Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Because the result was predictable and the beneficiaries are the other two families, who now share the tolls two ways, instead of three?"

  "Precisely. There's never been an explanation that satisfied me. I've heard rumors that the decision to hold onto the pass was actually made by certain of Jacobs' advisors who might have actually been loyal to the other clans, but I never knew exactly how it came about."

  "And Reading was friendly to Jacobs despite this, until this business about the iron?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you know that Cohos had iron before this happened? Reading is the second dwarf I have talked to that didn't."

  "No, I thought Hogan had been out of iron for the last twenty years, or so. But if he had some, and it was news to me or the fellow you spoke with in the capital, that would not be very surprising. But Reading, as a competitor, should have known. You know, you might ask the female human you spend so much time with."

  "Lady Elayne? Why?"

  "She's also here on account of the iron, in her own way, and might know something."

  "She could at least tell me if that part of Jacobs' story is true."

  "Aye. But think on it longer. If Brogdadus started sending soldiers here three years ago, they probably came from somewhere else. Somewhere else in the Alliance is this much weaker."

  "The deal that was supposedly brokered by this wizard Vechtin… I had heard that he had a pupil who was about ready to be an Adept, but beyond that I don't know him. Do you?"

  Wa'llach furrowed his brow. "It's hard to tell you scrawny magicians apart," he snickered, "but I know him some. He was a disciple of Grand Master Crane's, and served under Crane on Discipline within the Order for some twenty years. He'd been posted somewhere before that, but I don't remember. I butchered some people for him when he was with Discipline."

  "Anyone interesting?"

  Wa'llach shook his head. "Not all wizards are as communicative with a Bound dwarf as you."

  "But you had some impression?"

  "Aye. He was mostly going after people who had been dealing in Puppets."

  "If there's anyone who could stand for a butchering…" Wa'llach nodded agreement but watched him carefully. "Did you kill wizards or…?"

  "No wizards, merely the outsiders who had operated the ring. Vechtin and Crane might have taken care of the wizard…" Wa'llach's eyes twinkled.

  "Or they might have been the wizard and were trying to cover their tracks or eliminate competition," Wit said.

  "I haven't a shred of evidence," said Wa'llach carefully, "but I've never seen a thing that would tend to disprove that notion, either."

  "What happened to him after that?"

  "About ten years ago, he was given a region near the frontier, sharing a border with Youngkent. I haven't heard what he was up to." Wa'llach's sharp eyes stared forward, seemingly at a point in space, but probably at some object that Wit could not see. "It's always the worst trouble when you damned magicians turn on each other. But I don't mean to distract you from truly important things—like shutting down my little game."

  "Oh, I wasn't going to shut it down—I was going to make a wager."

  Wit could not see the dwarf well in the darkness, so he chose to believe he went deathly pale. "If you make a wager, there will be no convincing them it isn't fixed. It will be the same as shutting it down, only with bloodshed."

  "Are you trying to tell me your game is honest?"

  Wa'llach made noises of equivocation.

  "I might not understand the nuances of your ridiculous dwarven game…spinning a top a thousand times seems absurd…but I know damn well that the fellow who made the top has a secret agreement with the fellow who's been betting the round rune."

  "The round one? No, he's working with the fellow who's been betting agrth." Wit was a poor student of runes and blinked in the darkness. "The one with two right angles."

  "No. He's working with the dwarf betting the circle."

  "Are you trying to play a trick on me? It would be awful low if you were."

  Wit shook his head.

  "Those dogs," said Wa'llach. "Say, many thanks for the information."

  "It's not going to do you any good when I shut your game down."

  "Do you have to, though?"

  "It seems as if you've been had—I'd be doing you a favor."

  "Ahh, but now I can turn the situation to my advantage. You wouldn't happen to be in need of, say, fifty pieces of gold?"

  Wit had to think about this. He realized that his hesitation came not from want of the money, but out of a perverse desire to allow the dwarf to see his scheme through to the end.

