The Fair Elaine: A Kethem Novel

by Dave Dickie

  “Go on,” I said.

  He continued, “So, as I was saying, there was an incident. I only know what the other Holds needed to show me to prove a reasonable likelihood of misconduct on the part of Grafton Hold. The ship was attacked just before it pulled into the harbor. Several sailors and mercenaries died. Of the five Silver Rings, four of them were found dead. The fifth was Maizon Pelern, one of mine. The object was gone. It is only reasonable to conclude that Maizon is in possession of it, or was working for a group that is in possession of it.”

  I frowned. Attacking a ship in a port that included a number of Kethem Navy vessels seemed suicidal. “And what was the item?”

  Leppol shook his head. “Can’t tell you that.”

  I nodded politely and said, “Then, my Lord, I must respectfully decline the position. I know what I need to succeed, and I do not want to waste your money and my time going into it with my hands tied.”

  Leppol looked angry again for a moment. He wasn’t used to commoners turning down an offer for employment. In fact, he could order me to work on it and, unless I could convince a Magistrate that it imposed excessive hardship on me or my family, I would have to comply. But Leppol also knew men, knew that coercion was not the tool of choice if you wanted a professional to be dedicated to the job. Finally he said, “It's a transparent vial, about the size of a large beer mug, but sealed. There’s a liquid in it, green, faintly glowing. The vial is spell protected; it will give off a bright signature to anything that detects mana. I need you to understand that this mission, and the nature of the object, must remain a secret. Your job is to clear Maizon and recover the object if you can. Under no circumstances are you to extend yourself beyond those goals.”

  I nodded. “I understand, my Lord.”

  “This must be discreet,” he said, “If the other Holds know I have you looking into things, there would be repercussions.”

  “I understand, my Lord,” I said again.

  “Good. I’ll have you escorted to my head warden, Maiun Valont. I’ve filled him in. He can give you more details. He was there when the Fair Elaine docked. He’ll also equip you with whatever you need, including cash for any expenses you might require up front.”

  “That would suit, my Lord,” I said.

  Leppol called in one of the guards outside the door. He said, “Take Citizen Driktend to Valont.” The warden bowed and indicated I should follow him. I bowed deferentially to Leppol and we left the room. After winding our way through a few hallways we ended up in front of a door with the sign of the hawk, a typical symbol for the warden organization inside a Hold.

  The guard knocked, and at the gruff “Enter,” from the inside, opened the door and ushered me in, closing the door behind me. Inside was an office that, unlike Leppol’s, looked like an office. The walls were lined with maps, mostly of Bythe but a few of what looked like much more open terrain with isolated buildings here and there, much of it broken up into colored blocks. Probably the Holder’s landstead, with the areas the commoner farmers would till for the Holders marked by variety of crop. The farmers were not much better than serfs, with little prospect for improving their lot. But mandatory education would occasionally identify someone bright enough to be worth training in sorcery, some would learn the way of the sword, and those touched by fate might end up in a religious order or in the legal system as jurists. Not many, but some.

  Below the maps there were cabinets that looked like they were probably full of reports. There was a large, maple desk, plain but sturdy, with quill and ink pot and blotter. Sitting behind the desk was a man that had the large frame of a brawler and the soft bulges that came from sitting behind a desk for many years. He’d probably been fearsome in his prime. Now he looked soft and angry, as if he was baffled by what had happened to him. He had pale blue eyes, thin lips, and a square haircut that seemed to bristle. A gold ring with the Grafton glyph was on his finger, his only jewelry. It was clear from the way he looked at me that he considered it an imposition for me to be standing in his office. I bowed. “Gur Driktend, at your service, my Lord.”

  “Save it for the orcs,” he said, almost growling.

  I sensed a certain tension in the room.

  “Let me very clear here,” he continued, “I don’t like this. I don’t like you. If the Lord Holder hadn’t commanded it, you wouldn’t have made it down the driveway.” He sat back, took a deep breath. “But he has. So I will play along. The minute I feel you’re off plan, I will crush you. I ever feel like you’re holding out on me, I will crush you. You say something I don’t approve of, I crush you. You irritate me in any way, you cross me in any way, I will kill you. Are my terms clear?”

  I wasn’t sure what had him so spun up, but there wasn’t anything good that would come out of adding horses to the stampede. “Completely, my Lord. May I ask my Lord if you have any guidance on what types of things I might say that you wouldn’t approve of, or am I just walking blind on that?”

  Well, ok, maybe no good would come from adding horses but, then, he’d been a jerk.

  He turned red. “Don’t be a wiseass, Gur. Sit the hell down.” I sat. He sat quietly for a few moments, regaining his composure. Oddly enough, my being a wiseass seemed to calm him down rather than spin him up. Too bad. “Ok, sorry about that. This situation is very frustrating for me. Maizon was a friend of mine. I’ve known him a long time. I don’t believe he turned on the Hold. But I can’t do anything to prove it. I don’t like putting the reputation of my friend and the Hold in an outsider’s hands.” And he looked a little lost. I actually felt sorry for him.

