15. N
Haldeen sat quietly on a bench in the antechamber outside the Council Chamber itself, hunched over, his fingers steepled, while he waited for the other lords to assemble.
He knew from long experience that once the lords had gathered, they would then start waiting on the king’s pleasure.
Lord Berlan the Toady stood looking out the nearest window, blowing air through pursed lips.
Berlan tapped his perfectly manicured nails against the marble sill, a nervous sound, like a small animal’s claws scrabbling over tile.
Haldeen tried to ignore the Berlan’s irritations, glad for the moment to gather his thoughts for what would prove to be a difficult session.
He hoped that Berlan would limit himself to imitating leaky air-bladders and nervous clawed feet.
Berlan cleared his throat.
No such luck, thought Haldeen with weary resignation. He made it a point to not raise his head. Don’t make eye-contact. Don’t encourage him.
“Ah’hm, ah heard,” started Berlan, assuming the uppermost-class accent to which he aspired, “that you’ave had a bit of an accident at your ah’hm, ahstate. Some dah’ied, or so ah was told.”
Haldeen frowned. “We had some misfortune,” he replied simply, not looking up.
“Well, quite the scan’dahl,” Berlan said, “ah worker had some kind of episode. Ah’all that food gone, ah’all that production. How evah will you manage?”
Haldeen considered a moment. “Any words I say will be in the king’s ear in a trice, between bouts of bootlicking. Best to say nothing.” The silence grew, interrupted by Berlan’s nervous tapping. He thought about it for a bit. Perhaps I can use this.
“Yes,” he replied. “A worker suffered a bout of some kind of distemper, and caused a disruption in the workroom. There was a panic, and in the panic, several were injured, and a worker died after being trampled on the steps. It is a substantial setback.”
Berlan had stopped his noises, so Haldeen knew he had the Toady’s full attention.
Lots of juicy news to be the first to tell.
He paused, shrugged, using body posture to minimize the effect of the words.
Just one of those things. “Well … a setback. We’re recovering. Food production remains behind. We won’t catch up to what we lost, but we won’t fall further behind either. Production started back up, but we had a lot of contamination,
so we’re taking care to verify the quality of the pressings before they are converted, then making a second and third check before we wrap. Can’t take too much care where rations are concerned. We still don’t know what caused that worker to become unhinged.”
Oh, let’s set some fear in. “It might,” he added cautiously, “Be some new sort of disease.”
He let that sink in. “Or she might have simply snapped for no cause that my Overseer can discern.”
Now let them all start hunting for brain-destroying diseases, and putting more stress on their own workers by having them under scrutiny.
He shrugged. “Still, one small ray of sunlight through the clouds. The quality of our mineral ash has gone up as a result of all this, so fewer production failures.”
Haldeen waited to see how Berlan would reply.
He’d just loaded the Toady’s plate with a heaping pile of news for him to feed to the king, and better to do it now, than have to twist in the wind in front of the entire Council.
The conversation would still be uncomfortable, but Haldeen had hopefully shaped the direction the arrows would come from.
Berlan had visibly blanched at the word disease and took a shuffle-step away from Haldeen. His nervous fingers started up their skittering again. Haldeen looked at Berlan’s fingers, then at Berlan. The lord-by-birth had always been fidgety, but the tapping seemed new, now that he thought about it.
“Is something …?” Haldeen trailed off, hoping to draw Berlan in.
The Toady took the bait, glancing around to see if they were alone …
except for the king’s sensors to listen to his lords simmer and stew before he starts the grilling …
then an ostentatious finger to the lips.
“Sharing what ah oughtn’t,” he said, before another glance, and a whisper, and the telltale signal of losing that “upper-class” accent.
“The Kings are nervous. It’s getting bad. Food stores are down here, black mold even before your production got … disrupted. Foods down in the rest of the Jewels, worse in the outlying cities. Rumors of riots in some of the colonies. Monsters are getting more aggressive.
There is open talk within the Council of using actinics … bringing the sun here, if that’s what it takes to restore the situation.”
Berlan stopped suddenly. His accent sprang back. “Ah’ve said too much.”
He really is shaken up, Haldeen thought.
And, because these days, the ability to actually get full, unbroken “nights” of sleep had made it possible to think about more than one thing at a time, another idea occurred, triggered by Berlan’s mention of the black mold.