  "I'll tell you what," said Wit, "if we're late in Youngkent it was because you got drunk and lost our horses; and I need to have a word with the ass who said there was gambling going on in here—I haven't been able to see any such thing in all this damn dwarven darkness."

  "Haha!" Wa'llach slapped him on the shoulder. "I won't forget this, my friend."

  Wit eventually found his way out of the tunnels, and wandered back to the fort for his noon meeting with Elayne, in what he was coming to think of as their field.

  When she arrived, she confirmed the foreman's story. "We sent a larger detachment, at first, to chase off the orcs, and I went with them for the fight—I was a page for a general. Then I came back with the general, while we left about half the soldiers here to protect the mine. I trained with the royal guard for another two years, before taking command of this garrison a year ago."

  "And what were the troops doing before they came to Reading?"

  "Not all that much. We have arrangements with some lords on the frontier, where they will quarter and feed our soldiers in exchange for them helping out in the event of an invasion or siege. That's obviously a break-even proposition for us, or worse, if the troops are ever called on to do anything—but every once in a great while someone wants to hire mercenaries for a raid, and so we have them close by when those chances come up."

  "Are some of these lords in Youngkent?"

  "Yes."

  "And, since you've been keeping the garrison here, there have been fewer troops hanging about the frontier, waiting for something to come up?"

  "Exactly. We've gotten hundreds of weapons that are much better than what we had before and all it's cost us is a handful of soldiers who were just getting old waiting for raids that were never going to happen. That bothers you?"

  "Yes. It seems more and more like someone is doing their level best to get as many orcs into Youngkent as they can: first, the wall will come down, and then there will be fewer soldiers to fight them. What's much worse, is it seems like the someone who is doing it is working for, or with, some of the wizards of my Order."

  "But why would they do that?"

  Wit sighed. "I don't really know…but wizards all know, even if we never say it, that great advances in our power have always occurred in the wake of an invasion."

  "Your Order uses the devastation of our lands to seize power?"

  "We almost can't help it. An invasion means rebuilding, buying, selling, lending—all the things we are needed for, thousands of ways for us to exert our influence. And the lords who are the least behind on their dues get our attention first—so our friends always come out of a catastrophe better than anyone. It seems to mean that we thrive on massacres and starvation, but I'm not sure what we could do to avoid it."

  She shook her head. "But causing an invasion? I mean, I've heard people say that wizards have done that and worse, but they're the same ones that say you get your powers from eating babies. You don't do that do you?"

  "No, nor cause invasions…well, as you say there's people who tell strange tales about us, and we have strange tales of our own. My friend Haniel believes that, during the second invasion, the Order deliberately lost some letters which led to the orcs advancing beyond the Jakned River, thus making everything worse and better for us…but she's a paranoid drunk."

  "Well, I'd say that's all very rott
en of you, but I suppose I'm in exactly the same business. If the Alliance goes to war, we might be able to finally finish the north wing of our castle. All the gods, I wonder if I should write my father and tell him to dig out the plans."

  Wit was confounded, for a moment, trying to figure out if he was violating the Principles by giving her advanced notice, and feeling hurt that what he had thought was a private conversation had led, again, back to him questioning his obligations to the Order. He looked up at her and saw her face blank, and her eyes fixed on a point in the distance.

  He worried that his face had betrayed more annoyance than he had wanted. "I'm sorry…"

  She spoke softly. "Hand me your knife and run."

  "What?"

  "You run to the fort, I'll deal with these murderous trolls."

  Wit handed her his dagger, but did not run. The Power was suddenly all around him. There were three men and two trolls hiding amongst the rocks around the field.

  He could not help but see into the princess' mind: it was dominated by an overwhelming fear, becoming almost a certainty, that he was about to get himself killed. Wit was fairly sure that he was not, but understood her fear. Although the men in the woods aspired to take him and Elayne alive, they were desperate, hungry, poorly trained, and on the precipice of fatal violence.

