“Funny business, that is!” Delia squeaked. “I should find a way to tell Kordas!”
Isla seized her by the arm and shook her. “You will keep your mouth shut and your thoughts to yourself,” she spat. “Or this is what is going to happen to you!”
And she bent and whispered in Delia’s ear. “Well played, love. Meet me in the cellars after dinner. Now run up to your room and pretend to cry.”
Delia ripped herself away from her sister’s grasp and hid her face in her arm as she raced to her rooms, where she flung herself on her bed and shook with what should look like sobs.
But they weren’t sobs, of course. She was laughing herself sick.
17
Well, if the reason the Emperor brought me here was to keep the Court amused, I am certainly doing that, thought Kordas, as he moped in the rear of the afternoon Court in the Great Hall. Muted chatter swirled around him, like the perfumes that covered up the ever-present faint chemical taint in the air.
When he had been presented with the accusation that Isla was having an affair with Hakkon, he had decided to stretch his reactions out as long as he could. So he started with angry denials. He didn’t go so far as to challenge the person who had told him this over dinner to a duel—he really didn’t want to complicate the Plan still further with the repercussions of killing Prince Morthas of Halengard—but he flew into a rage and stormed out of dinner and tried to get an audience with the Emperor to demand he be sent home.
That would have been ideal, but alas, he couldn’t get that audience, and none of the dozen messages sent to the Emperor were answered. Nor was he permitted to bring a petition up at Court. He tried, but all the Court clerks refused his petition, and even the Dolls were forced to tell him that it would not be accepted. He continued to deny that Isla would betray him.
That ate up about four days of time, time he spent alternately shouting at people and shouting at the closed doors of the Emperor’s quarters.
Then he was presented with scryed records, and his first thought was that Isla was a brilliant actress, and Hakkon was pretty inept. She managed to make his flubbings look like the bumbling of a lovestruck dolt. That was ideal for the ploy, and he mused that it was also why he loved and valued Hakkon. The man simply didn’t have it in him to lie enough to be a danger, and he was much smarter than anyone might think.
Kordas locked himself away for a day, ostensibly to sob into his pillows—but actually to refine the Plan. And despite his anxiety, he did rest. Drugged tea helped. Wisdom from his father was, it is better to rest before exertion, than after. Sleep after exhaustion is inefficient, because it tries to heal body and mind at once; better to be well-rested, to be sharp-minded and react quicker, than to try to catch up or just drop where you stand. Good bed, deep sleep, big breakfast, and one could outpace anything except a Night Person. Their ways were mysterious and full of cats.
Kordas slipped away whenever he was not being scryed and Gated into the records complex. He had unprecedented latitude in using the City’s stores and resources, thanks to the Dolls. He’d begun, early on, by grilling the Record Keeper on what he could do as a Duke without attracting anyone’s attention. It was stunning just how bad the Imperial way of doing things had become. The Record Keeper revealed to Kordas that its function was not to interpret nor verify the origin of orders, but rather, to follow the authority of the seals—and the Record Keeper had full sets of seals. Talking quickly, Kordas prepared requisition forms via the Dolls—all of whom worked nearly blindingly fast when they wanted to—then sat at the Record Keeper’s desk, and had the Dolls turn away. By using the seals there, Kordas could impersonate a King, if he dared. The Record Keeper would turn around to find a stack of properly sealed orders to be carried out, and no Doll could claim to have witnessed anything awry. The materials requisitioned by the sealed order would be located, neatly packed, labeled, inventoried, and carried by Dolls to the so-familiar-as-to-be-unnoticed plain barges and boats that plied the canals of the City, with the inventory attached just inside the door. And off the barge would go to the refuge.
Kordas felt a genuine tingle of joy at stealing on such a scale. He knew it was wrong in general to steal, but this was for lives. He told himself that whatever he plundered from the Empire for his people were resources that wouldn’t be available to the Empire against his people. Audacity will win the day, he thought, and had the City Armory unobtrusively carted out “for offsite inventory and storage relocation” with the proper stamps, and replaced with identical, but empty, crates. Tons of combat-ready Poomers, Spitters, and the ammunition for them streamed to Valdemar, with no one but he and the Dolls aware of it. Boatloads of pellets in their secured crates accompanied them. All the boats looked the same with their raincovers on, and nobody cared what Dolls shipped. Hundreds of Doll-operated barges plied the canals every day. And so, without Courts, Kings, or commoners noticing or caring, the Plundering of the City was underway.
Better to be hung for a big deed than a small one, he thought. And, if I leave the City with a bare minimum of weapons, they won’t have reserves to defend themselves with, and they might panic. Panic was a good, useful option in a Court. The only supplies he let go out as usual were things that were expected on specific dates, such as ammunition and pellets going to the War. If those didn’t arrive as expected, there would be furious consequences.
Tremors came and went all this time, and an urgent message came to Kordas from the Record Keeper while Kordas was deep down a storage bay: Foreseers were reporting new visions. The Imperial City, the Palace, all exploding in fire or consumed by lava. When, they weren’t certain, but the visions were reported from Foreseers at the far edges of the Empire, as well as locals.
