18. N #3
He let a malicious smile rise … personal metals, the sorts that birth lords’ wives adorned themselves with, those would have to go, as well.
He knew that class well … lots of talk about shared sacrifice, but when it came to their turn? He could already hear the wailing.
At least he had ideas. Ideas the king could use. Haldeen shook his head. Firelances to defend the raised road to the World Gate. Firelances to protect the cities. Not nearly enough for both.
They would soon be balanced on a precipice …
competing demands for resources for the protected road, to defend the cities, and to establish a foothold on Triana’s world.
The Monsters would get a vote as well. An attack on a city stripped of its protections in order to armor and protect the road might mean its fall.
Still, as long as it isn’t all of the cities, and the rest get out … .
Getting out required having a place to go to and a way to get there.
The plan Alliard had convinced the other Kings to back required the restart of the World Gate.
His World Gate … had been taken from him and passed over to the other cities.
Haldeen felt the humiliation of losing that work, and the prestige it carried.
Gatekeeping had been the highest and finest science of the Jeweled cities, and a task that only the best and brightest could accomplish.
He kept the title, and remained the Lord Gatekeeper, but had been stripped of his identity, his core function. Reduced to paper plans for plagues!
Lord Kaeltwyn had done exactly as the king had bid him, taking every scrap and note regarding the Gates, and making it clear that if Kaeltwyn had been in charge, then Haldeen would have been stripped of his title and sent to farm algae.
Had they gone into the lab and confiscated the test Gate, I would have been.
One look at the Probe, and Alliard would know what lines I crossed, and what laws I broke to accomplish the miracle of our escape.
He smiled a malicious little smile. They wanted to take him down, show him his place.
Let’s see what good it’s done for them. He picked up the daily progress report, and sifted through the pages to the to the Gate portion of the king’s daily progress report.
As expected, the worthies that had stripped him of his Gate had yet to even get the greater Gate to respond to simple instructions to power itself. He let out a silent, mirthless laugh.
He scanned the report, looking for the short sentences with their broad generalities that hid a multitude of sins. The words shifted a bit each day, but the sense remained the same.
He read the update out loud, loading up the banal words with heavy doses of sarcasm.
“The preliminary assault proceeded as successfully planned, descending from Skydancers and Carryalls, and driving back the Creatures with spells and brave use of handlances, until a safe perimeter had been established.
Once the soldiers (yesterday it had been valiant guards) had accomplished their primary purpose, our stalwart (who even uses that word?) spell researchers and investigators proceeded across the secured ground to continue their progress on establishing the corridor that animates their purpose.”
He flipped to the supporting details. Only there did it become apparent that the fight to secure a small working area around the Gate had been long and vicious, with several dozen killed or wounded.
One precious and irreplaceable Skydancer had flown too low and been taken out by some kind of jumping thing from the ground.
Even the relentlessly optimistic first page couldn’t completely suppress the bad news.
He looked for the shift in tone, stalwartly marked by the switch to passive voice …
. Ah, there it is … put off the bad news as long as you possibly can.
He read the last sentence, the same last sentence he had read for something more than the last fortnight …
two eight-days of optimistic ledes that dashed upon the rocks of reality.
In today’s report, reality had been reshaped into …
“… losses were taken, progress was made, mistakes were learned from, and directives were issued that will build upon the success of today.”
Balderdash. This means they failed. No progress on the Gate, and more dead elves to show for … absolutely nothing. Driving the Monsters back for a few marks isn’t victory, it’s the price of admission!
He estimated the amount of daylight they would have to actually study the Gate and to try and get it operable.
He used the proven principles of informed guesswork and counting on his fingers to tick off the marks.
Let’s see. Can’t leave before dawn. Not after that Skydancer from Opal got eaten.
So, nothing flies before first light. Two marks to fly first thing in the morning.
An operation that big … something goes wrong every day, so two marks flying time becomes three.
So, not arriving until after breakfast. More marks to fight their way in, then one mark to get set up.
