The Fair Elaine: A Kethem Novel

by Dave Dickie

  “Thank you, Faeranduil,” I replied.

  “Just return it when you are done, please,” he said.

  “Of course,” I answered. A few minutes later I was heading back to Brindle street, looking for a telemage, with the Elvish dagger riding inside my tunic next to one of the stilettos and a grim expression on my face. The tail was back when I left the embassy. Whoever these people were, they were persistent and they were very good. That spelled trouble.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The advantage of using teleports was the travel time they saved. The disadvantage was the cost, and that they are relatively easy to trace. It was a good thing I was on an expense account. Unfortunately, the easy to trace thing was becoming a bit of a bother. So I did a combination of walking and carriages to shake my tail, which didn’t work, and finally ducked into undertown, the labyrinth of shops and restaurants that had been carved into the bedrock lying under the mostly granite hill called Harper’s rise on the western edge of the city.

  The hill itself had a number of expensive houses with commanding views of Bythe. A combination of spells and manual labor had carved circular roads in concentric circles with four major cross roads that angled up the incline to connect them. The bottom of the hill, however, had a more colorful history. Back during the fall, Elementalists had used spells to carve out a warren of tunnels and rooms, an emergency shelter if the royalists or the Tawhiem usurpers vying for the title of emperor brought in a fleet to convince people not to trade with the other side. Those negotiations were typically conducted by burning everything they could lay hands on so there was nothing to trade. So undertown was designed to hold people and goods comfortably for several weeks.

  After Kethem had finally become a power in its own right and had enough of a military to drive the attackers off, the facilities had fallen into disrepair. No one remembered when small merchants started setting up shop there, mostly people dealing in quasi-legal or illegal contraband, but it was a good location, providing bolt holes whenever authorities decided to do something about the criminal element. Food vendors had moved in next, and then more mainstream vendors looking to capitalize on the constant foot traffic. Now, it was a sprawling combination of maze and bazaar where almost anything could be had for a price.

  It was also the perfect place to shake a tail, or to catch one if you wanted. In that tight a space with that many people, they would have to close the distance or lose me in the crowd. I spent an hour moving through the tunnels and connected rooms randomly, sometimes doubling back, and saw nothing. It was like my followers had vanished into the woodwork. I finally exited on Zimmerman’s alley, which isn’t really an alley, since the houses that use to make it an enclosed area had been torn down to make space for an outdoor extension to the shopping areas.

  I headed into town on foot. Half a mile later, I was sure. My tail was with me again. I stopped and thought for a few minutes. There was no way they could have stuck with me in undertown without my detecting it. Which left only a couple of possibilities. Either they had a scrying device that was locked onto me, which takes a very, very large mana pool to keep running, or they had something that was broadcasting my position on a regular basis, which was much more practical. But there was no way someone had anything I owned long enough to burn in a tracker, and I wasn’t carrying anything I didn’t trust.

  I froze. “Son of a bitch,” I said, reaching into my pockets. I pulled out the small metal square comm artifact Valont had given me. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but many of those devices, at least the ones used by the military, could send out information about the user’s location and general state of health as well. And Valont had struck me as a thorough kind of guy. I doubted he had been setting me up. Why would he? I worked for him, or his boss in any event. But if someone else had tapped into it, they could be using it for the same purpose.

  I stood for a minute, then doubled back to undertown. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for, one of the small dealers in Ohulhug madweed in a darker section of the tunnels, looking furtive. They tended to use a drop system; you paid, specified a location, a runner would deliver the drugs after making sure the spot was clear. A double blind that protected everyone.

  I nodded to him. “I’m looking to have something delivered,” I said. He looked at me a little suspiciously, perhaps a little too well dressed compared to most of his clients, but he could tell I wasn’t a warden.

  “What’s your pleasure?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

  I smiled and said, “This is a simple one. I need this,” and I showed him the metal box, “delivered to my house. You can leave it inside the outer door on the landing.”

  He looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?” he asked.

  “My business,” I said.

  He squinted at me. “One hundred rimii,” he said. Which was about as much as it would cost to have a small bag of madweed delivered to my door. I handed over the money and gave him my address.

  "And, just so we understand each other, I’m not a warden. I follow my own rules. My rules are that when people rip me off, I get upset. Sometimes I do things I regret later. We clear?” He nodded and melted into the shadows. I wondered how long it would take for my tail to realize they were not following me to my house, but a courier.

  After ten minutes, I exited undertown by a different route and zig zagged through the cobblestone streets of the Bakva, where a lot of small troupes performed shows. After I was satisfied I wasn’t being followed I took a carriage to a tiny square near Daesal’s apartment, walked to it and tapped on the door. There was no response.

  I thought for a moment. With Daesal out, there were only a few things left that I could use to try to untangle this mess. It was time to explore less obvious options since I’d tapped out on the bigger leads. I thought I knew how Morran Stall, the artificer that had designed the chaos vial, fit into the picture, but I’d never actually talked to him. It it always paid to verify what you thought you knew, because sometimes you were wrong, and sometimes you were right but it lead to new threads to pull on. He’d declined that opportunity the last time I tried, but perhaps I could persuade him to talk to me through a mutual contact.

