Fortress Draconis (56 page)

Resolute stood taller than his foe, and it wasn’t just the spiky height of his white hair that gave him that advantage. In every way he was bigger than his enemy, but the smaller Vorquelf didn’t seem concerned. He dropped into a fighting stance, still waving Resolute toward him, then dashed forward in a quick attack.

Resolute sidestepped the lunge, twisting to let it pass from left to right along his body. He flipped the longknife in his right hand around so the blade lay flat against his forearm, then raised that forearm to parry the backhand slash his enemy launched. Continuing his forward momentum inside his foe’s guard, Resolute brought his left elbow up. He smashed it into the Vorquelf’s face.

The Vorquelf staggered for a half step. Resolute’s right hand came around, the longknife coming back off his forearm. With one quick swipe, Resolute could have laid the Vorquelf’s throat open, but instead he just punched the black-haired elf in the face, snapping his head around to the left.

The Vorquelf stumbled back two steps and Resolute ate up that distance with one strong stride. The silver-eyed Vorquelf kicked his enemy full in the stomach, dropping him to his knees. The other Vorquelf abandoned his sword and clutched his stomach, then retched his last meal into a thick puddle. Behind him his horse shied away.

Resolute grabbed a handful of black hair and yanked the Vorquelf’s head back. Blood from his nostrils melted into the vomitus running down his chin. Resolute snarled barbed words at him, then released him. The defeated Vorquelf vomited again and hunched so far forward that the ends of his hair sank into the puddle on the road.

Alyx emerged from hiding, glancing at the arrow on the ground, then up at Resolute. Pure fury contorted his face, matching the tone of his words. She didn’t want to know what Resolute had said, nor did she need to know. The other elf held himself, his body wracked with sobs.

Resolute snorted. “He says his name is Banausic. I’m sure he picked it when he started working for Chytrine. At least a quarter of a century ago he had a sense of shame.”

“Resolute!” Crow, coming up from where the Zhusk worked on freeing the wagon crews, stopped short of Banausic. The Vorquelf had dragged himself over to his sword and was bringing it to hand. For a heartbeat Alyx feared the elf would plunge it deep into his flesh, but he remained hunched over and brought the point nowhere near his heart or belly.

Instead he let the blade lay flat in his palms and raised it in Resolute’s direction.

Snorting again, Resolute walked over and kicked the sword out of the other Vorquelf’s hands. “Why would I want a sword that couldn’t beat a longknife? Even the name Banausic is too good for you. You should be known as Wretched or Pathetic or Nothing.”

The utter contempt in Resolute’s voice brought his foe’s head up. “Perhaps Irredeemable would suit.”

“You better hope not, or you’ll leave a lot more blood on the road here.” Resolute slowly shook his head. “You want to be of use to me? How many Aurolani troops at the mine?”

“Sixteen. Four vylaens, eight gibberers, two men overseers, and two spies within the slave crew.” The Vorquelf glanced back down the road. “The redheaded driver is also a spy.”

“And my reason for believing you is?” Banausic’s head snapped up and his blue eyes blazed. “You defeated me. I offered you my sword.”

“Chytrine defeated you. You offered her your sword.” The kneeling elf’s nostrils flared. “I offer you my word of honor. My family…”

“Your family is dead. All our families are dead. If you had any honor I’d not have found you here.”

“I did what I had to do, to stay alive.” Banausic sighed and seemed to shrink. “I knew this day would come. There are things I’ve seen, things I know that you need to know.”

Resolute’s eyes narrowed. “So tell me.”

“No, I can tell you much, but not all these things. I’ll tell you what you need to know to take Svoin. The other things … If I tell them, she’ll know, and will kill me.”

“This is pathetic.” Resolute shook his head solemnly. “I should kill you for that transparent plea for sympathy alone.”

“Not if you want to redeem Vorquellyn.” The Vorquelf swiped a hand across his mouth, smearing blood over his cheek. “I’ll be Pathetic, if you want. Anything, it doesn’t matter. Take Svoin. Kill Malarkex. Once she is dead, I will tell you all I know and you will be glad I did.”

“And why is that, Pathetic?”

