing towards the filing cabinets.
Tevis shrugged. “Past editions. Print records. You know, important things.”
Strefer struggled to keep her disappointment hidden. Tevis was her boss. He was here when she first arrived. He would probably be here whenever she left. It was difficult, as a Telebrian, for him to accept a woman working for a newspaper at all. Strefer figured that the best she could ever hope for from him was benign neglect. “Well, I was taught to never throw away something that you hadn’t already put into a story. You never know when you might make good use of it.”
“I cannot see how,” Tevis said, leaning against one of the massive cabinets.
“That’s because you’re not formally trained, boss,” Strefer said, before she could catch herself. Tevis had his job for the same reasons that most Telebrians of his age had the jobs they did—he had connections, in his case to the publisher of the Daily Register back in Sermont. She tried to redeem herself. “I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right. What I mean is that one of the things I learned as a Guild apprentice was how to synthesize information from different sources. How to look at all these little bits of information from all over and pull them together in a coherent whole. I was quite good at it.”
“Were you?” Tevis had a look of exasperation on his face.
Strefer nodded. “I won an award for it. Best use of disparate sources in one story, or something like that.”
Tevis chuckled. “Bet your mother kept the certificate,” he said.
“How could she? By that time, I hadn’t seen my birth mother in years. Remember, Tevis, things work differently in the Guilds.”
“Right, right,” he said, waving a hand. “Forgive my ignorance. So, do you have anything?”
“Unfortunately not,” Strefer said with a sigh. “I thought I might have something about absentee landlords in the outskirts of the city, but that didn’t pan out.”
“Why not?” Tevis asked.
“They aren’t absentees,” Strefer said. “Turns out that most of the men who own those hovels out there actually live in the city. Not out in the outskirts, of course. But still, it wasn’t the angle I thought it was.”
“You better come up with something,” Tevis said, walking out of the room back to his office. “We have columns to fill and I can only take up so much space writing about how the Grand Council basically did nothing. Contribute something, please.”
“I hear you, boss,” Strefer said. She stood up, surveyed the somewhat organized mess that surrounded her, and checked the clock. She had about an hour before the Sentinels changed shifts, probably another quarter of an hour before the off-duty Sentinels began to drift into the taverns. Enough time for her to reassemble her archive and put it away in the cabinet Tevis had given her for storage. Strefer sighed, bent to begin picking up papers, and struggled to find the enthusiasm for another night in the taverns.
Chapter 7
The business of the Grand Council sessions continued for the rest of the week. Alban’s routine remained the same, as well. Every day, Antrey would have to drag him back to the Grand Council for the afternoon session, away from the book he was reading at his desk. Antrey thought it was always the same one, although she was never allowed close enough to be sure. One thing had changed, however. Alban had been more careful about making sure he put the book in the locked glass cabinet before he returned to the chamber each afternoon.
At the end of the week the Council adjourned after its morning session for the weekend. Alban sent Antrey to the apartment for supplies and stayed behind in his office, working on something.
It was early afternoon when Antrey returned. She took supplies into Alban’s office itself, only to find that he was not there. Whether he had just stepped out or left for some period of time was unclear. Antrey went to the desk to unload her cargo, where she saw the book, lying out, open to a page, just as it had been earlier in the week. She placed the supplies on the desk and then studied the book more closely.
The first thing she noticed was that it was not printed. Most of the books in Alban’s library, even the ones that contained his own notes about Grand Council sessions, had been professionally printed and bound. This book was handwritten in neat semi-block letters. The writing did not belong to Alban, Antrey was certain. The paper itself seemed old and weathered, the ink fading in spots due to age. It was a small volume, containing only about a hundred pages. It was open to a spot in the middle, where Antrey could see, at a
quick glance, that the clan structure of the Neldathi was being discussed.
Antrey walked over to the doorway from Alban’s office back towards the public entrance, to make sure he was not there. Then she did the same thing with the doorway and corridor that led to the Grand Council chamber. It was completely empty.
When she returned to Alban’s office, Antrey sat down on the chair behind the desk and placed a scrap of paper in the book to mark the spot where Alban had been reading. She looked at the cover to find there was no title on the front, nor an indication of who the author was. She picked it up and looked at the spine, but it was similarly blank. The binding was simple and unadorned red leather, fraying a bit around the corners where fingers would flip through the pages. On the inside of the front cover, in the same neat script that apparently filled the rest of the book, was written “A Summary of the Grand Council’s Conclusions Regarding the Neldathi Problem.” Underneath, it said, “Noted by Rangold, First Clerk of the Grand Council of the Triumvirate.”
Antrey’s first thought was that it was odd for such a book to be one of those that Alban kept locked in the glass case. There were numerous history books in his library, including Antrey’s beloved Xevai’s History that discussed the Triumvirate’s policies towards the Neldathi in great detail. After all, containing the threat posed by the Neldathi was the primary function of the alliance, once the Rising itself had been put down. The Grand Council’s plan, which called for both maintaining the alliance itself and the creation of an extensive series of fortifications along the Water Road, was well understood throughout the land. Why should this book be locked away when all those were not? For a moment Antrey thought that perhaps it was simply an old primary source, valuable for its age alone rather than what it actually said.
She began turning pages, skimming the words to find some hint of something beyond her knowledge of the Triumvirate. In the beginning pages, Rangold laid out the conclusions reached by the Grand Council on the nature of the Neldathi clans and how they interacted with one another. She swiftly came to the section Alban had been reading, which addressed the organizational structure of the clans, and continued skimming quickly over the words.