I wonder if I can convince the others that black mold creates a brain disease, somehow?
Maybe if someone was desperate enough to eat it …
. That would be yet another distraction from things he didn’t want anyone asking about.
He raised a finger to the side of his eyelid and rubbed the corner of his eye. More to think about. “Do you want to go see what’s keeping the others? I’ll wait here.”
Berlan nodded a hasty yes and fled, heels tapping on the slate floors as he escaped the scene of the indiscretion.
Haldeen considered the effects of his time away. Days’ progress for hours away had sped things along, but the hours locked in his workshop carried their own price. He had fallen behind on the news, and the deterioration here.
He laced his fingers together under his chin, and stared at the swirling pattern on the slate floor.
He sifted Berlan’s words while he waited, drawing them out, and seeing what conclusions came to mind.
Things were bad and getting worse. He had a pathway now that would get him …
and a few others, if he chose … off this world.
He would live, provided he was close to his Gate if it all failed.
Then what? He had managed to trickle energy from the Gate, enough to light a light, to power a small reserve, and to cast a minor fire spell using that reserve. Progress. Definite progress. He still needed the Gate at this end to feed power through, which he would not have if all this collapsed.
His analysis of Triana’s world suggested that her people were at least as cruel and capricious as the bitch-goddess herself.
His interviews with those who had been present when the tantrum took place suggested she had done magic, battle magic, without calling the ambient field that surrounded her.
Triana’s work-table had a sensor barely two feet away from where she had her tantrum, and not a sound had come from it.
The wave she cast away from her had disrupted mage-lights for some distance in every direction.
The Overseer had made a diligent search for the weapon she’d used, to the point of stripping her to see if it had been hidden on her clothing or person. Nothing.
She had to have done it by herself, somehow.
Stunned a guard, nearly killed him, with no ambient magic, and no focus.
He had thought it hilarious that she claimed to be a powerful lord among her own people.
Now the boast wasn’t as funny. He had gathered from her stories that in general, her people shunned direct combat with each other, preferring to waste the lives of their slaves, either in gladiatorial matches or direct combat.
He had thought it was because they had little to no power or ability.
Now he knew better. And she was, by her own admission, largely untrained in the use of her magic.
What could an older, more skilful elf there do?
One who had actually taken part in personal combat and was really on his game?
Her people could crush his the moment they arrived, unless they could fight back … or take them out first.
The arrival of the other lords en masse broke his train of thought. They looked grim and tired. He became quite aware he looked well rested. He stood and faced them, birth lords mostly, with a few technical lords hovering around the edges.
High Lord Kaeltwyn, the ranking lord and the temporary Prime Minister, had the privilege of speaking first.
“Haldeen, you look well.” Haldeen kept his expression grave.
“If I do, it is only thanks to the ministrations of my ladywife. She has a tea that allows me to sleep and rest, regardless of my mental agitations. These are grave times, my lords. Grave times.”
He saw at least a couple of skeptical glances between a couple in rows back. Servants gossip, and juicy bits of scandal flew between Houses on wings of its own. He suspected his cold marriage bed was quite the talk.
On the other hand, that cold bed would be a fine reason for her to drug me into sleeping soundly every night so she can’t be bothered. And she certainly is not going to nay-say anything that reflects well on her, regardless of the truth.
Still, there had been nothing overt about his statement that could be called out, and it sufficed to answer the High Lord’s insinuation regarding his zeal, or lack thereof.
High Lord Kaeltwyn replied with a thin smile. “We are gathered together? Shall we go in?”
“Lord Berlan has gone in already, High Lord. I don’t know about the others.” Haldeen looked around the faces. No friends, and only a few he could stretch to call colleagues. “I don’t see Pelias the Lord Provisioner.”
“Pelias is the High Lord Provisioner, if you please, Haldeen,” Kaeltwyn corrected. “Remember your station.”
Haldeen made a small bow, accepting the reprimand. So near the edge, and still this?
He made it a point to drift to the back, and follow as the gathering of the city’s lords born and lords made moved together through the bright morning of the clerestory and into the Council Chamber to await the king’s pleasure.
Unusually for him, King Alliard did not keep them waiting, emerging from a side room with Pelias …
High Lord Pelias … in tow, just as they entered.
Haldeen peered over the shoulder of the higher-ranking lords to see the king.