These reports made Kordas feel the most apprehension of the whole operation, and he lit off via Gate to the Records Complex. Not everything a Foreseer predicts actually happens, but they can be good warnings to check things, and in my case—to check things that I have compromised. So long as his subterfuge with the official seals was between him and the Dolls, everything should be all right. But if the predictions were delivered to the Emperor in a timely manner, the Emperor would search on his own, and Kordas would surely be exposed. By stealing the martial supplies alone, Kordas had cemented himself as a traitor.
If anyone was left alive to come after me. If anyone knew I was behind it. If anyone could find me.
Kordas agonized over the decision as he read the dispatches. In his heart it felt very, very much like pulling a trigger to end a life. If the Emperor received the Foreseer reports, he might lock down the entire City. No one in or out.
“If any more reports like these come in, can you destroy them?” he asked the Records Keeper.
“No, my Lord. Many things we can delay, but these are urgent and must be delivered to the Emperor. That we cannot change.”
Kordas flew through his resourcefulness in his mind. Mis-labeling? Re-routing? Copying errors? Wait—“Can you hand over urgent dispatches to a human courier for delivery?”
The Records-Keeper answered quickly, “Yes, if they have a certification as an Imperial courier.”
“Then have all new dispatches delivered to my Herald, Beltran. Then it is his responsibility to see to it they reach the Emperor, and none of you are liable for what happens after they’re handed off to a courier.”
“That would not violate our directives.”
With a flick of his fingers, flames erupted at the corners of the Foreseer reports. “Oh no, look what I did.”
The Records Keeper nudged a trash receptacle toward Kordas, who dropped the burning papers into it. “We will have to report that sometime, my Lord. Delays or loss of official materials must be reported within one hundred days.”
Initially, the Plan was for Valdemar to escape the Empire, which has turned even worse since Father devised it. Then I twisted the Plan into getting the abused children out, and th
en the Dolls, and the truth prisoners, and supplies, and now I’ve found myself thinking about the innocents in the City, from blacksmiths to noodle-cooks. Father’s Plan is My Plan now, not The Plan. If the City will be annihilated, anything and anyone left here would be incinerated anyway, so—my conscience is clear about my secret sacking of the City. If the Emperor sees the Foreseer reports, though, he’ll be enraged with paranoia, unleash every hound he has—and he’ll discover the Plan. It’s all about what the Emperor reacts to.
He exhaled hard, because he could only come up with one solution.
It never stops. It only escalates.
* * *
—
Kordas resumed his performance the next morning. He stormed around Court abusing Isla and Hakkon to anyone who would listen. He channeled his very real anger at not being allowed to go home into feigned anger at them. In a few more days, anyone who saw him coming would hastily find something else they urgently needed to do.
Then he changed his tune again. He begged people to tell him how to win his wife back—or at the very least, get the Emperor to hear his petition to go home. He would bargain with anyone, which made him amusing again, as people gave him all sorts of absurd advice about his wife. No one, however, was willing to bargain with him for access to the Emperor. That was apparently one line they would not cross.
He kept that up for about six days more. Some of his desperation was real. It was perilously close to the day of the Regatta. He still had no good idea of how to protect the stubborn people who were intending, no matter what, to remain in Valdemar. The Record Keeper had been unable to give him any help either. In fact, the only other thing the Record Keeper had been able to advise him on was what to do about Merrin’s spies . . .
Which had been, quite simply, to take them prisoner and allow the Record Keeper to forge reports to Merrin from them. So the spies were cooling their heels securely locked in the never-used prison cells of the Valdemar manor. They were being treated well, and on the day after the Regatta, the spell-locked door would swing open. So that was all right.
But it didn’t help Kordas at all.
So now he was moping around, talking to no one, brooding. He displeased Star by disarranging his appearance so that he looked a bit unkempt. He pushed his food around his plate at public meals, and refused far, far more dishes than he accepted. This was actually all to the good, in his opinion; he had been afraid that even with moderate eating he was beginning to get soft around the waist. People snickered openly at him, but avoided him with alarm, because he would get maudlin and immediately turn the subject of conversation to Isla, pleading with them to give him advice, then interrupting that advice to grow teary-eyed and dissolve into a wet mess.
But the desperation and depression were both very real. He didn’t have to feign those. He didn’t have to feign pacing the gardens night and day, head down, as he went over every ploy he had thought of and discarded.
Put everyone remaining in Valdemar under a sleep spell, until they are awakened by those storming the place to investigate.
And what if that took days? Worse, weeks? Those storming the place would find the dead, not the living. Three days without water would kill a grown man, and it would be a day or less to doom an infant.
Have everyone remaining locked up by the last to leave.
That was the one he was still toying with, but it was still perilous, even if he left the ones imprisoned with adequate food and water. And would they be believed? And what if they were questioned magically?
Have everyone left behind claim that a disease made everyone else run mad.
That wouldn’t be believed for an instant.
There were variations on all those things, but none of them would hold past the Emperor’s inquisitors coming in and applying real questioning.