  I took a small chance and telemaged my way to Yimmy’s. He was there, working on something I didn’t want to know about, but he took a break when I showed up. After I gave him the name, he thought about it for a few moments. “Sure. Morran the man,” he said. “Older guy, kind of a specialist in containment spells, sorcery shields, that kind of thing. He’s good at what he does.”

  I nodded. “That would be him.”

  Yimmy nodded back. “I’ll put the word out.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next day I had a note sitting downstairs, left by a messenger. Messenger services had a mage specialist that could duplicate text on parchment over a distance. They had local offices and could send multiple copies to different locations if need be. The local office would deliver it to the recipient. Since the messengers had to see the text to send it, you couldn’t send confidential information without some kind of encryption scheme that most people didn't bother to set up. I had, although there were sneaky spells that could pull information out of the resulting random appearing strings of characters. Something about the message having an essence of its true self or something. But it was better than nothing.

  I decrypted it slowly… it’s a shifting letter substitution scheme that changes based on the location of the character, more secure but a pain to use. It tended to make things short and sweet. This was just an address, a time, and a signature by Yimmy.

  The address was a few blocks down the street from Morran’s building. I was pretty sure my tail would be with me again; they must have realized at some point that I’d given them the slip. But we were on more even footing now that I was leaving the comm artifact in my apartment. I did the same multi-telemage porting I had the prior day to throw them off, ending up a couple of miles away from the meeting spot
. Which gave me forty minutes of walking, which gave me forty minutes of looking for someone who didn’t belong. By the time I reached the spot, I was pretty sure I was clean.

  We were meeting on a street corner, which seemed a little odd. Normally if another artificer vouched for you, you were considered part of the in-crowd and were invited directly to the workshop. But maybe Morran was a suspicious type. I took the time to check the area out before heading to the spot. There were two youngsters hanging out there. They had the same geeky, not quite sure what to do with their hands thing going on that Yimmy did, one a smaller man - boy really - with close cropped brown hair and a tunic that was a little too large for him. The other one was taller and slightly older, a dirty blond. I recognized them as the two that had followed Morran out of the building when I’d visited it two days ago.

  They seemed jumpy, eyes constantly wandering, turning suddenly if someone came into sight. Something was off. Why would Morran send his junior flunkies to the meet?. I settled inside the door frame of a shop that looked like it had gone out of business a while ago and watched. A half hour after the meet was supposed to have gone down, with the two speaking more and more agitatedly with one another, they split up and went different ways.

  I followed the dirty blond. The other one was just a kid. The blond ducked into food shop and came out with a hot meat pie. I used the time to find a spot just down the road where a narrow alley exited onto the street and pretended I was looking for something in my pockets. When he started to step by me, I pushed him into the alley, up against the side of a building, with a stiletto at his throat. He’d dropped the meat pie in the road and looked like he was about to cry, but his hands were moving to reach into a pocket. I shook my head and said, “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Hands where I can see them.” He could have had an offensive or defensive spell that could be triggered without touching it - my safety teleport was like that - but they were tricky to make and occasionally resulted in a spell going off by accident. I figured my odds were good.

  The young man - teenager, I was revising my estimate of his age down a bit now that I was close to him - stopped reaching for a pocket and tried to roll his eyes to see the dagger at his throat, which was just not going to work. “What do you want?” he said. His voice cracked as he spoke.

  “Why wasn’t Morran at the meet? Why’d he send you and your friend?” I asked.

  Then he did cry, small tears leaking out of his eyes. “He’s dead. I and Jonesy are his apprentices. We want to know who killed him and why. We just wanted to ask questions. Someone we didn’t know looking for him seemed suspicious.”

  “What’s in the pocket?” I asked.

  “Firebolt stone,” he answered. “Morran wasn’t into that but he traded a few things with other artificers.” I thought about taking it away from him. He was more likely to get himself in trouble with it than to actually defend himself. But it felt too much like stealing.

  “What happened to Morran?” I said.

  “We were out getting supplies yesterday, the three of us. Just food, stuff like that. Suddenly, Morran stumbles and goes down. Vegetables everywhere. I and Jonesy think it’s a bit funny, but we’re trying not to laugh. But then he doesn’t get up again. And then…” and tears really started welling … “and then I see the blood pouring down the back of his neck. Someone stuck a shiv in him, from the back of his neck right up into the brain, and we were there and didn’t even see it. It was like a ghost did it.”

  I didn’t believe in ghosts, and an invisibility spell would have failed as soon as they stabbed Morran. But I knew about misdirection and I knew people that used it, who hunted in pairs and were good enough to make it seem like sorcery. Professionals, assassins. They were good. They were expensive. It put the tail on me in a new perspective. Maybe they weren’t following me. Maybe they were looking for an opportunity. I took the dagger away from the boy’s throat. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.” I didn’t think there was much point in asking the kid questions. Even Morran had been a long shot for getting any additional information. “I was just looking for a shield artifact. Heard he specialized in them.”