  Wit got up and slowly walked towards the path. The Gift seldom allowed the Gifted to feel especially helpless, and Wit dimly knew that part of his power came from this sense of invulnerability itself, and not from actual magic. But he was also certain that neither of the two men who stepped in front of him with drawn knives were going to kill him.

  The princess had sprung to her feet, with her sword in her left hand and Wit's dagger in her right. The other man, armed with a knife, and the two trolls, carrying massive clubs, advanced on her. She cast a despairing glance at Wit, but her three opponents were bearing down on her and demanded her attention. She threw Wit's knife into the neck of the first troll, tossed the sword into her right hand, rolled under the swing of the second troll's club, and hacked at his legs.

  Wit was almost offended by her concern. For one thing, the knives that his attackers carried were a poor match for his staff, and he had actually learned several things in the last week.

  Wit fell into one of the stances that the princess had taught him. Physically centered, he felt the Gift more strongly as well. He chopped neatly at the first man who advanced on him, landing a sharp blow on his hand, and knocking the knife away. The attacker went to retrieve his knife, leaving Wit facing a lone opponent.

  Wit's strong instinct was that the superior reach of his staff gave him an insurmountable advantage, but a stronger instinct told him that the time had come to cheat with the Gift.

  The man suddenly dropped into a wicked-looking, compact stance, and tossed the blade smoothly between his hands with an absent half-smile on his face. Where had he learned how to do that?

  In the backroom of a tavern across the mountains, near the frontier. Wit and his opponent watched as the opponent's mother explained how to hold the knife, and beat him on the wrist whenever he got it wrong. Wit grinned at him, and then they were back in the field.

  While the man was still disoriented from the immersion into his past and blinking with confusion, Wit brought his staff down on his head, sending him crumpling to the ground.

  The princess had severely wounded the knife wielder, and risked looking back at Wit. It was enough for the troll to start to swing his club again. She noticed, but not nearly in time, and while she was able to avoid the brunt of the blow she was still sent sprawling, and the sword was knocked out of her hand.

  The first man Wit had faced had retrieved his knife and now advanced on Wit, who kept the distance between them with swings of his staff.

  The princess drew a dagger from her belt as the troll closed on her with the club raised for a blow to crush her skull. She held her dagger in her left hand; her right arm was limp. She was moving slowly, still shaken by the blow, getting ready to spring for an upward thrust as the troll advanced. Wit could not tell if she would make it in time.

  Wit had little experience with troll memories, but the urgency gave him strength. He ripped the troll backwards into his childhood—a dark wet cave, gnawed bones, the howling of winter winds.

  The troll's mind was still in the cave when the princess plunged her dagger into his heart.

  The manipulation of the troll's mind had allowed Wit's opponent to close within stabbing distance, but as he saw the troll fall, he had a change of heart and ran in the opposite direction.

  The princess snatched up her sword with her left arm, and Wit had to throw himself in front of her to keep her from chasing the last of the attackers.

  "All the gods," he said, "your arm is broken."

  "It won't stop me," she hissed.

  "He doesn't matter," said Wit. "What's he going to do? What's the use?"

  She spat blood. "Maybe your Order can afford to let people insult you and live to tell the tale—my house cannot."

  "The only tale he has to tell is how you killed their three best fighters by yourself."

  She hit Wit in the stomach with the flat side of her sword and he doubled over. "By myself, you lying magician? Training dummies fight back more than that troll." She cast an incredulous glance at the man that Wit had struck, who was now groaning on the ground. "Have you been letting me win all week, you son of a bitch?"

  "No," said Wit, when he had air, "or maybe only a little, near the end. If you hadn't taught me to fight, I certainly couldn't have done it at all."

  "What do you mean?" She glared at him.

  Wit's stomach hurt, and the adrenaline was sickly dying in him. He looked at the Lady Elayne; her clothes splashed with red human blood and green troll blood, her face dirty and twisted, and her eyes glistening with anger and pain. He could not tell how much of her distress came from her injury and how much from her anger at him.

