War Maid's Choice-ARC Read online

  “I don’t know.” Sahrdohr frowned thoughtfully. “Shaftmaster’s, yes. I’ll have to be careful, but I can get to it without too much difficulty. If it will be all right to use a capture spell on it, that is?”

  It was Varnaythus’ turn to frown. A capture spell was a very minor working, one even one of those accursed magi probably wouldn’t notice unless he was right on top of it at the moment it was triggered. It required the use of a very small gramerhain, however, and if that was found on Sahrdohr’s person...

  “You’re not concerned about carrying the stone with you?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t concerned, but I think the risk would be manageable.” The younger wizard smiled crookedly and held out his left hand, then tapped the ring on his second finger with his right index finger. It was an obviously old piece, set with a rather cheap looking opal. “I’ve been wearing this ever since I got here just for a moment like this one,” Sahrdohr continued. “Everyone knows it has great sentimental value to me, despite the poor quality of the stone—it was a gift from my grandmother to my grandfather—so nobody thinks anything more about it. But—”

  He touched the opal itself and it flashed into sudden clarity, like water-clear quartz. It stayed that way until he took his finger away again, when it turned just as quickly back into the milky stone it had been to begin with.

  “Very nice,” Varnaythus said sincerely.

  The fact that Sahrdohr had put the ring into place so long ago was yet another demonstration of his basic intelligence and foresight. And even at this short range, even after having had the glamour concealing the gramerhain demonstrated to him, Varnaythus could detect barely a whisper of the spell. If that was a sample of Sahrdohr’s craftsmanship, he was further along towards the rank of master than Varnaythus had thought.

  “All right, if you’re comfortable using a capture spell, I’ll leave that in your hands. But what about Macebearer?”

  “That’s going to be a lot harder,” Sahrdohr replied. “I’ve at least got an excuse to be in Shaftmaster’s office. I work for the man, after all. But I’m not high enough in the Exchequer to be wandering into the Prime Councilor’s office and examining his personal correspondence with Baron Tellian.”

  “I really want to get our hands on those letters,” Varnaythus said. “Shaftmaster’s estimates will help—probably a lot—but Cassan’s still keeping his head down, even without our gingering up the ghouls. I need proof of how much ground Tellian is gaining with Macebearer and Markhos to get him stirred back up again.”

  “Why don’t we just forge it?” Sahrdohr asked. “It wouldn’t be difficult—I can at least get samples of Macebearer’s signature and his personal secretary’s handwriting, and we already have samples of Tellian’s. We could create correspondence that said whatever we needed it to say, then mix it in with genuine correspondence between Tellian and Shaftmaster.”

  “Tempting,” Varnaythus conceded. “Unfortunately, Cassan’s almost as good at this game as he thinks he is. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s managed to get someone of his own inside Macebearer’s staff. Probably not someone with the kind of access he’d like to have, but he might well have enough access to realize we’re feeding him doctored documents.”

  “I might have a solution,” Salgahn offered, and shrugged when both wizards looked at him. “I have a couple of men of my own inside the Palace. One of them’s covered as a stable hand, but the other’s on the housekeeping staff. He happens to be quite a good burglar, as a matter of fact.”

  “Does he, now?” Varnaythus considered the other man thoughtfully.

  Like most dog brothers, Salgahn was officially a follower of Sharnā, although he was scarcely very devout. In fact, Varnaythus doubted Salgahn had ever seen one of Sharnā’s actual rituals. It wasn’t the sort of thing which would have appealed to him any more than it would have appealed to Varnaythus himself. But every profession required at least some support structure, and the Assassins Guild had found its support in the church of Sharnā. Which meant that from time to time, whether they liked it or not, the dog brothers found themselves “urgently requested” to assist the church. Of course, the fact that Salgahn hadn’t bothered to mention his men’s presence in King Markhos palace until this very moment made Varnaythus wonder just how completely Salgahn had thrown himself into this operation.

  And I don’t blame him a bit if he’s been thinking from the very beginning in terms of ratholes to dash down the instant this ship hits a reef, the wizard reflected, then chuckled mentally as he realized how liberally he’d just mixed metaphors.