Well, he thought unhappily, as he left the Court early and paced the gardens in the thin, smoky afternoon sunlight. At least I’m losing the weight I put on.
* * *
—
Delia would never have believed so much could be accomplished in so little time.
The vast combined herds of cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and goats had been moved upriver to keep them from overgrazing the area around Crescent Lake. Smaller herds of each had been left to supply fresh meat for the common kitchens that had been set up around the Lake. Their owners and tenders followed them with strings of barges as the herds ate their way north and westward. Crescent Lake would have been full of barges from shore to shore if the slow migration to further safety hadn’t already started. The Gates disgorged barges and people on a regular basis all day and night long; Delia reckoned about fifteen thousand people had arrived, with barges they intended to live in trailed by barges of everything they could possibly cram inside from their homes, and as many supplies as they could manage. Entire farms and manors now stood mostly empty back in Imperial Valdemar; not even Lord Merrin’s farms had been spared.
Valdemar Manor was mostly stripped too. Counting on the fact that scryers would only concentrate on where Isla and Hakkon went, there was a narrow path of rooms that looked “normal”; everything else but heavy furnishings had been removed at Delia’s direction. All of the mages were here now, living two and four to a home-barge. So far, none of them had murdered each other.
Having them here, with the power nexus available to them, had made it a lot easier to solve many problems. Like where people were going to get flour; they had grain in plenty, but flour spoiled if it wasn’t used within three months. Two barges had been set up as mills, with several small millwheels powered by magic, instead of one big millwheel powered by water or wind. One of those was here at the Lake, the other at the head of the caravan making its way upstream.
Two of those rivers had proven to be dead ends of a sort . . . but only of a sort. Although the streams ended, it turned out there were settlements of people there. Isla and Ponu had visited each, used their magics to quickly learn the local language, and assured the local leaders that the Valdemarans intended no harm, and would soon be on their way.
And that . . . was where things had taken a turn for the unexpected.
Which was why Delia was mounted on one of the Gold Chargers, a three-year-old, which had been a bit of a feat, as big as the mare was. Her legs were practically splayed out on either side of the saddle; it was not comfortable. The Charger was tethered to the start of a string of barges that was just about thirty long. Ten of them held some of Squire Lesley’s prize pigs, including the Empress and her brood. There were another two strings behind her, and shepherds and herdsmen moving along flocks of sheep and cattle on the riverbanks.
They were all very near their destination, the settlement at the head of one of the two dead-end streams. The locals called this “the Brandywine” in their language, and their little village “Brandywine” as well.
The sun shone down hotly on the expedition, and the air smelled of fresh water and trampled vegetation.
Squire Lesley rode next to her on a fat cob. She looked down at him. “You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked anxiously. “You’ll probably never see your sons and daughters again.”
“My sons and daughters are smart and strong. I love them and they’ll be all right. They can always visit, right? The good folk of Brandywine are my sort of people,” the Squire replied. “When they asked if some of us would join them, and I got a look round the place, I honestly couldn’t imagine myself taking the long journey the mages are saying we should.” He sighed. “I’m too old for such things, and that’s the truth. Uprooting me and my pigs and piling everything into barges and making that crossing took more out of me than I ever thought it would. I’m ready to settle. And these good folk are ready to have us! It seems like providence, to me.”
Delia couldn’t argue with that. The elders of Brandywine and the other settlement, Oakton, had come down the rivers, taken a look at th
e Valdemaran armada, and had evidently very much liked what they saw. And, truth to tell, it was a good bargain all around. Some of the Valdemaran families got new homes immediately and would not face the great migration that was ahead of the others, and all of those families had at least one elderly member who was spared a grueling journey. Crescent Lake certainly could not support the whole population that had arrived, much less the ten thousand or so yet to come; there was a lot of discussion going on about who would be staying and who would be going.
And the locals got an infusion of new people, new herds, and folk who were no strangers to putting their hands to weapons.
This might be land mostly empty of people, but it was not empty of dangers. The Valdemarans had already encountered some of them—things born of twisted magic that were far more perilous than bears. And there were roaming bands of bandits as well, men who preferred to take rather than produce.
Beyond that—and the locals always seemed to point in different directions—was something called “The Pelagirs.” Marauding monsters, bears, and what was essentially an invasion of foreigners did not make the locals as sick-looking or pale as the word “Pelagirs.”
So two struggling villages were about to get what they needed to stop struggling and start prospering. And as a bonus there was about to be a large town within an easy distance of them. Granted, the “town” was going to take some building yet, but the people would be there, and their skills and tools.
The river made an abrupt turn, and there was Brandywine, with its cluster of thirty houses and its palisade of logs. Actually, all Delia could see from where she sat was the log palisade, the open gate, and a glimpse of a couple of wooden houses that were very different from the stone cottages of Valdemar. And it looked as if the entire village had turned out to cheer the arrival of the newcomers. They also looked very different from the folk of Valdemar; clothing was all of homespun, home-woven materials and colored with local, natural dyes.
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