The Vorquelf spat blood onto the ground. “After the fall of Okrannel, they took me home, to Vorquellyn. I saw Chytrine create one of hersullanciri there. I know what else she wanted to do and why she failed. I don’t know how to stop her, but I know how to undo much of what she’s done.”

He tapped a slender finger against his head. “It’s all up here. Kill me now or let me die, and Vorquellyn will be lost forever.”

jypg a journal, Kerrigan decided, would keep him

^sane—if it didn’t drive him crazy first. The idea of chronicling his adventures had come to him after he caught a chance remark by Resolute in the wake of one of Will’s rhymes. The Vorquelf had said, “If that’s the best you can come up with for a bit of song, minstrels will let your history die.”

The Adept refused to admit to himself that a strong part of his motivation was a shocked indignation at the idea that Will might be remembered in song while he would be forgotten. Almost instantly his mind flashed back to the grand history of Vilwan and how a chronicle of his adventures might be a vital chapter in the history of magicians. After all, he’d survived the culling of the innocent, he’d fashioned a new magick to save a Panqui, had lived through a brush with deviltry in Yslin, and had visited Gyrvirgul. That alone would have been enough to make a nice little travelogue, but the coming siege of Svoin and his role in saving the hostages, that would be a truly heroic tale.

Will worked on his little rhymes and songs, but Kerrigan eschewed that route for his chronicle. He didn’t reject it because he had no facility with rhymes and couldn’t have carried a tune in a bucket; minstrel’s immortality was just too common and clearly meant for the illiterate. Civilized people were capable of writing, and a written record was far less mutable than one that had to be learned by rote and crafted to pander to the needs of the audience.

Will’s song will beentertainment;I will create history.

The difficulty with creating history was that it required a bit more in the way of materiel than did a song. For all that General Adrogans had requisitioned ample food and supplies, writing materials seemed scarce and tightly controlled. The general, it seemed to Kerrigan, had a near-pathological fear that someone might use the sort of spells that createdarcanslata to enchant his stock of paper. As he wrote out orders and exchanged information with the queen in Lakaslin, those messages could then be read over by the enemy. Because of Adrogans’ paranoia, his paper stocks were kept under lock and key.

This lack of paper frustrated Kerrigan no end, which made it difficult for him to sleep. One night, as he wandered the camp, he happened upon a trio of Jeranese Crown Guards. The one in the middle had a piece of paper and clearly was trying to read what was written on it, but from the way he twisted the paper left and right, it was pretty clear he was not having an easy time of it.

The tallest of the warriors slapped the reader furiously on the shoulder. “You sure it says my Flora is having the baker’s boy?”

The reader shrugged. “Them’s the words, Fossius.”

Kerrigan smiled sheepishly. “If you wish, I could read it for you.”

The trio eyed him suspiciously, then Fossius gave the reader a shove in the back toward him. “Let him have the letter.”

The Adept took it and began to read, though the script was certainly not Vilwanese cursive, which made it a bit difficult to decipher. “Ah, here it is, Fossius, your Flora is wet-nursing the baker’s son. The baker’s wife had twins and it says here that she’s a small woman.”

Fossius smiled proudly. “That’s right, little slip of a thing; and my Flora, she’d help out since our girl’s about ready to be weaned. And you had me all worried there, Pirius.”

Kerrigan finished reading the letter, which appeared to have been written by a neighbor and included local gossip as well as news for each of the three men. They desperately wanted to reply to it, and Kerrigan agreed to write their return letter, provided they get him blank paper. Word spread through the camp fairly quickly about what he was doing, and men began bringing him every scrap of paper or leather or even strips of cloth they could find to write on.

Even as the camp was packing up to head out for Svoin, Kerrigan’s scribe business thrived. Will’s mutterings about how silver could be had as payment instead of paper told Kerrigan how well he was doing. He felt pretty certain that Will wished Kerrigan was taking in coin so the thief could steal it. The Adept put all his paper scraps into a leather-bound, wood-slat folio a Helurcan officer offered in return for Kerrigan’s writing down some of his Steel Legion’s history, then gave the folio to Lombo for safekeeping.