  “I understand my Lord. I will do my best to clear both his name and Grafton Hold’s.”

  He nodded. “Ok. You keep me in Hectlac's light, let me know what you find. The priority here is to get Grafton Hold back in the game. You do that, I will personally cry your name from the top of Kuseme’s cliffs.” He looked sincere. I didn’t really need him telling everyone how wonderful I was, but if it meant he’d give me what I needed I could live with it. He reached inside his desk and took out a small metal box. He threw it to me. “Communications artifact,” he said. “Trigger it, you get me telepathically. You find something, you use it, day or night.”

  “You have my word, my Lord.” I slide the box into a pocket. He grunted, opened a different drawer in the desk, and pulled out a sheet of chits with a the thousand rimii mark and Leppol’s chop on it, tore off te, and passed them to me.

  “Use them as you need them. I need justification when you’re done, but you don’t have to worry about it until then. What else do you need?” He seemed like the kind of guy that, once he decided on a course of action, went all in. I liked that.

  “Information on Maizon, my Lord,” I replied. “Why are you so sure he wouldn’t turn on the Hold?”

  “You know the next meeting of the Major Holders is in four months?” I didn’t and said so. “The Great Hold will be up for vote again. As the incumbent, with things going well, Grafton Hold should be in good shape to win that vote again. This fiasco, if it’s not resolved, could knock us off that path. Maizon is a family man. His children, his wife, they’re the center of his world. They’re suffering because of this. He’d never do that to them.” Again, he seemed sincere.

  Interesting. Suddenly the stakes in the game seemed clearer. Once every three years, on a staggered schedule, each Hold in a district voted on who would be the Major Hold to represent it, and the Major Holds voted on the Great Hold to represent them on the High Council, the nine member body that ruled Kethem. If the vote for the Great Hold was coming up, and Grafton Hold lost their position, putting it up for grabs… that would be a plum worth going after. The dance of power between the houses was constant, but it reached a crescendo during the periods when the hierarchy was due for a bit of shuffling.

  “A family man. A warden, I assume.” I said.

  Valont’s eyebrows raised. “Maizon? No. Not a fighter. He was in External Affairs.” I was vaguely aware of the differe
nt offices inside a Hold but not up to snuff on the particulars. Before I could ask, Valont continued. “External affairs handles accounting for the capitation funds, interactions with other Holds, gathering support from or providing support for Holds during reinvestments, and those kind of things. Typically a small staff. Grafton Hold’s is larger than normal because we’re handling the common funds pooled from the Major Holds, and there’s a lot of accounting and bookkeeping that goes with that.” I tried to envision an accountant being sent to lands overrun with Ohulhug, smart, ruthless, psychotic killing machines who only failed at wiping out the human race because they were as likely to turn on each other as their common enemy. It wouldn’t gel.

  “Was he a powerful enchanter?” I asked, trying to find something that made sense.

  Valont shook his head no. “Smart, knew a few spells, but you really have to be practicing all the time to be good at it. He had a day job.”

  I thought for a moment. Nothing came to me, which meant I should just keep asking questions until it did. “What about hobbies?”

  Valont cocked his head, thinking. “Well, he was a bit of a history buff. He knew all sorts of pre-fall Empire stuff off the top of his head, spent a lot of time at the Nitheia libraries reading. Loved the entire history of the orc-human wars, the Kethem-Stangri alliance and the retaking of Pranan. And languages. He had this amazing eidetic auditory memory, could remember words and phrases in other languages and repeat them back after hearing them once.”

  Something clicked. “Did he speak Ohulhug, by any chance?” I’d had a few cases dealing with Orc madweed smugglers, including a few half breeds from Pranan who had been running the drugs into Bythe, and I picked up a thing or two about our dangerous green brethren. Many people thought Orc and Ohulhug were the same language, but they are, at best, only vaguely related. Ohulhug is hard to learn, given the only one that could teach it to you was as likely to take your head off at the shoulders as spend the afternoon in amiable conversation.

  Valont nodded yes. “One of the few.”

  A mission north of Pranan, in Ohulhug territory. Someone who spoke the language. A diplomatic mission to the Ohulhug? Or a trade, more likely, for this vial full of green liquid. But in return for what? I looked Valont square in the eyes. “What do you know about the mission he was on when he disappeared?”

  He didn’t blink. “Nothing. It was pretty hush hush.” I wondered. Using a light merchant instead of a warship to visit Ohulhug would imply it was a covert mission. Light merchants were typical for diplomatic missions to any human or elf-held locations because of their speed, and if they were trying to hide the fact they were visiting hostile territory it would be an effective ruse. But so hush hush the head of Hold security knew nothing about it? It seemed like a stretch, but if he was lying, he was very good at it.

  “What about the other Hold members that were part of the expedition?”

  “Three men, one woman. I knew two of them. One warden, very good with a sword. One member of External Affairs, but that was just a token job, the woman. She was a very good enchanter. One of those situations where you make a spot for someone because they have a skill set you want.”

  “Artificer?” I asked.