  “Just how obviously could your burglar burglarize the Prime Councilor’s files?” he asked out loud.

  “Obviously?” Salgahn raised an eyebrow.

  “If everyone knows Macebearer’s office was successfully broken into, then Cassan’s a lot less likely to worry about whether or not we’re trying to feed him forged documents. If we’re going to physically steal them anyway, I’d like to leave enough evidence behind—evidence that Macebearer and the Crown would be able to keep from becoming general knowledge—to prime the pump with Cassan. His need to show how smart he is is his biggest weakness, when you come down to it. So if he knows about the ‘secret burglary’ when I show him copies—or even originals—from Macebearer’s files, he’ll be so smug about knowing how I got them that he won’t even consider whether or not any alterations were made before he saw them. Letting someone convince himself always works better than trying to sell it to him from the outside.”

  “It’ll make it a little riskier for my man,” Salgahn pointed out.

  “I’ll triple the Guild’s usual fee.”

  “Then I’m sure something can be worked out.” Salgahn smiled, and Varnaythus chuckled.

  “What about Borandas?” Sahrdohr asked, and Varnaythus frowned thoughtfully.

  Borandas Daggeraxe was the Baron of Halthan and Lord Warden of the North Riding. The oldest of the four great barons of the Kingdom, he was also of no more than average intelligence, and he knew it. He was aware of the political power games swirling around at Court, but he was wise enough not to fish in such troubled waters and let himself be drawn into the toils of smarter but less scrupulous players. His son, Thorandas, was sharper than Borandas, and he’d been his father’s primary political advisor for years. He understood the value of maintaining the North Riding’s neutrality in the bitter power struggle between Cassan and Tellian. With Yeraghor of the East Riding supporting Cassan and the wind rider’s representative supporting Tellian, that neutrality allowed the North Riding to effectively hold the balance of power on the Great Council, and Thorandas was unlikely to favor any course which would endanger that situation. On the other hand, he was also one of the hard-line anti-hradani bigots....

  “I’m not sure about Borandas,” Varnaythus admitted. “But if Tellian’s correspondence with Macebearer says what I think it says, then showing certain select passages to Thorandas might pay a very nice dividend in the fullness of time. I’ll have to think about that once we see what it actually does say.”

  Sahrdohr nodded, and Varnaythus drew a deep breath.

  “Now,” he said, “the reason I want to get my hands on all that documentation is that the time has come—or is coming very soon—for us to...restructure the Kingdom of the Sothōii. And this is how we’re going to do it. First—”

  Chapter Four

  “Careful, lummox! That’s my head you’re dumping crap all over!”

  The hradani stopped, parked the wheelbarrow carefully, and then leaned sideways, looking over the edge of the excavation.

  “And would you be telling me what in Fiendark’s name you’re doing down there right this very minute?” he inquired testily.

  “My job,” the dwarf standing in the bottom of the steep-walled cut replied in an even testier voice.

  He took off his battered, well-used safety helmet to examine its top carefully, then rubbed a finger across the fresh patch of dust (and dent) the falli
ng piece of rock had left in the steel and looked up accusingly. The hradani hadn’t actually “dumped” it on him—his wheelbarrow had simply dislodged a small stone in passing and knocked it over the edge—but the result had been the same.

  “If I hadn’t been wearing this, you’d have splattered my brains all over the cut!” he said.

  “Now that I wouldn’t have,” the hradani replied virtuously. “They’d not have covered more than a handspan of dirt at most, and likely less, come to think on it. And you’ve still not told me what it was you thought you were after doing down there when it was yourself told us to start pouring in the ballast.”

  “Checking the form, if you must know,” the dwarf growled. “No one signed the check sheet.” He waved a clipboard irritably. “Somebody has to do a walkthrough before the voids get filled in!”

  “Well, you’ll not be doing any ‘walkthroughs’ so very much longer if you don’t get your sawed-off arse out of the way.”

  “‘Sawed-off arse,’ is it?” the dwarf demanded. He stumped over to the ladder fixed to the face of the massive, freestanding wooden form and started swarming up it. “For about one copper kormak I’ll use you for ballast!”

