15. N #4
One of the lords Haldeen couldn’t see raised his voice. “Sire, I’d like to commend you on your quick thinking ….”
King Alliard cut him off. “Horseshit. The Kings have been debating and discussing variations of this plan for at least five forevers. I just need to get my counterparts off their fundaments. Everyone is staring at the same food math, and black mold is a thing in at least ….”
He looked at Pelias. “Two other cities, High Lord Provisioner?”
Pelias nodded. “Aye, Sire.”
King Alliard ran his gaze across the assembled nobles, meeting their eyes in turn.
“You know what you have to do. Reach out to families and contact. Sell this. Kaeltwyn, two stout lads, by the door, then attend me in the Farspeaker chamber when I go to wrestle some sense into my fellows. In the meantime, get some tea. Lords Marshall, High Provisioner, and Gatekeeper, walk with me.
”
Haldeen caught Pelias’s eye. The younger man cracked a huge yawn.
The Lord Marshall ignored them to catch up to the king.
Once they were well away, Alliard led them to a small room.
Once inside, he set a sensor to sniff for ambient magic, then whispered the incantation to bring a wall of silence down around them.
Haldeen had never mastered the spell, a complex mix of brute power and subtlety.
Haldeen braced himself for a second scalding, perhaps worse that the one delivered in front of the Council.
Alliard’s anger appeared to have passed, and his tones were conversational.
They might have been discussing the weather.
“The others heard what they needed to hear, and no more. I have questions. Haldeen, was she really that powerful?”
Haldeen tried to temporize, to find an evasion, but couldn’t think of anything.
So, lacking any better options, he went with honesty.
“I don’t know, my king. She made the yellow gem glow, and only flickered the orange. So, a firm low-middle according to our testing. She couldn’t do the ration volume … she said she couldn’t touch the ambient. Hit a guard with something powerful enough that we thought it was a weapon,
until a search proved there was no weapon, so it was something she did. Stunned him. Didn’t kill. Don’t know if it was just the once, if it required anger, or something else. Her interrogator said she described herself as ‘weak,’ but we don’t know what that means either.”
Alliard looked at the Lord Marshall, considered a moment before answering.
“We take it at face value. Her kind can cast some kind of stunning, if not killing blow, from a distance. We can too, if we have a firelance, but we’re limited to how many we can make and carry.”
He shifted his attention to Haldeen. “Provided there is ambient magic when the operator triggers the spell.”
Haldeen nodded.
Alliard rubbed his nose, as he thought. “First task, Haldeen. Find a way to package ambient magic into a firelance. Just enough to complete the spell. That will put us on an equal footing with their casters, at least until we run out of lances.”
Haldeen exhaled, and nodded a quick yes.
The Lord Marshall took a deep breath. “There may be another way, my king.” He trailed off.
Alliard looked hard at him. “Go ahead. Out with it.”
The Lord Marshall’s expression suggested he’d wished he kept his mouth shut. “The girl you were talking about, that was supposed to be handed over, she was from this new world. Yes?”
“Yes,” Haldeen and Alliard responded together.
“She got sick, then. Got better?”
“Yes,” Haldeen replied.
“Where are we going with this, Lord Marshall?” Alliard snapped.
“Bear with me, Sire,” The Lord Marshall pressed on. “This may be important. She got sick here? After she arrived?”
“Yes,” Haldeen replied. He most emphatically did not want to talk about Triana. “After she got here. Yes.”
“Was it something she brought, or something she got from us here?”
Haldeen saw the point and was very glad it wasn’t he who was bringing it up.
Alliard looked a bit puzzled. He thought back to …
damn, what was her name … the translator.
Her report. Concentrate on that first illness, let the others come to the right conclusion.
“At first I thought it was something she brought, which was why I didn’t send her on to you as you ordered. It was only after she recovered that we decided it was something she got here. A child’s disease, I think. A cough and sniffle for us, but it put her down for a week,
and another week to recover.”
The Lord Marshall looked satisfied.
King Alliard interjected. “Why is this important?”
The Lord Marshall thought for a moment. “Over the years new diseases spring up in the cities. Sometimes they can be pretty virulent, particularly in the stews, where people live cheek by jowl. There are ancient records of sometimes manipulating those diseases, making them weapons,
and using them against other cities … until we came to our collective senses. Now, it’s a section in the oldest of the oldest records on warfighting. Citrine tried resurrecting the idea, using it to see if they could kill the Predators by cooking something up. Like most things Predator related,
it failed. But, they tried it.”
The Lord Marshall looked at Haldeen. “So, if your girl was susceptible to one childhood disease that we shrug off, then perhaps something stronger would take her kind out … but be no worse than a few days in bed for us. We solve the spell problem that way, by wiping them out before we invade.
We wouldn’t get them all, but we may cut a great swath through them. Unfortunately, the girl died, so you have no test subject.”
Haldeen opened his mouth to confirm he had a subject, then recalled his lie earlier, saying Triana had died.
His cleverness in that moment had trapped him in this one …