  The kid nodded and wiped his eyes. “The best,” he said.

  “What happens with you and Jonesy?” I asked.

  The kid looked downcast. “I… I don’t know. We weren’t that far along, we aren't good enough to stand on our own yet. We’re just living off of what we had and trying selling a few things that ended up on the shelves. It’ll be enough to get by for a while.”

  I nodded and said, “I might be able to do something about that. I’ll put out some feelers.” I didn’t know Yimmy wanted apprentices. I suspected he was only a few years out from being one himself. But he probably knew someone who did. The kid nodded his appreciation.

  “Sorry about the meat pie,” I said.

  He glanced at it, sitting on the road. “Wasn’t that hungry anyway.”

  After we split up, I tried to frame it. Morran’s death couldn’t be a coincidence. Well, it could be, but it was unlikely and it would be more conservative to assume it wasn’t, which meant it would be stupid to think it was. If it was, the question was who, and why. Leppol sprang to mind as the immediate suspect. Taking security to the next level, particularly with artificers, who were eccentric and difficult enough to control that they would pose a significant threat of inappropriate disclosure. But I kept circling around to the why, and couldn’t find anything that made sense. Eventually, word would get out about the raw chaos. I could see tight security when the mission was in progress, but afterwards, the need for secrecy should have been less and less of an issue. So, could it have been whoever stole the vial, this magicked-to-the-max ninja military team? But again… why?. They had the vial.

  Maybe they needed additional information on it? How to release the chaos in a controlled fashion? But killing the guy who made the vial wasn’t going to help with that. The Sambhal temple made even less sense. Was there another player I didn’t know about in the mix? As if it could get any more convoluted.

  I shook my head. The one thing that was clear is that whatever had gone down was still in play, and the stakes were still high enough that people were willing to kill for them.

  It turned out that the visit to Morran probably saved my life. As I entered the alleyway leading to my apartment, the sun was setting and casting shadows up and down the street. I saw two men walking down it from the other direction, chatting casually with each other. Except I was pretty sure they had been standing still just before I turned the corner, and they were walking at a pace where they would be passing me just as I reached my door and had my back to them. They were in nondescript city clothes, cotton shirts and pants, with long cloaks like mine. They both had hats with wide brims and high collars that masked their faces a bit. One of them looked a little bulky, like he was overweight but it was spread over his entire body instead of bunching up around his stomach. I changed my pace, slowed a little. They subtly did the same thing. I wrapped my cloak around me. The evenings were getting a little chilly. As I reached the door, instead of turning to it, I faced the two men. “Gentlemen, I’d advise you to rethink your plans.”

  The closest one almost nailed me despite the fact I was prepared and I know knife fighting. He had a thin dagger that had been hidden by his cloak and was aiming for a body blow, which probably wouldn’t be a killing blow but really was just a distraction for the other guy, who also had a dagger and was staring at a point on my throat where he wanted to sink it in. Fortunately I had the lightning stone in my hand, hidden by my cloak, which is noisy but much more effective that a knife, and I fried the first one while he was pulling back his arm for the strike. The impact from the bolt at that range was a physical blow and made him stagger back, but it was a reflex. He was already dead. I could see electrical arcs running between his upper and lower teeth as he fried from the inside out, and his eyes turned milky as they baked inside his head.

  I thought th
e second guy would run, or at least pause, but he was a pro. He saw I had turned my attention to him since his partner was no longer in play. He went for a more conservative thrust at the abdomen, low enough to avoid bone, a disabling wound. That close I could see a faint glimmer of metal through his cotton shirt. He was thin enough that he could wear chainmail under it and not look too awkward. Before I could get the lightning stone around, he stabbed me, then grunted unhappily as his dagger bounced off the magicked shirt I’d purchased from Yimmy. That was enough of a surprise that I took a chance and used the heavy lightning stone in a completely inelegant way, as weight to smash into his head.

  I wanted the guy alive.

  Unfortunately, he was as fast as his friend and ducked under the blow, then cut at my leg. I’m pretty fast too, and I dodged the full blow but I felt pain and the slick wetness of blood trickling down my thigh. He came at me again, and I used a second charge from the lightning stone, a blazing bolt of blue electricity jumping from the stone to his chest. His chain mail absorbed part of the charge, but that’s one reason I like lightning spells; you might survive getting hit if you were wearing armor, but you weren’t going to continue fighting when your skin is burned away over half of your body. Except he did, smoke rising from his clothes, which were charred in places and had a couple of dim patches of flames licking up where they had caught on fire. He wasn’t superhuman, though, and thrown off by the pain, his blow went wide. The stiletto I’d pulled from the quick-draw sheath went into the side of his neck, through the jugular. I left it sticking out of his neck. There was nothing I could do to keep him alive, but at least I could keep the blood on the ground to a minimum.