It’s lunchtime before someone has even taken a hand-glass to that old stone.
A couple of marks of hasty work, while looking over your shoulder for the boo-jums.
Midafternoon, you’re starting to pack up and head for the barn.
A couple hours in the evening to go over notes, and try and figure out what to do next.
Then, trying to decide how to spin today’s dung into diamonds for the day’s report. More “Progress was made.”
Assuming that the team studying the Gate proved competent enough to pour piss from a boot without reading instructions on the sole, they probably only had a mark or two each day to try and solve a problem that bedeviled Haldeen for months.
He might have been under stress from King Alliard barking at him, but he did not have to worry about the security cordon suddenly collapsing and the researchers being torn apart by enraged local wildlife.
Or having the researchers’ Skydancers depart without them as they crowded too close to dusk. The worries about being eaten and abandoned had to generate a certain level of distraction and lost mental focus. Hate to be the fellow studying obscure power symbols on a pillar and miss the recall beacon.
Haldeen suspected he should be less happy about the Kings’ failure to make progress, but his very public demotion still stung. Then again … given the utter lack of progress the others were showing in getting the World Gate to function, he might still recover that prestige.
He would kiss and make up with them, but only after they came crawling back to him. Any of those idiots can tune a city gate, but I’m the only one in a century who has gotten the World Gate to work, and gone to another world!
He laughed out loud then. He’d worried they’d upstage him, but while they paid in blood to fail, he still had his small Gate, and his small Gate still worked.
They fought their way in, and he went to his lab, cast the incantation, and had a cup of tea while it powered up.
He simply walked through once it appeared stable.
He couldn’t stay very long these days, but long enough to ensure nothing had gotten into the cave, then to run a few tests, and to show he had succeeded where they failed.
And, now that I think of it, it could be long enough to get the occasional, much-overdue and badly-needed nap.
He cleared the daily reports from his desk and took them to the small fireplace and fed them in.
They probably did more good here, providing a bit of heat and light, than they did in their native state, where they utterly failed to illuminate.
He laughed then. It wasn’t much of a joke, but better than his usual.
Next piece of paper in the diminishing pile. A one sentence order directly from King Alliard to him …. Provide an update on our ability to use the magic native to the target world.
He thought about this one for some time, making notes before composing his response.
Efforts continue. Kaeltwyn’s plunder of my Gate-notes broke my experiments and caused setbacks.
He liked the wording. No direct criticism of the king, with High Lord Kaeltwyn to take the blame.
Still, Alliard would know. Let him stew on that!
Oh! He just thought of something else! Experiments with the deceased subject from Gateworld suggested that the …
. Hmm. He set his pen down. He needed a good word for them.
Not “escapees.” Not “rebels,” that would suggest there had been a successful rebellion.
Ah! … the fugitives … that was it! The descendants of the fugitives …
that word makes them still under our authority, but not our responsibility.
He picked his nib back up and continued.
The descendant fugitives are not at all acquainted with ambient magic and are unable to use it, which limits them to only their personal stores.
In their home-world, this gives them a tremendous advantage.
We learn to use our personal stores to shape and control the ambient that surrounds that.
They have none, so have learned to make do with what they have.
He paused for a moment, thinking. Unless we can secure a source of ambient magic in that world, or find a way to carry stores of it with us …
we will be at a disadvantage. In time, we might learn to use personal stores as well as they have, but that only sets us on an equal footing.
All right, there was the problem, and now …
let’s have someone else do the work and plunder documents for me for a change.
He thought out every word carefully. There may be records in our oldest archives with instructions on strengthening, bolstering, and supplementing our personal magic.
If I could study those, I could suggest a course by which we can all become more powerful than the natives, who are not used to using their magic combatively, but only as a plaything and a means to control their slaves.
Access to the archives held in other cities will require either the application of the king’s prestige, or an elevation in title sufficient that I may access the necessary archives on my own authority.
He read back over the draft. King Alliard would see the gambit for what it was …
but would also have to acknowledge Haldeen’s reasoning.