15. N #2
King Alliard appeared rested, the fatigue that had etched his face during their Farspeaker conversation gone.
Kaeltwyn looked from the king, and back to Haldeen. “Tea?” he asked softly.
“I’ll have some sent over,” Haldeen whispered back.
Alliard might appear well rested, but Pelias looked a wreck. He was the closest person Haldeen had to an ally on the Council, and it appeared he had not slept in days. I’ve been so focused on my own issues … there are others in the same grinder.
“How much food, High Lord?” asked Alliard. Haldeen recognized that tone. The question for the lords, not the king.
“Twenty-one days’ reserve, best calculation, your grace, and declining by one day every eight-day. That assumes the mold contamination doesn’t spread, and we don’t have another production loss.”
Pelias glanced at the king. “Everyone not needed on the walls who has the ability is making food. We have no other outside sources … and the few honest conversations I’ve had with my counterparts says they are in roughly the same shape. If not worse.”
“If not worse,” the king repeated. “We’re a ship going down on an even keel. If I do nothing, then in twenty-one eight-days … give or take … the city will begin to starve, and then it will begin to riot.”
He stretched his shoulders back, and they heard a distinct pop.
“You are here to consider critical reports, and offer suggestions. None of the usual slap and tickle.”
Alliard drew himself up to his full height. “Haldeen, stop hiding in the back.”
Haldeen came through the group, hastily working a speech. He hoped Berlan had seeded the ground for him. “Your Majesty,” he started, then began stammering. “I-I-I’m s-s-so-orry about the b-b-usiness in the f-f-ood hall.”
King Alliard raised a hand. “Consider yourself rebuked. Berlan already told your tale.”
He made a wry expression. “Hopefully the way you wanted it told.”
He made a gesture, summoning Haldeen with his fingertip.
“Up here, in front. Where everyone can hear. When do we begin evacuating our people through the Great Gate?”
Haldeen’s time spent working up speeches and clever evasions failed him when he saw the desperate need on the king’s face.
Haldeen had seen the toll the job had taken, seen the mask slip before, heard the sly quip when the king let down his guard, but never completely understood the full weight on his shoulders.
Alliard’s city was dying, either slowly from starvation, or quickly if the Monsters breached the walls, but it was dying.
“I don’t know,” he replied, a simpler and more truthful answer than he had planned.
“I’ve made solid progress, have been able to regularly send … umm, a Probe … back and forth, but not ready to go to scale.”
He took a deep breath. More truth. “There are other issues. The elves on that world can wield magic there. They don’t have ambient magic. I’ve … umm, I’ve had the Probe test for it. Magic works there, our magic works, just no way to power it. I’ve confirmed it with experiments here on the subject.”
The king furrowed his brows. “The subject? The girl … the same girl I ordered be sent to me for questioning?” His voice took on a dangerous tone. “You kept her. Against my express wishes?”
Haldeen felt the others shift away. A king’s wrath, especially this king’s, would be unpleasant, and could be contagious.
Haldeen cursed his slip. He worked to control his fear, and fought to keep the stammer under control.
“M-Majesty, the girl fell ill. Obviously, not knowing if this was some disease she had brought with her, I could not in good conscience expose you and yours to her. Then no sooner had she recovered, then you ordered all of us to put every hand on food production.
So I put her to work in the conversion room until you called for her.”
Now for the big lie. “She … did not take to the work. In fact, not only was she the cause of the disruption in my food production line, she used her innate magic for the first time, ever, to attack the other women. It caused a riot.
The few descriptions I could pry out of people seemed to indicate that, on her own, she had all the power of a firelance. In a panic, the bravest of the women flung themselves at her to save the others, and trampled her to death before she could hurt any more of them.”
He paused to see if the king would say anything, but the stunned expression on the king’s face told him that his best chance of coming out on the other side of this was to plow through with the rest of his story.
“I can have her body sent to you, and perhaps your people can learn something from it?”
He wasn’t quite sure what to do with his eyes, so he fixed them on the king’s, studying his expression to see how his tale fared.