  He tightened his grip on his staff and looked. The broken arm was a minor annoyance, if that. Part of her had already determined to make the most of a bad situation by learning Master Findeck's short sword technique with her left hand.

  Mostly, she was the youngest of seven children, fighting and losing one thousand battles with wooden swords against older, larger siblings. Worse, by far, than the pain, the million wooden blows absorbed by the small body, was the sense that her few triumphs, which she wanted, desperately, to believe in and to cherish, were in fact illusory, and that she had only ever won when her older brothers and sisters had let her.

  Wit sighed. It was not lying to her; it was simply going over his possible truths and finding the one she needed to hear.

  "All the gods, you bitch," he said. "You beat the shit out of me. If I could have done something about it, don't you think I would have?"

  Castle courtyards, wooden swords, older brothers, all went rushing back to their normal place in the back of her mind. She smiled at him. "I'm sorry I hit you."

  He shrugged. "You've given me lots of chances to get used to it."

  The trolls were dead. The man Wit had hit over the head was slowly regaining consciousness, and the one who had attacked the princess with a knife had received bad cuts to his arm and face for his trouble, although they were unlikely to be fatal—at least until infection set in. Under the princess' direction, Wit tied their hands behind their backs with their belts, and then they made their way back to the fort.

  At the fort, Elayne grudgingly turned herself over to a medic while Wit went back with soldiers to retrieve the wounded attackers. He half hoped that the men would have managed to escape, but both of them were still tied up in the field. They were taken back to the fort where they received treatment for their injuries and were then thrown in the stockade.

  By the time Wit got back to the fort, Wa'llach had heard the news and come up from the mine. "Which way did the fellow who ran off go? I've half a mind to chase him."

  Wit shook his head. "He s
eemed like the least fearsome of the lot. I imagine that tracking him would be no very great feat, but his friends will know where he went and give us a better idea of if we need to find him."

  "Have you…?"

  Wit shook his head. "I'm going to wait and talk to the princess, they are her prisoners, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't want to overstep."

  Once Elayne had had her arm set, Wit went in to see her with several of her officers. The medic had got her to agree to stay in bed and she glared at the room. She told them that she was feeling fine, and they asked her if she had any special instructions for the prisoners.

  She looked at Wit, who stared off into space and made it clear that he was pretending not to be there.

  In theory, the situation was somewhat complex. The ruffians had damaged the princess and threatened the Order—and the survivors could be Bound, both to compensate for the princess' injury and the attempt on a wizard's life. But turning the matter over to Wit would mean a complicated inquiry: the troll who actually broke her arm was dead, for one thing, and while some of the fault did lie with his companions, determining how much might be difficult. By his silence, Wit was saying that he did not care to collect any damage on behalf of the Order and that if she chose to kill them, or leave them indefinitely in her gaol, he would not object.

  She nodded. "I think someone should have a talk with them." She looked at Wit again, who this time stepped forward.

  "I would gladly volunteer to supervise an interrogation."

  She nodded again. "Good. Sergeant Meanor is generally very persuasive, but the cold weather is not kind to the joints in his hands."

  She and the officers left, and Wit collected Wa'llach, and followed by one of the officers, went into the gaol.

  Wit needed to do little more than periodically use his power to make sure that the prisoners were telling the truth. Demoralized, injured, and fully aware they were under the power of a wizard, they answered the questions put to them readily.

  Both of the prisoners, and the escapee, had lived in a town on the other side of the frontier, near Cohos. It had fallen to orcs several months ago, and only twenty of the villagers had escaped. They had wandered into Alliance territory, looking for shelter and support. Most of the survivors had ended up in a village outside of the mountains, where the local lord had grudgingly allowed them to build huts and mostly given them enough food to keep from starving. Apparently unmoved by the generosity of the Alliance's lords, the three men had fallen in with the two trolls and went into the Reading Mountains with the idea of stealing a wagon on its way to or from the mine.