Kerrigan didn’t realize how well he’d truly been doing, however, until two of the Jeranese Horse Guards came for him. Each man grabbed an upper arm and quick-marched him to Adrogans’ longhouse. They deposited him just inside the doorway, then retreated, leaving the young mage alone with Adrogans and Orla, both of whom stood in close conversation on the other side of the large map of Okrannel.

Orla nodded, then Adrogans turned and narrowed his eyes. His voice, full of import and gravity, filled the longhouse easily. “I don’t believe, Adept Reese, you wish to be a problem for me, do you?”

“No, sir, no.”

“But you have become one.” Adrogans slowly shook his head. “You’ve produced a volume of correspondence that will severely weigh down any Gyrkyme courier.”

“I didn’t, I mean—”

The general held a hand up. “When I want you to talk, I will give you leave to do so, do you understand?”

Kerrigan opened his mouth, then snapped it shut and just nodded.

“You’re right, Magister, he can learn.” Adrogans narrowed his brown eyes. “The weight of correspondence is not the problem, Adept Reese; it is the volume of it. Orla has assured me you really have no understanding of how things work, so I will explain it to you simply. The missives you are producing have to be read by my staff before transmission to see if they reveal any information that would be useful to the enemy. The reports I send to Lakaslin, the orders I send out, are coded, so the enemy would find them useless if they were to stop a courier. The letters, though, might have little details, like someone reporting that he’d named a mountain ‘Eagle’s Nest’ because of its profile. That would tell the enemy that our camp is within sight of such a place. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. I could edit out all those references in future letters.”

“You could, yes, but you won’t.” The Jeranese general smiled slowly. “I will provide you a list of things to substitute for such observations. The truth of things won’t matter to the people back home—just getting a note is what will matter. To the enemy—and if you do not believe there are spies in Lakaslin you are even more naive than I would choose to accept—the information will misdirect them and put them where I want them.”

“But, that would be lying. To the people, I mean.”

“It would, yes, but would they rather have a lie that keeps someone alive, or a truth that would kill him?” Adrogans slowly smiled. “I understand you have amassed a collection of paper scraps, often half of a letter where you used the back of a sheet for a reply. Is it as motley as the notes you’ve produced?”

“Yes. I was going to write a history on them.”

“A history. Interesting.” The man stroked a hand over his chin. “I will give you a bound journal for your history, Adept Reese—ink, quills, whatever you need—but I need something in return. You will take your stock of scraps and you will write letters on them, mythical letters, from soldiers.”

Adrogans approached the map and pointed to an area near the mountains that split the central lowlands from the Crozt peninsula. “This force will number three thousand, complain about short rations, long marches, and my insane plan to draw the Svarskya garrison south to relieve Svoin, while they strike north to liberate Svarskya. You’ve already heard the concerns of soldiers in the letters you’ve written. Can you compose this mythical correspondence?”

Kerrigan frowned. “I can, but I don’t understand why.”

The general cast a glance at Orla. “He might be brilliant when it comes to magicks, but you’ve really taught him nothing else, have you?”

She shook her head. “It is my duty to expand his awareness of practical knowledge, but there is so much he must learn.”

Adrogans waved Kerrigan closer, and pointed to Svoin on the map. “We’re taking that city. We have roughly enough troops to do it, but we will need time to build siege towers and some of the other things we’ll need to do the job. The forests will provide the raw materiel, so all we need is time. The problem is that Malarkex can easily bring a relieving force down from Svarskya that will force us to withdraw.

“This army we have here is large, and casualties are expected. The other day we lost a man to a snakebite and we used magick to preserve his body. I can place him in a courier’s uniform and place him here, where Malarkex’s scouts can find him. They will read the notes and assume there is indeed a force in the mountains, working their way toward Svarskya. I have Zhusk out there creating the signs of encampments. It won’t fool them for long, but as long as they hesitate, I get some of the time I need.”

Kerrigan smiled. “You’re creating an illusion.”

“I am, with your help. You can double the size of my army with a little ink and paper.”

The Adept nodded. ‘T will do it.“

“What you are doing will have to be our secret.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that.”

“Good, very good. Orla assured me you could be very powerful, but I suspect even she did not know your power might lie in other talents.” Adrogans clapped him on the shoulders. “And, Adept Reese, this history you will write…”