“But the two things I have learned about this other world are that the Insurrectionists have control of personal magic to a degree unprecedented in our world. The girl was, by her own admission, a minor practitioner. She relied on her slave army and her slave gladiators to remain in power,
not her own magic prowess. And yet, she personally wielded the power of a firelance. Until I can solve the problem of little to no ambient magic on the other side of that Portal,
we might just as well open our Gates to the Predators as walk through that Portal into the Insurrectionist side and attempt to confront them. We’d be like children facing an army of armored, sword-wielding, battle-hardened fighters.”
Haldeen realized he was babbling, and clamped his mouth shut.
“How is that possible?” Alliard asked. “They were scrubs. Pathetic, weak-magic scrubs. How is this possible?”
High Lord Kaeltwyn coughed politely, drawing all eyes to him. “That’s not quite true, Sire. About them all being scrubs. There was definitely gold mixed in with that sand.”
Alliard fixed him with a stare. “I was the First Minister then. I remember the instructions. No one above a red.”
Kaeltwyn shrugged. “Those were the instructions, my king, but in those days the cities still took in refugees, and many cities still had outlying colonies and farms. Those outstations had leaders, and in some places a fairly sophisticated country gentry.
When they fell to the first waves of the Predators, many of the country gentry lost their holdings. Many came to the cities as destitute refugees. A few might have been absorbed if they had friends and relations, but most would have been pushed in with the poor.”
Kaeltwyn raised his left hand. He made it a point to study his perfectly manicured and lacquered nails.
“When it came time for the city to meet its quota, many … including us … simply swept through the stews, rounded up anyone who looked poor, and sent them to the Great Gate. I’m sure we wound up sending a number who were a good bit stronger than advertised.”
He gave Haldeen a thin smile. “The Great Gate was no secret. I’m sure that for a few who had lost everything, a chance in a new world was better than staying here. I have every confidence we might have sent through a number of Greens, maybe even a few Blues.
Most cities have their established noble families, and really don’t want to share that with a newcomer, even if he tested Blue. Especially if he tested Blue.”
He gave a nod to Haldeen. “Most of us aren’t Gatekeepers, beloved wherever we go, and certain to be taken in when our home city falls.”
Haldeen felt their eyes on him. He felt the need to change the subject.
Haldeen shook his head. “There may be another factor. Time flows differently there. Faster.”
“Faster?” the king asked. “How much faster?”
“Nine or ten times. A day there is a more than an eight-day here. A thousand years have passed there since they left here. Maybe that was enough to breed those whose personal magic is now the equal of the most powerful of us using ambient magic.”
He shook his head. “Maybe it was always the case that the people we called ‘scrubs’ were capable of just that, but because we were so reliant on the use of ambient magic, we never trained that ability. They did, I suppose.
But that’s just speculation on my part—none of that is relevant to the answers I got from the girl. She was appallingly ignorant of her own history. Most of her life revolved around pleasure and petty revenge.”
Alliard frowned, thinking, working through Haldeen’s answers. Then the king opened his mouth and said the one thing Haldeen had not anticipated. “You opened that Gate to one world. Can you open a Gate to a different one? One we can evacuate to and conquer?”
I … never even thought of doing that. Haldeen’s reply must have shown on his face. He gave a quick shake. No.
“What else, then?” Alliard asked.
Haldeen had to pause to refocus. The king had asked a most excellent question, and one which he needed to answer. A different world. The possibilities whirled in his head.
“The Great Gate, my king. It’s forty leagues within Predator-controlled territory, and dead, except for the trickle I can pass through it. Before we can use it to evacuate, we need to reoccupy it, secure it, and repower it; then establish a safe way to get our population to it.
The Probe’s transits tell me it’s aligned well enough, but I’ll need to check that.”
And perhaps learn how to realign it to another world.
“More?” Alliard asked.
Haldeen thought for a moment, then shook his head again. Too many truths today. He dare not say he had been going to this world and experimenting.
The king turned to face the assembled Lords, who stood as still and silent as statues.
“To sum up. As we stand here today, we have twenty-one eight-days before we have exhausted our food supply, assuming we can continue to produce what we are today. We have a dead World Gate that we must first retake from the Predators, before we can even begin to start the process of powering it.
We know we can pass through, at least one at a time, using this … Probe … of Haldeen’s, but we have no idea at this point how it will work at scale. We know that the last attempt at a mass evacuation failed when the colonists panicked, and we will have that again if we don’t prepare.