  “Ah? And how would you be doing that?” The hradani propped his hands on his hips and looked down at the dwarf from his towering inches. “I’m thinking a wee little fellow like you’s likely to strain himself moving someone who’s properly grown!”

  The dwarf made it to the top of the ladder and across the wooden plank between the form and the solid ground beyond the cut, and stalked towards the enormous hradani. He was barely four feet tall, which made him less than two thirds the hradani’s height, and he looked even smaller beside a massive, hradani-scaled “wheelbarrow” larger than most pony carts. But his beard seemed to bristle and he jabbed an index finger like a sword as he halted in the wheelbarrow’s shadow and glared up at the hradani.

  “It’s a pity all a hradani’s growth goes into his height instead of his brain,” he observed acidly. “Not that I should be too surprised, I suppose. After all, when a skull’s that thick, there can’t be all that much room for brains inside it!”

  “Sure and I’m thinking such envy must be a hard thing to bear,” the hradani replied. “Still and all,” he gripped the wheelbarrow’s handles again, “such as me, being full grown and all, would look right strange creeping about in those squinchy little tunnels your folk favor.”

  He lifted, straightening his spine with a slight grunt of effort, and the heavy wooden handles—well over six inches in diameter—flexed visibly as the wheelbarrow’s massive load of gravel went thundering down into the excavation. A plume of dust rose, blowing on the hot afternoon breeze, and he glanced down with satisfaction.

  “Which isn’t to say such as you wouldn’t be looking right strange pushing around wheelbarrows as are all grown up, either, now I think on it, now is it?”

  The dwarf shook his head with a disgusted expression, but his lips twitched slightly, and the hradani smiled benignly down upon him.

  “You’re like to do yourself a mischief venting all that spleen, Gorsan, and a sad thing that would be,” he said. “Well, sadder for some than for others, now I think on it.”

  “Somebody’s going to suffer a mischief, at any rate,” Gorsandahknarthas zoi’Felahkandarnas growled back.

  “And so I have already, I’m thinking,” the hradani sighed. “Why, I might be off lounging around on guard duty somewhere—or at least mucking out a stable—and instead, here I am, wheeling around loads of gravel to fill a hole I had the digging of my own self in the first place, and all of it with a wee little runt no higher than my knee yammering and whining the time.” He shook his head dolefully. “It’s enough to make a man tear up like a babe in arms, it is, and I’m after wondering just what it was I had the doing of that got me on Prince Bahnak’s bad side and landed me here.”

  “You really don’t want me to answer that one,” the dwarf told him with a chuckle. “Or maybe you do. Listing all the reasons he doesn’t want to trust you doing something hard would take long enough to keep both of us standing here till the end of the shift after yours, wouldn’t it?”

  The hradani grinned, conceding Gorsan the last word, and trundled back off for another load of fill. Gorsan watched him go, then stepped back out of the way as another hradani wheeled another massive wheelbarrow down the pathway of wooden planks which had been laid across the muddy ground. The newcomer had clearly heard most of the exchange, and he shook his head, foxlike ears cocked in amusement, as he dumped his own load of gravel into the gap between the form and the side of the excavation.

  Gorsan shot him the expected grumpy look, but the dwarf’s brown eyes twinkled when he did. The truth was that he got along extraordinarily well—indeed, far better than he’d expected—with the hradani laboring on the Derm Canal. The canal was the longest and (in most ways) most vital portion of the massive construction project conceived by Kilthandahknarthas of Silver Cavern, Bahnak of Hurgrum, and Tellian of Balthar six years earlier, and it had been an enormous professional compliment when Gorsan was named its chief engineer. It had been inevitable that it would go to someone from Clan Felahkandarnas, given that Felahkandarnas stood second to Clan Harkanath in Silver Cavern by only the slimmest of margins and that not even Harkanath had been in a position to finance something like this solely out of its own resources. All of Silver Cavern was deeply invested in it, and the other clans had a right to nominate their own fair share of its supervisors. There’d still been at least a dozen possible candidates for the assignment, however, and Kilthandahknarthas and Thersahkdahknarthas dinha’Felahkandarnas had made the choice based on proven ability. On the other hand, that ability had been demonstrated working with other dwarves, and although Gorsan would never have admitted it to a soul, he’d approached the notion of supervising a mixed crew of hradani, dwarves, and humans with pronounced trepidation.