  Valont shrugged. “Not sure. battle-sorcery, I think. And an appraiser.” An appraiser was an enchanter who specialized in analysis of sorcerous artifacts. Valont went on “The other Major Holder I’d heard of. He was Internal Affairs. Contract negotiator, a real up and comer from what I heard. The minor Holder… didn’t know him.”

  I wondered about that. Why the token minor Hold representative? But perhaps the man had some kind of special expertise. I would have to dig a little to find out. “What can you tell me about the incident with the Fair Elaine?” I asked.

  He sat back in his chair. “I was one of the ones that met them at the dock,” he said. “I didn’t even know they were arriving until a couple of hours before they pulled in. The Lord Holder dropped it on me at the last minute.” That jibed with him not being clued in about the mission, but some people are good about creating a believable story with all the trimmings, inventing little details to make it seem more plausible.

  I nodded for him to continue.

  He said, “Dark was falling. The dock was crowded. Someone had told the families that it was pulling in, so there were a lot of citizens there. Everyone could see there had been trouble. There’s something about blood, you can smell it on the breeze. The crew looked scared. Maizon wasn’t above deck.” Valont’s eyes had gone a little unfocused, like he was seeing it all again. “Once they were tied off, it was obvious they had been attacked. I was first below decks, first in the Holder’s common room.” He shook his head. “Four bodies. It was ugly, but it was neat, like they had little or no chance to defend themselves. Maybe assassins, but I don’t know, those guys usually work alone or with one partner. I don’t know how they could have killed all four of them at the same time.”

  “Sorcery, maybe? Some kind of paralysis spell?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Possible, but all four getting caught in a single spell? That would be a wide area spell, with enough juice behind it that it overwhelmed everyone’s innate resistance sufficiently to keep them from even moving? That’s some pretty serious sorcery. You don’t pick it up on the street. If it was something like that, the teams from the other Holds will find it. That kind of stuff leaves a trail.”

  I wasn’t so sure, but then, I’d never had the luxury of having dozens of people to go around asking questions, so I ceded the point to him. “You said you talked with the crew later?”

  He nodded. “After inspecting the room, I went back above decks. I’d already sent one of my wardens to fetch a magistrate and his team. Not that there was anyone to charge with a crime, but if you get them in early, you get the truthsayers and when you do finally track down the culprit you have an entire trail of evidence the magistrate is already aware of.”

  “Sure,” I said, having been down that path a few times.

  “So I talked with the crew. They’d been boarded by another ship on the way in. A lot of them had been trapped below decks, which was a blessing in disguise because everyone that wasn’t was wiped out to a man.”

  “Did they have a description of the ship or the people that attacked them?”

  “No. Anyone who saw the attackers died, and the ship was gone by the time they freed themselves.“

  “That seems a little odd,” I said. “Are you sure none of the crew were complicit in the attack?”

  He gave me a little flash of annoyance. “I am a warden, Gur, I know how it’s done. We cross checked the stories and had everyone repeat them with a truthsayer verifying it. And, yes, I did check for protection charms that might have let them fool a truthsayer.” I nodded. He was right. He did this kind of thing for a living, part of the consortium’s crew that policed the city. But it still seemed odd that an entire crew of a light merchant, usually three or four dozen people, hadn’t seen anything. Not to mention someone in the harbor, although if they were coming in during the evening it was possible it had been too dark.

  I thought for a moment. There were other questions I could ask, but I wanted to go visit the Fair Elaine myself and talk to the people that had been involved. It’s always stunning to me how what someone remembers is filtered through their perceptions and expectations and can leave them with a story that is completely at odds with reality. A story they believe. Another reason I think truthsayers are not the be-all end-all they are cracked up to be. "Ok. I need a signed statement with the Grafton chop on it that says I’m working on your behalf.”

  Valont frowned and said, “You know we can’t be officially involved in investigating this until Maizon’s name is cleared.”

  I nodded. “I do. I will be discreet in using it, but I don’t know what I'm going to need to open doors. Pays to be prepared for anything.”

  “Ok,” he said. “What’s next?”

  “Next,” I said, “I visit the Fair Ela
ine.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Fair Elaine was a light merchant, a clipper with three masts, the raked bow giving it an angular look. It was high in the water, which meant no cargo was on board. Unlike the heavy merchants with their big, square sails, meant to push a lot of weight through the water, the Fair Elaine was a thoroughbred with lean lines, meant to skim the surface and move fast.

  It was a relatively warm fall afternoon, a little hazy and humid. The ride from the Grafton Hold Ostrog had taken a while, and I’d stopped at a small shack that served very good seafood gumbo for lunch, and then spent an hour trying to look inconspicuous while checking out the dock and the ship, which convinced me that it was, in fact, a dock and a ship. So it was early afternoon before I finally decided that there wasn’t anyone else skulking around like me and that it was time to be a little more direct.

  There were four men on the deck under the careful eye of a boatswain doing repairs to things that didn’t look broken to me. But then, I’m not a seaman. “Ahoy,” I shouted. “Gur Driktend, requesting permission to come aboard.”