  Actually, he conceded, watching another outsized wheelbarrow approach, it hadn’t been the humans who’d concerned him. The hradani’s reputation as the most dangerous of the Races of Man had been well earned over the twelve hundred years since the fall of Kontovar. Their tendency to erupt in berserk, homicidal fury when struck by the Rage—the inherited madness of their race—was enough to make anyone nervous, especially people who’d lived in the same vicinity as them for the past several centuries, and the old adage about burned hands teaching best had come forcibly to mind when he first contemplated his assignment.

  In theory that had all changed now, and Gorsan admitted that he’d seen no episodes of the Rage during the five and a half years he’d supervised the canal’s construction. Despite that, he still wasn’t certain he believed all the stories he’d heard about how the Rage had changed, even if they were vouched for by Wencit of Rūm and a champion of Tomanāk. For that matter, he still had a few problems wrapping his mind around the concept of a hradani champion at all!

  But whatever might be true about the Rage, he’d discovered there were definite advantages to a work force whose laborers had the size, strength, and sheer stamina of hradani. They took workloads in stride which would have made even a dwarf blanch, and for the first time in Gorsan’s experience, a job actually looked like it was going to come in ahead of schedule, even with the miserable weather of northern Norfressa to slow things up!

  And there was no question that Prince Bahnak of Hurgrum was a far cry from the stereotypical barbarian brigand most people thought of when anyone said the word “hradani” to them, either. Gorsan had met the prince and most of his almost equally formidable offspring, and he suspected the rumor that Bahnak had suggested the project to Kilthan rather than the other way around might well be true. The dwarves of Dwarvenhame were far more accustomed to interacting with the other Races of Man than any of the ancestral clans had been back in Kontovar, and Kilthandahknarthas was even more accustomed to it than most, but the sheer boldness and scale of the Derm Canal—and its implications for all of Norfress
a—were staggering.

  We should have thought of it years ago, he reflected now, clasping his hands behind him as he strolled down the brink of the canal cut. Except for the minor matter of its being impossible until Bahnak came along!

  He snorted at the thought, but it was undeniably true. Even for dwarven engineers, the thought of building a canal almost four hundred leagues long between the human city of Derm and the hradani city of Hurgrum could never have been anything but a fantasy as long as the hradani city states had been at one another’s throats. But Bahnak of Hurgrum’s Clan Iron Axe had finally brought hundreds of years of ongoing conflict to an end.

  For now, at least.

  Gorsan grimaced as his mind insisted on adding the qualifier, yet it was hard to believe anyone or anything could truly turn the northern hradani into a single realm and keep it that way. But Bahnak and his Horse Stealers hadn’t hammered the Bloody Swords into surrender by simple force of arms. Oh, he had hammered them—that was the only way anyone ever convinced a hradani to do anything he didn’t want to, after all; that much hadn’t changed whatever might have happened to the Rage—yet it had been Bahnak’s shrewd diplomacy which had made his victory possible...and which looked like making his conquest stand up. Even the name he’d chosen—the Northern Confederation—only underscored his shrewd understanding of his own people. No one doubted for a moment that the “Northern Confederation” was actually a kingdom and that Bahnak was its king, yet he’d been careful to avoid the other clans’ stubborn, hardheaded, not to say intransigent noses in that reality. Instead, it remained a simple confederation, no more (officially) than an upgrade and an enlargement of the old Northern Alliance he’d forged amongst the Horse Stealers, and he remained a simple prince, no more (officially) then first among equals. It was true, perhaps, that he stood “first among equals” by a very considerable margin, yet he was careful to show what Gorsan believed was a genuine concern and respect for the opinions of the members of his newly created Council of Princes. No one was going to be so foolish as to cross him or mistake him for anyone but the Confederation’s undisputed ruler, but that was due in no small part to his demonstration that he understood the responsibilities of a ruler.